Hideaki Anno is the director responsible for Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) and its film continuations. His career — first as an animator on early Studio Ghibli films, then as a founding member of Gainax, then as the founder of Studio Khara — spans most of the formative shifts in commercial anime production since the 1980s.
Career
Anno worked as an animator on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984, where his sequence work on the God Warrior is well known among industry historians. He was a founding member of Gainax in 1985 and directed Gunbuster (1988), Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995).
After leaving Gainax he founded Studio Khara in 2006 to produce the four Rebuild of Evangelion films, completed in 2021. He has also directed live-action features — Shin Godzilla (2016), Shin Ultraman (2022), Shin Kamen Rider (2023) — that re-stage older tokusatsu properties with deliberate fidelity to their origins.
Evangelion's place
The 1995 series is one of the most studied works in the medium, both for its visual language and for its production history: notorious budget shortfalls during the original broadcast altered the form of the final two episodes, and the 1997 film The End of Evangelion was both a commercial event and an oblique reply to fan reception. The four-film Rebuild project (2007–2021) is a partial retelling that progressively departs from the original.
Style
- Long, deliberately held still frames — sometimes seconds of unchanging image — as deliberate compositional choice.
- Dense, technical, semi-believable mecha designs with frequent reference to military and biological imagery.
- Frequent reuse of stock footage in original works, partly as economy, partly as deliberate stylistic mark.
- Psychodrama framing inside otherwise commercial genre material.