Gainax, the original studio responsible for Neon Genesis Evangelion and a host of other anime franchises, has filed for bankruptcy, and fans are lamenting the company’s decline and closure.
On May 29, 2024, Gainax entered bankruptcy. This was revealed on June 1, 2024, by the production house in an official statement. Known for some of the best anime ever, the move comes after years of uncertainty about the outfit’s current prospects.
Several reasons were given for the studio’s decline, including big unsecured loans, an attempted expansion with a bespoke CG studio, investment agreements drying up, among numerous other issues. Yasuhiro Kamimura, CEO of Gainax, commented further in a statement.
“We are very sorry to our creditors, the companies that cooperated with us, and our fans for having been unable to fully achieve our goals and having no choice but to choose bankruptcy,” he says, per Oricon.
He gives a timeline of events leading up to today that involves defaulting on debts within the anime industry, trading of IP without the consent of rights holders, the 2019 arrest of a former Representative Director for alleged indecent acts, and other speed bumps.
Ultimately, he writes, even though Gainax underwent an audit by fellow studio Khara, Inc. and brought in new directors, the amount of debt is simply too much.
Fans of Evangelion will recognize Khara as the current home of the franchise, founded by Hideaki Anno in 2006 as a way for him to produce the Rebirth of Evangelion anime movies on his own terms. Although Gainax never managed to recapture the heights of Evangelion in the ’90s, the animation house birthed several other series, including Gurren Lagann in 2007.
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Khara released a statement on the matter as well, revealing that Anno campaigned to assist Gainax in any way possible, but there was no fixing the damage done. “By the time we understood the situation, we had already found ourselves in an unmanageable state of debt, and Gainax had come to the conclusion that it would be difficult to continue operations,” Khara says.
Onlookers have mixed feelings. “At that point it was nothing but a skeleton of its former self but this points the end of an era nevertheless,” reads the top comment on Reddit.
“Poor company was mismanaged in to the ground,” says another. “I’m just surprised it took this long. This Gainax isn’t even the Gainax we know and love,” says a third.
That last comment mentions that both Khara and Studio Trigger maintain the spirit of Gainax. Both are founded by creatives from there, and they’ve since flourished in different avenues.
We had Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time in 2021, with hints of something new in the franchise at some point, and Studio Trigger has given us Kill la Kill, and SSSS.Gridman, one of the best superhero anime.
