Hideaki Anno

The Animator Who Loved Metal

Hideaki Anno is not an easy director to work with.

He is a composition obsessive who started out drawing impossible explosions in a garage in Osaka. In 1981, this student at the Osaka University of Arts was already obsessed with mechanical details and the density of smoke. And he did it with a precision that frightened his classmates.

During the production of Warriors of the Wind in 1984, Anno convinced Hayao Miyazaki to let him animate the God Warrior sequence. He spent weeks sleeping under the office desk to finish those frames. It was his first big breakthrough.

In 1988 he directed Gunbuster and showed that theoretical physics could be mixed with teen drama without losing momentum. But what came next would surpass any commercial or artistic forecast of the era.

The collapse of 1995

In 1995 the premiere of Neon Genesis Evangelion blew up TV Tokyo's late-night ratings. The series began as a story about giant robots but ended up as a raw essay on clinical depression and the rejection of human contact. Anno poured his own traumas into the script in an almost obscene way.

But money didn't bring peace. The director received death threats after the cryptic ending of the series and fell into a state of creative paralysis that lasted for years. Fans never forgave the finale for being a psychological therapy session instead of an epic battle.

In 1997, he released The End of Evangelion to close the story with visual violence that bordered on unbearable. It was a direct, aggressive response to his own audience. The film grossed 2,470 million yen in Japan while the director kept searching for a way out of his personal anguish.

Nobody expected that ending.

Handheld Camera and the Asphalt

Anno decided that animation was not enough to purge his demons. In 1998 he shot Love & Pop using low-resolution digital cameras to capture the anxiety of teenage girls in Shibuya. It was a technical experiment in which he placed the lenses in impossible spots, such as inside a mouth or on the floor of a train car.

In 2000 he directed Ritual in his hometown of Ube. The film is an introspective exercise shot on 35mm that barely received international distribution. But it helped the filmmaker find his rhythm again before facing his most famous creation once more.

So in 2006 he founded Studio Khara to regain full control over his work. He wanted to remake his great hit from scratch and with better technical tools.

And the gamble paid off.

Rebuilding the Myth

Between 2007 and 2021, Anno devoted himself to the four-film Rebuild of Evangelion saga. It was not an easy path, as the director halted production several times due to mental exhaustion. In 2012, the premiere of the third installment left audiences puzzled by its fourteen-year time jump.

In 2016 he took on the challenge of bringing Japan's most famous monster back to life with Shin Godzilla. The film set aside traditional action to focus on political bureaucracy and the trauma of the 2011 earthquake. It won seven Japan Academy Prizes, including Best Picture and Best Director.

In 2021 he definitively closed his chapter with robots in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. The film became the biggest commercial hit of his career, grossing over 10,000 million yen. Anno finally seemed to have made peace with his past and with his fans.

In 2023 filming of Shin Kamen Rider used GoPro cameras and long-range lenses to recreate the look of the television series of the 1970s. The final budget for the production was estimated at around $15 million.