Hideaki Anno and the anime he keeps ending but cannot escape

Hideaki Anno

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 22, 1960 Ube, Yamaguchi, Japan
Occupation	Animator and Film Director
Known for	Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
Awards	Nihon SF Taisho Award (1997) · Best New Director, Yokohama Film Festival (1998) · 2 Japan Academy Film Prize · Medal with Purple Ribbon (2022)

The crowd at Yokohama Arena expecting a farewell was instead watching a beginning. Hideaki Anno — the director who had spent the better part of his adult life trying to close his signature franchise — had returned with new footage of the children and the angels and the machinery that made him one of the most analyzed and imitated directors in contemporary animation. That this kept happening, that every declared ending seemed to generate another entry, was itself the argument his career had been making all along.

Anno was born in Ube, Yamaguchi in 1960, the son of a carpenter, and became obsessed with tokusatsu — the rubber-monster science-fiction genre of Japanese television — before he ever thought seriously about drawing. He enrolled at Osaka University of Arts, stopped paying tuition to make animated short films for a science-fiction convention, and was eventually expelled. The films were extraordinary. Hayao Miyazaki, who saw them, hired the young man he had never met to draw some of the most technically demanding scenes in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. This is how careers in animation have sometimes worked in Japan: brilliance first, credentials never.

He became one of seven co-founders of Gainax studio in 1984, and by the late 1980s had directed Gunbuster, an OVA that combined mecha action with an unexpectedly emotional ending and announced a filmmaker interested in genre structure primarily as something to subvert. The follow-up, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, was larger and more commercial, and Anno has described the experience of making it — produced under constant pressure, with limited creative control over thirty-nine episodes — as a four-year descent. After it concluded, he could not work at all.

What emerged from that collapse was Neon Genesis Evangelion. The series ran twenty-six episodes beginning in 1995 and introduced Shinji Ikari, a pilot who would rather not pilot, to the biomechanical weapons and layered psychological wounds that would define the franchise. The final two episodes — produced as Anno’s mental state deteriorated and the budget collapsed — became among the most debated and deconstructed television in the history of the medium. They arrived as images of his own mind rather than narrative conclusion, and when audiences demanded something more coherent, Anno made The End of Evangelion, a theatrical film of considerable ferocity and emotional extremity, in response.

The easiest version of the Anno story ends there: man has breakdown, makes art from breakdown, art becomes cultural phenomenon. The critical reading is the quarter-century that followed. He went on to direct live-action films — Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu, Cutie Honey — that received limited attention outside Japan. Then in 2006 he founded Studio Khara and announced the Rebuild of Evangelion: a tetralogy of theatrical films that would reimagine the franchise with modern production values and a conclusive new ending. Three films arrived across five years. The fourth, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, was delayed nine years before its 2021 release. Anno said, in interviews around its premiere, that it was finished. He said it with the specific exhaustion of someone who had said it before.

Between the Rebuild entries, he made Shin Godzilla with co-director Shinji Higuchi in 2016. The film, a satire of Japanese bureaucratic paralysis dressed as a kaiju picture, won seven Japan Academy Film Prizes including Picture of the Year and Director of the Year, and is considered by many critics the most formally inventive Japanese blockbuster in decades. Shin Kamen Rider followed in 2023 — a darker, more overtly personal tribute to his childhood franchise, directed solo and received more divisively — completing what has come to be called the Shin Japan Heroes Universe.

In 2025, Anno contributed to Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX as a writer, storyboard artist, and animator — his first sustained creative engagement outside Evangelion in several years. And in February 2026, the thirteen-minute short he oversaw for the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary festival at Yokohama Arena drew attention precisely because it contradicted the finality that Thrice Upon a Time had claimed. Anno planned the project, wrote the script, and supervised the production. Studio Khara, the company he founded in 2006 expressly to conclude the Rebuild films, had further projects in the pipeline. No ending was holding.

He has spoken publicly about the clinical depression — including periods he has described as near-suicidal — that accompanied both the production of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and the creation of Evangelion. He married the manga artist Moyoco Anno in 2002. Anno the director is a vegetarian and an agnostic, a collector of tokusatsu memorabilia from the shows that formed him, and one of the more frankly self-analytical filmmakers of any nationality. His next confirmed project has not been announced. It is likely, given the pattern, to involve someone in a very large machine trying very hard not to be where they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1o01aSPjBg

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Tags: Hideaki Anno, Neon Genesis Evangelion, anime directors, Gunbuster, Rebuild of Evangelion, Shin Godzilla

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