Gainax, founded in 1984 by a group of doujin and fan-film makers including Hideaki Anno, Toshio Okada, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and Hiroyuki Yamaga, is a studio whose 1990s output — Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990), Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), His and Her Circumstances (1998) — defined a generation of anime even as the company's commercial management produced sustained internal turmoil.
From Daicon to incorporation
Gainax's founders had collaborated on opening films for the Daicon III and Daicon IV science-fiction conventions in 1981 and 1983, both of which were unusually polished for amateur productions. The studio was incorporated to produce The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), a theatrical feature backed by Bandai. Subsequent OVAs — Gunbuster (1988), Otaku no Video (1991) — established the studio as a recognisable creative voice.
Evangelion era and subsequent fragmentation
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) and The End of Evangelion (1997) defined Gainax internationally. The studio's later output is less commercially central. Several key personnel left to found new studios — Hideaki Anno founded Khara in 2006 to produce the Rebuild of Evangelion features, and Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masahiko Otsuka founded Trigger in 2011. Gainax itself filed for bankruptcy in 2024.