Hideaki Anno

Hideaki Anno is a Japanese filmmaker, animator, producer, actor, and voice actor. He is widely recognized for creating the Evangelion franchise, a prominent media property that significantly influenced Japanese popular culture and the television anime industry. His creative style is distinguished by a postmodern approach alongside deep explorations of character psychology and internal emotional states.

Born on May 22, 1960, in Ube, Yamaguchi, Anno developed an early interest in artwork and filmmaking during his school years. He later attended Osaka University of Arts, where he began animating for the series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross and produced opening animations for DAICON III and IV. After prioritizing independent filmmaking over paying his tuition, he was expelled. His industry breakthrough arrived in 1984 when Hayao Miyazaki hired him to animate complex scenes for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind after Anno responded to a magazine advertisement.

In December 1984, Anno co-founded the animation studio Gainax. He served as animation director for the studio's debut feature, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, and became Gainax's premiere anime director. He led notable projects including the 1988 video release Gunbuster and the television series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water from 1990 to 1991. Following Nadia, a project where he had limited creative control, Anno experienced a four-year period of depression.

Drawing from his mental health struggles, Anno created the 1995 television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Although it initially received modest ratings, the show gained massive popularity after moving to a later broadcast slot. Facing production constraints, Anno substituted the original planned finale with introspective episodes set within the characters' minds, later expanding on this narrative through the feature films Evangelion: Death and Rebirth and The End of Evangelion. Decades later, he wrote and directed the Rebuild of Evangelion film series from 2007 to 2021 to make the story more accessible to broader audiences.

In addition to anime, Anno has directed live-action projects, starting with Love & Pop in 1998, followed by Shiki-Jitsu in 2000 and Cutie Honey in 2004. He established Studio Khara in 2006, officially resigning from Gainax the following year. His live-action directing extended to the Shin tokusatsu reboot series, which began with Shin Godzilla in 2016 and continued with Shin Ultraman in 2022 and Shin Kamen Rider in 2023.

Anno's work has earned multiple accolades, including Animage Anime Grand Prix awards for Nadia, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and The End of Evangelion, alongside director honors at the Yokohama Film Festival and Tokyo International Film Festival. Outside directing, he curated a tokusatsu miniature exhibition in 2012 and voiced the main character in Miyazaki's 2013 animated film The Wind Rises. In his personal life, Anno married manga artist Moyoco Anno in 2002; he is a vegetarian and identifies as agnostic.