And without further ado, the entire write-up, which may be longer than my senior seminar project in college, is after the jump.

Hokay, so! Bandai Entertainment told us that there were as many as 49 Gainax employees running around this convention. They aren’t all participating in everything though; there are four panelists (and two translators), including Fanime vet/president Hiroyuki Yamaga, producer Takeda, character designer Ohtsuka, and “old” staff member Akai.

They’re going to show us a DVD which’ll be a bit of a retrospective, made for Gainax’s 20th Anniversary some years back. It starts with Daicon back in ‘81 and moves on through Nadia, Gunbuster! and all the rest– including a lot of live-action stuff; I hadn’t realized how much of that they’ve really been involved in. Here’s the more recent stuff; FLCL, Mahoromatic, and– hey, the kanchou who appeared in Lucky Star! Yes, he’s a Gainax reference.

A lot’s happened since they finished the second season of Mahoromatic, eh?

We have just been informed that Gainax is an animation company. Wow…(I guess it’s ’cause Fanime named the panel “What is Gainax? A Day In The Life Of Gainax.”) Speaking of a day in the life– typically, they just…produce animation…every day. Currently they’re working on a fall TV anime that goes untitled, as well as the Gurren Lagann movie.

Opening up for Q&As already, and the first question is: how long does it take to make an anime, from inception to first airing? Yamaga answers, and some other Gainax employee in the back of the room throws out a response in Japanese as well (I assume it’s a Gainax employee anyway). There are always 3-4 projects in planning, we’re told, and it can take 5 years to go from concept to an anime. So, if they waited until each was finished to start the next, they’d come out every five years or so. Those who’ve known Gainax for a long time might have noticed that they’re doing a lot more lately, and it’s because of the simultaneous planning process. Apparently their previous process was rather inefficient, Yamaga says. So before Yamaga came to Fanime he was in England to prepare for a new project, but who knows when that’ll actually come out.

Next question: is the animation complete before the show actually starts to air? The asker refers to rumors about Gurren Lagann being atypical in this sense– I’m not sure how true that is; I think typically an anime episode is completed pretty shortly before that specific episode airs. The answer, via Yamaga and Akai: they try to make as much as they can before it starts airing, but they’re still creating episodes as the earliest ones air. They had 7 episodes created when they started airing and from then on it was mostly catch-up for the animators to keep up. For Gurren Lagann the story changes in the middle but not because they changed direction; that was lpanned before.

Do they ever play practical jokes in the office, and if so what kind? I like this question! The answer: Ohtsuka says they’re all so buddy-buddy that of course it NEVER happens. Takeda says he wants to do them a lot, but that everyone else is too serious so it’s impossible– also kind of sacastic. Yamaga says that Takeda wants to run around the office naked.

Someone is asking if sequels also take the same five years that a new original series takes. There are two types of sequel: planned sequels and unplanned sequels (like Gunbuster 2), the first being ones where they presumably intend to do them pretty much as the original airs, and the second being where they decide to do a sequel later. A sequel takes the same steps as a new series, but not five years’ worth of them. (Does this mean that the Gurren Lagann movie had been planned prior to the show’s airing?) Basically when you plan a sequel it’s not like starting from scratch, it doesn’t require the 1-2 years of world and character creation. Usually more like three years.

I just asked what comes first when creating a new series: worldsetting, characters, story, etc? Takeda says that it depends on if it’s based on one of their original ideas or on someone else’s (like Mahoromatic). Obviously with the latter their goal is to translate over, but for original series the first thing is usually the theme. Usually they brainstorm the theme, such as “going to space,” and then they fill in everything from there– why do they want to go to space? And story and characters come from that. The most important point when brainstorming– and they can do all day and it takes forever –is to pinpoint something interesting on why a character wants to go to space (for example) and come up with an interesting and good reason.

Someone is asking about the nature of the Gurren Lagann movie– a retelling, new footage or old footage, a new story, etc. I wonder how much they can even talk about it? I guess we’ll find out…Takeda answers that the movie will be reusing some footage to retell a bit, and now he’s trying to figure out if it’s okay to say something…basically he just spilled the beans on saying that there’ll be two movies, because it’d be hard to fit 26 episodes in one movie. But it’ll be original footage, but with some reused footage as well. Apparently Takeda is known as the big blabbermouth at Gainax. And that’s all he can say today.

Someone asks what Takeda likes to drink, and he says…ramune! And someone wants to know where Yamaga got his t-shirt, which is a Puma knockoff that says Kuma (bear). He bought it in Hokkaido.

Ooh, interesting– turns out that Akai is the Gainax co-founder who resigned as producer of Gurren Lagann and as board member after he achieved the ire of fans online when he said some disparaging things about otaku. Someone just asked about it. But he still works at Gainax, and resigning as a producer doesn’t mean anything. Hmm!

The next question is what is your favorite show you’ve worked on? Apparently they get the question a lot, and Yamaga says his favorite is whichever one he’s working on. Currently he doesn’t care about Gurren Lagann, for example. Even though they’re still actually working on it, so that’s a problem…aww! Because he’s working on an unannounced project. Akai says that he doesn’t even want to look at the anime, because he’s embarassed at how bad it is. So the DVD at the beginning of the panel was like torture for him. Gurren Lagann, the newest series he’s worked on, he actually still likes a lot, so he guesses it’s his favorite. So please everyone watch it!

Takeda gets the question a lot too and has so many favorites, so he can’t really decide. A long time ago he was able to specify, but for now he really likes their next unannounced project best. In his mind, about 2/3rds of his day is the new project, even though the rest are all important as well. So tortured! Yamaga says it’s not torture for him. Takeda and Yamaga have a bit of a back-and-forth. Moving on to Ohtsuka…soft-spoken, he says that he’s watched one of his works many times, though while working on something he can’t enjoy it like a viewer, so he has to watch it later. Then he thinks “wow, this is great!” Not his greatest and biggest hit, but he really likes Puchi Puri Yushi.

Someone is now asking a question in Japanese, so I’ll have to wait for the translation of the question…he’s a HUGE Evangelion fan and when he found out about the Rebuild he bought it and thought it was mind-blowingly good and wanted to know when they decided to make the movies. Takeda answers; it was pretty much when Anno made the original series, interestingly…after that Anno worked on his own movies and got a lot more experience as a creator (level up!) and about three years ago Anno decided he wanted to revisit Eva and create something new from it, and now he’s finally able to “make an Evangelion that fits his vision.” From what Takeda hears, anyway.

And now of course, someone wants to know more about the new untitled project– or rather, how the company decides which projects to go with. Is it Yamaga going alone on a bold mission alone, or the entire management team collectively? Yamaga takes this one, and says that the only time he’s demanded a project is Wings of Honneamise, but he’ll only be that unilateral once ever maybe twenty years or so. Wait, no, he says he made a mistake: it does happen with little things on occasion, but he only does it when necessary…it’s not really Gainax’s style. He feels that at Gainax someone should be saying, “I want to make something!” and then everyone else gets involved.

Next up, someone wants to ask about Honneamise, if there’s any desire to return to that style and/or setting in the future. Yamaga says that there’s always different staff on every anime, and among those many styles they tend to take the best one for the show, so he’s not really sure what’s meant by the “style” but he thinks that maybe sometime in the future they’ll go back to Honneamise.

A PR question: in responding to fans about things, what’s a time that stands out when someone was “very negative” about something Gainax has done. (Uh…episode 4 of Gurren Lagann? Yeah, there’s some chuckling and I think Akai, who mentioned being dissed online earlier, is pouting a bit.) Ohtsuka says that in his house’s entrance, right after Evangelion ended, someone just wrote “DIE.” Akai says he remembers a bad one too, and Takeda says that when there’s a lot of Gainax-bashing it mostly comes from the Internet of course, and he remembers that someone once wrote in that Hideaki Anno stole Eva from a story he wrote on a desk in high school…wacky. But that they’re always getting bashed so it’s hard to pinpoint.

Akai says sarcastically, “no one ever talks bad about us, right?” Then he goes on to say that there’s really too much for him to remember anything specific, and it makes him mad when it happens but then he forgets about it. And he’s okay with getting negative comments, but it hurts the most when people say nothing about their works. Yamaga says that really, he’s never heard any real badmouthing about Gainax, but he thinks it’s because he ceases to care about a project once he’s done about it, like he said earlier. Sometimes he gets badmouthed personally, people saying he’s so full of it, but not so much Gainax itself.

And now someone wants to know their opinion on fansubs. I think someone asked Yamaga this last year…the translator has to explain what fansubs are to some of the staff, including the ones hanging out in the back. Yamaga says he answers this every year, but that it’s common sense: there are companies in the US who pay money to release it here, so he officially can’t say that fansubbing is good. But objectively, it’s true that fansubs are the driving force in why anime is so popular in the US, especially since it’s so hard to air anime on TV in the US, so he can’t really say that it’s bad, but that it is, as president. Akai chimes in on the fansub question and says that especially since BEI is here– and hopefully they’re not in the audience, he says –they’ve worked really hard to get the show on TV so don’t tell them what Yamaga said.

A “Mr. Beard” asks about how, if at all, the Japanese industry is changing to deal with all the new Internet-based issues. Takeda takes this one on, saying that the biggest change is that the number of titles released every year has gone up. He also thinks that studios are much livelier, and that more series are able to be adapted from manga or novels into anime, as well as original series. Back in the day, he says, animation production companies would be hired by bigger companies to produce an anime, but now production companies are taking initiative to make their own anime. Smaller companies can have an idea and make an anime and grow more easily than before. And that’s how the animation industry was created in the first place. But there are problems that can occur as well, and that anime DVD sales have dropped– something we all knew. Years ago if you could sell even 10k DVDs it was a hit, and now titles are only selling from 1-8k, and the lowest figures: 200. Ouch. Selling only 200 it would probably be cheaper to burn the DVDs on the computer…and someone else suggests selling it at ComiKet. And it’s something Takeda thinks about a lot. He predicts that the weaker companies will die and the number of releases will go down.

Next, someone asks WHY there are more anime– is anime a bigger part of what’s broadcast, or are there just more channels? Takeda says it’s because animation became profitable. It was profitable in the past too– he says he misunderstood the question –but it’s become more and more profitable with various products. Because there are so many titles, there’s no way a regular fan can buy 100 titles a year, so now fans are being more picky about their choices…which is something I think older American fans can relate to; it used to be everyone bought everything ’cause so little was brought out! Takeda thinks that people won’t pay for the series they only kinda want to watch.

An Evangelion question– about the manga there are besides Sadamoto’s main version as well as about their involvement in Sadamoto’s. Takeda says that they’re really only involved in the planning stages of Eva manga, though occasionally they come up with ideas and plans and Sadamoto puts it in the manga. The asker follows up to press the question about the other, non-Sadamoto manga, and Takeda says that they produced the Koutetsu Girlfriends game that became a manga after, and the Gainax people are trying to figure out which was the other Eva manga she’s talking about…he thinks it was Kadokawa’s project, not theirs. He’s calling up a staffer from the audience, who confirms that it was Kadokawa’s idea, and Gainax said they could do.

Someone asks whether foreign markets enter into the brainstorming process of what projects to keep and which ones not to. Akai says nothing, none whatsoever. That’s just for Gainax though; they don’t know about other companies. Another person asks if any foreigners have approached them with project ideas. Yamaga says that foreigners are bringing in projects as well as people within Japan, but they haven’t really done any yet, they start from inside the company. He says that he hears other companies have foreigners bringing in proposals but that it doesn’t sound like it’s going well (helloooo Highlander anime). Akai says that as Yamaga said earlier, it takes 3-5 years to plan anything at Gainax, so when people bring in proposals they expect the shows to air next year, which doesn’t fit their scheduling.

My question next: since they told us their favorite shows they did work on, do they have favorites that they didn’t / non-Gainax shows? They’re chuckling now, and Otsuki says if it’s not Gainax, then he likes Studio Ghibli stuff. Takeda says he can’t really think of something outside of Gainax and he doesn’t really like Ghibli but it’s the only thing he can think of– like, he guesses he cosplayed as a Ghibli product, he did a Porco Rosso character. And as the Catbus. For the lulz! Akai has a favorite but the audience might not know it…Wanpaku Ouji, a Toei anime from 1963 about an 8-headed dragon and a boy fighting. Yamaga says he likes Road to Munich, which sounds like is a “documentary anime” about a volleyball team who works hard to get to the olympics. He also says he likes another documentary-to-anime called Ketsudan (Judgment), which was just released as a DVD box so we can watch it too (so released in the US). Akai says that the show shows alternative decisions in the Pacific War (WWII?), but no matter what changes, Japan always loses.

A Gurren Lagann question: this guy thinks that the intro doesn’t suit the series. Akai asks if he means the intro to the first episode, and Ohtsuka says that originally that scene was supposed to be how things wound up, but things changed a bit as the series went on. He says that you can think of it as a predicting scene instead of a scene that actually happened. It was supposed to give you a glimpse of what to expect from Simon when he eventually gets into space.

Someone is asking about the Road to Munich documentary-to-anime to see if it was about the 1972 Olympics, in which the Israeli athletes were killed. Yamaga doesn’t know what year’s Olympics it was. Yamaga says yes.

The next question is about the new unnamed project: the guy wants to know if Yamaga’s trip to England was for research– maybe for setting? –or if the series actually involves foreign companies. Yamaga says that the new project he’s working on with Takeda is completely separate from the England-related project. However, the England-related project isn’t set in England, but to give a glimpse of the new project: there’s a character who is a rock musician from England, and who went to England to figure out where his hometown would be. Akai says that when talking about the project they talk about how it’d be nice if they could go to England to get a clearer picture, but “just for that, we can’t go to England, can we?” and Yamaga said “no, let’s go!” and went. Yamaga says that the other new project alsod involve a “research” trip to Egypt, to Akai’s surprise. Yamaga says that it’s because a particular sport is involved in the show and that sport has an event happens in Egypt involving this sport. They won’t tell us what sport, but…England? Egypt? I’m thinkin’ soccer. Anyone else care to speculate?

Next question: have they done similar research in foreign countries for projects before, and what was the most interesting? Yamaga says that when he was a kid, people like Hayao Miyazaki and other bigshots, they did such research in foreign countries. Yamaga says that when Gainax started in the anime industry they dreamed of doing things like that, but when they first started they had no money so they couldn’t just up and go. So mostly working on anime is just sitting at your desk drawing, but he thinks he’s learned that it’s important to create realistic anime by visiting places and seeing the world. So recently even if they are short on money they would cut back somewhere else so that they can go, because it’s important not just to sketch the scenery but to see the atmosphere and the food and stuff, so they try to go and see the world as much as possible. And they have to have a reason so that it’s not just a vacation. So in this England-related project, there are fields that came up in the script, and it’s part of one of the characters’ childhood memories so they decided to go, so that they could convey the nostalgia and other feelings better than if they were just sketching from photos. When Yamaga was in England walking on the countryside (in the rain), he was able to feel the character come to life, like he was there. So going with the character designer and director, they talked about the character. Also, although the translator is referring to the character as “he,” she specifies that Yamaga isn’t assigning the character a gender…yay for no pronouns!

As for the other part of the question, the most interesting place: they’re talking about different places and why they went where and for what shows, and now Yamaga says that for Honneamise they went and watched a rocketship going into space for the series. Yamagi says that Abenobashi Shopping Arcade, set in Osaka, was researched on-site but the old atmosphere was getting crushed and they were replacing it with a new Osaka, so they didn’t see what they wanted to see…but that the new Osaka became part of the story.

Last question: Gainax is one of the preeminent anime companies in Japan; do they attend a lot of events for fans in Japan, like Fanime? Takeda says that Japan doesn’t really have events like Fanime. He says that the only similar ones are TAF or ComiKet, and that there are some sci-fi festivals, but no one from Gainax goes to those. So…no.

Since they have ten more minutes they’re going to show the rest of the DVDs they brought, even if Akai doesn’t like it. Akai says that this might be a good time to go to the bathroom. It’s from Daicon 4, and all I can tell you is that there is a bunny girl in a turnip spaceship thing. And ’80s music. And Darth Vader. Oh, Gainax.

Tags: fanime08, gainax, Gurren-Lagann, JP-industry

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