Original ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ Studio Gainax Officially Shutters After 42 Years

Iconic Japanese animation studio Gainax has officially shuttered after a hugely influential and often tumultuous 42-year run.

According to a studio president and co-founder, Hideaki Anno, the company recently wrapped up bankruptcy proceedings, finalizing with the legal dissolution of the company.

Founded in December 1984, Gainax spun off from the indie filmmaking collective Daicon Film and quickly became one of the region’s most influential animation studios. Early titles like Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise were part of an industry-wide evolution that led to one of the art form’s most distinctive and often-copied eras. That evolution eventually led Gainax’s crowning achievement, Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the most impactful and enduring anime titles in the medium’s history. For decades, Gainax sat at the forefront of the anime landscape, serving as an incubator for major talent.

In his statement, Anno expressed gratitude to the companies and partners that have worked over the past six years to try and resolve the studio’s issues, including restructuring and, eventually, the wind-down of the studio after its former president, Tomohiro Maki, was arrested in 2019 for sexual assault of a teenager.

According to the studio, Maki’s arrest led to a “complete loss of operational capacity,” resulting in the following years of upheaval. In 2020, an internal audit revealed a pattern of irregular conduct spanning multiple years, including substantial borrowing from financial institutions, failures to meet payment obligations to industry partners, and the unauthorized sale or transfer of intellectual property and production materials to outside companies and individuals without the consent of their rightful owners.

In May of 2024, the company was sued by a debt collection company, and it decided that the only remaining possibility was to file for bankruptcy, leading to this week’s dissolution and the end of an era in anime production.

Anno’s full letter is available in Japanese here, and copied in English below, translated by Google Translate.

About Gainax Inc.

As announced in the Official Gazette on December 10, 2025, the animation production studio Gainax Inc. has completed its bankruptcy reorganization and ceased to exist as a corporation, bringing an end to its nearly 42-year history.

As someone who has been a shareholder for over 20 years since the company’s founding, I find this truly disappointing, but I am accepting it with a sense of calm.

First of all, we would like to express our gratitude and respect to all the related companies that worked with us for nearly six years, free of charge, to rebuild and subsequently reorganize Gainax following the arrest of then-CEO Maki Tomohiro in 2019. Thanks to your cooperation, we were able to properly process the rights for each work, transfer the rights, and transfer all production results and other materials, and safely return them to the respective rights holders and creators.

Once again, we are grateful. Thank you very much.

What I have revealed up until now about Gainax’s past is almost everything that can be made public, but there is something new that I find disappointing, so I would like to take this opportunity to mention it.

The problem was that the transfer of rights and materials had been carried out without due process under the former management.

As a result, we filed a civil lawsuit against the management at the time, and on January 20, 2023, a settlement was reached in which the plaintiff’s claims were accepted and the defendant apologized.

Settlement documents

When Gainax changed to a new management structure, contract documents and emails related to transactions were scrutinized in order to understand the company’s critical financial situation and to prevent the loss of rights and materials, and as the company’s largest creditor, we cooperated with the investigation.

During this process, we witnessed firsthand the dishonesty of Gainax regarding repayments after we provided emergency financing to the company in response to its financial difficulties, as well as various exchanges within the former management team that showed a lack of respect for Gainax’s works and staff regarding company management and the preservation of production materials.

Specifically, upon learning about the various false statements made by former Fukushima Gainax representative Yoshinobu Asao, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and Yasuhiro Takeda, whom I considered friends since college, toward my company and myself, including instructions from then-President Yamaga to Gainax employees to pretend he was hospitalized, statements that viewed our company as hostile, and schemes to unfairly avoid repayment, I have gone beyond anger to sadness.

I have come to realize once again that our relationship with them will likely never return to what it was before, and I am truly sorry. The reason we agreed to the previous settlement as a company is because we did not want to waste any more of our time dealing with them.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to President Yasuhiro Kamimura, a friend from my university days and the last representative director of Gainax, who, despite the fact that the previous management team had abandoned the historic anime studio Gainax without taking responsibility for its many responsibilities and creditors, managed to prevent the rights and materials from being lost and inherit them with the understanding of all parties involved, faced creditors sincerely, and did his best to the end, witnessing the studio’s demise.

“Thank you, Kamimura. And thank you for your hard work.”

Hideaki Anno, CEO of Khara Inc.