- cross-posted to:
- anime@ani.social
- cross-posted to:
- anime@ani.social
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From what I understand the artists that made Evangelion moved on or retired a long time ago, which is probably part of why the studio hadn’t made anything as culturally relevant since the 00s.
Gainax staff had left and split into multiple companies like 2 decades ago, and I think many of those companies have already split off into their own companies.
Personally I’m more interested in the FLCL side of the company and the stuff they put out over the Eva side which seems to only rehash Eva.
To be fair the flcl side has been largely rehashing that as well iirc. The original series and it’s soundtrack are goated. I’ve watched the ones after and they were okay. Though it’s always hard to match that first bog hit.
The FLCL sequels were made at Production I.G., Gainax just licensed out the IP. There’s no real overlap in the people who worked on it either; I think just the director, and only in the role of “supervisor”, and the original character designer.
Unfortunately, that’s what most of these companies and studios have largely become. Risk averse IP leasing crews.
I remember seeing a while back that they were looking to restart reboot or somehow continue some of Rumiko Takahashi’s IP from the 80s. I think they did produce some new episodes of Those Annoying Aliens and there was talk of new Ranma 1/2 as well. I’m sure Inuyasha 2 is somewhere in the pipeline.
Heh, in fact there was a new Urusei Yatsura series recently, there’s a new Ranma 1/2 running right now and there was an anime-original Inuyasha spinoff (Yashahime) a couple of years ago. There’s actually a bunch of 80s IPs being taken out of the storehouse right now, with a new Cat’s Eye series running right now and an upcoming Kimengumi series.
The issue appears to be a lack of original works to adapt, or perhaps more accurately, too many of them. Adapting existing works has always been anime’s bread and butter, but while there are more people than ever reading manga (and light novels) right now, their attention is spread across a larger body of works, so there’s not that much that stands out in terms of popularity.
That said, brining back these old IPs might not be a bad thing in the long run. Back in the early 90s after the real estate bubble popped, a lot fewer shows were being made, so TV stations had to air reruns of older shows. This revived interest in genres that had gone out of fashion, like science-fiction, and led to the mid-to-late 90s period that is often seen as a golden age. Maybe this will be one of the things that will end this current rut of infinite isekai stories. I can hope, at least.
I’ve always liked Rumiko’s stuff. I think I first ran across it when the internet first started to become common late 80s early 90s. I have a first volume of Urusei Yatsura manga English translated that’s getting near 40 years old. And the content was already a decade or two old at that point. Realistically, Inuyasha is proto-iseki even.
I’m sure Takahashi like Toriyama at this point, have a lot of cultural memory and inertia. Though I honestly would have thought by now that there would be proteges or others influenced by them, that would be more culturally relevant in this day and age.
The most recent work by the director (Tsurumaki Kazuya) and writer (Enokido Youji) of FLCL is Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, at Khara, Anno Hideaki’s studio. Some other prolific people who worked on FLCL, Imaishi Hiroyuki and Ootsuka Masahiko, are now the big cheeses at Studio Trigger. Yoshinari You also mostly works at Trigger.
