Hideaki Anno: The Depression Behind Evangelion and What Came After

Hideaki Anno was a founding member of Gainax, the studio that would produce "Neon Genesis Evangelion," and his path to directing that series ran through a period of clinical depression so severe that colleagues described him as functionally absent for years. He did not work, could not engage with other people, and had no particular interest in resuming either. When he emerged from the depression in the early 1990s and began developing Evangelion, he made a decision that would define both the work and his career: he would use the series to investigate the depression itself.

The decision was not announced. Evangelion was pitched to sponsors as a commercially viable mecha series — the market for giant robot toys was reliable, the format was proven. Gainax needed the production to succeed financially, and Anno knew that a series explicitly marketed as an autobiographical exploration of clinical depression would not attract the necessary investment. The commercial shell remained intact through the early episodes. What shifted as the production continued was Anno's relationship to his material: the further the series went, the more directly it engaged with the interior states he had been living through.

The character of Shinji Ikari — the reluctant pilot who is asked to fight world-ending threats and consistently fails to summon the will to do so — is, in ways Anno has confirmed, a self-portrait. The persistent question the series asks of Shinji, and through him of the audience, is why it is so difficult to choose to engage with life when the cost of not engaging is so clearly catastrophic. This is a clinical description of certain depressive states, and Anno stages it not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be examined. The series does not resolve it; it investigates it.

After the original Evangelion and its theatrical conclusion "End of Evangelion," Anno spent years in and out of production. He directed "Cutie Honey" (2004), a tokusatsu film, and co-wrote "Shin Godzilla" (2016), a political monster film that was received in Japan as one of the finest Godzilla productions in decades. The "Rebuild of Evangelion" tetralogy, which he produced over fifteen years, represents his attempt to return to the material with some distance — to remake the story with craft and perspective that the original's chaos did not allow. Whether it improves on the original or merely clarifies it is a question that serious viewers of both works continue to debate.

Anno has said that completing the final Rebuild film, "Thrice Upon a Time," felt like closure — that he had finished with Evangelion in a way he had not been able to in 1997. He is now in his early sixties and continues to work. What his career demonstrates, more clearly than most, is that the relationship between a creator's mental state and their creative output is not always tragic — that sometimes the work that emerges from the worst period is the work that matters most, and that surviving it makes subsequent work possible.