FanimeCon - Day Two - Gainax Memories

It's appropriate that Takami Akai (left) and Hiroyuki Yamaga (right), who were two of the founders of the Gainax production studio, got together at the FanimeCon convention - because a convention in Japan was where the company got its first big break. Akai, Yamaga and Hideaki Anno were film students at the same art college, and moved into the same cramped apartment in Osaka. "It's not like we fell into this - we had this dream," said Yamaga. During this Friday panel discussion, Akai actually got out of his chair and acted out what it was like for the three artists to live in the apartment, which wasn't much larger than the ballroom stage on which they appeared. Among other thinks, Yamaga and Akai said they didn't like the smell of the coffee-and-milk mix that Anno liked.

The three wanted to make an animated film so bad that they got an 8 mm camera, put together some pencil tests and photographed them, frame-by-frame. The result entranced them. "the characters came alive. It gave us more self-confidence in our drawing," said Akai. From that original three-minute animated tests came the hope for something larger. "I said `Hey, let's make a movie out of this. We can do it if we put the time and energy into it,'" Yamaga recalled. "I wonder where we went from there - it was a ways back."

What came from that cemented the Gainax legend. The fans who ran the Daicon 3 sci-fi convention in Japan asked the three to make the con's opening animation. "That was a very big honor," said Yamaga. With a staff of fans to work on the animation, the three created what is considered the greatest fan animation in history. It was the original super-powered schoolgirl, a ten-year-old who stopped being cute and started beating up monsters with her ruler that transformed into a light sword. "Here's this ten-year-old who has a backpack with the power of a Gundam," Yamaga said. "Back then, the audience thought it was a really cool idea. We were trying to shock the audience."

Later opening animation featured the "Daicon bunny girl," and that work led the three friends to move to Tokyo and get jobs in the animation industry. Those early years produced some irreverent recollections about how they didn't like the designs of the transforming mecha in the original Superdimensional Fortress Macross series (something about how they looked like bananas) and had to change the designs. In those years, Yamaga got a job despite his mediocre drawing skills. When the studio that hired him learned about that shortcoming, Yamaga was told that he didn't have the drive to become a success. Eventually, Yamaga and his friends proved that was very, very wrong.

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four