[ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA - Twilight]
"Gainax Company, Limited (株式会社ガイナックス, Kabushiki-gaisha Gainakkusu?) is a Japanese anime studio most well known for the series Neon Genesis Evangelion and its ambitious, experimental works and ambiguous endings.
[...]
History
The studio was formed in the early 1980s as Daicon Film by university students Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Takami Akai, and Shinji Higuchi. Their first project was to make an animated short for the 20th Annual Japan National SF Convention, also known as Daicon III, held in 1981 in Osaka, Japan. The short film is about a little girl who fights all sorts of monsters, robots, and spaceships from earlier science fiction TV shows (including Ultraman, Gundam, Space Battleship Yamato, Star Trek, Star Wars, Godzilla, and many others) until she finally reaches a desert plain and pours a glass of water on a dried-out daikon radish, which immediately resurrects itself and grows into a huge spaceship and beams her aboard. While this animated short was ambitious, its animation was rough and low-quality.
The group made a much bigger splash at the 22nd Annual Japan National SF Convention, Daicon IV, in 1983. The short they produced for this convention started with a recap of the original short, showing highlights of the little girl's adventures with much better animation quality; then it showed the girl all grown up: wearing a Playboy bunny suit, fighting an even wider selection of creatures from all sorts of science fiction and fantasy movies and novels (appearances include various Mobile Suits from the Gundam series, Darth Vader, an Alien, a Macross Valkyrie, a Pern dragon, Aslan, a Klingon battle cruiser, Spider-Man, and a pan across a vast array of hundreds of other characters) as she surfs through the sky on the sword Stormbringer. The action was set to the song "Twilight" from the group Electric Light Orchestra. The use of this song, however, was unlicensed, preventing the short from being officially released on DVD, making the limited laserdisc release (Daicon Film) of the Daicon shorts very rare and highly sought after. The song was used again, legitimately licensed for the opening of the Japanese live-action TV series Densha Otoko, which had opening animation by GONZO. The Daicon IV short firmly established Daicon Film as a talented new anime studio. The studio changed its name to Gainax in 1985.
In 1995 Gainax produced perhaps their best known series, the commercially successful and critically acclaimed Neon Genesis Evangelion. In the wake of Evangelion's success, Gainax was accused of tax evasion and its president, Takeshi Sawamura, was sentenced to jail for accounting fraud[2].
Gainax marked their 20th anniversary with the production of the sequel to Gunbuster, Diebuster."
(Source: Wikipedia)
Une "success story" au pays du soleil levant ou comment parvenir au top en commençant de rien. Quand j'ai découvert cette vidéo il y a quelques années, j'ai jubilé devant la qualité du travail pour des amateurs à l'époque.
En parlant d'amateur, jetez un coup d'oeil sur "Hoshi No Koe" réalisé par un seul bonhomme et sa copine pour doubler l'héroine de ce fameux OAV. Histoire peu commune mélangeant SF et mélancolie sur une histoire d'amour que le temps et l'espace rend impossible.