Regarding the announcement from Gainax Co., Ltd.
Following the announcement regarding the bankruptcy proceedings on the
Gainax official website , we would like to provide some additional information from our company's perspective, and after taking into consideration our relationship with Gainax and its current management structure, we are posting this comment on the official website.
Gainax was the former company of Anno Hideaki, the representative director of our company Khara. However, Anno founded Khara in 2006 and left Gainax the following year in 2007. He has since become a shareholder of Gainax.
Our company had been aware of Gainax's poor management and debt for some time, and Anno expressed his concerns to management and made proposals for improving the company's management, but these were not accepted for a long time. Even in such a situation, we accepted the proposals of the management at the time and even provided supportive loans as color. However, Gainax's situation did not change, and the situation continued to worsen, culminating in the arrest of the then-presidential director in 2019 on a criminal offense unrelated to the company's operations.
Following the arrest of the former CEO of Gainax, our company's CEO, Hideaki Anno, asked for cooperation from KADOKAWA, King Records Co., Ltd., and Trigger Inc. in order to prevent reputational damage to the Evangelion series and other related works. He revamped the management team by having representatives from each company serve as directors, and has been working with each of our partner companies to understand the inner workings of Gainax, at the very least resolve unpaid payments to studios, writers, and creators within the animation industry, and prevent the loss of intellectual property and documents.
However, as stated in the Gainax release, by the time we understood the situation, we had already found ourselves in an unmanageable state of debt, and Gainax had come to the conclusion that it would be difficult to continue operations.
In light of this situation, in order to ensure that creators, original authors, and writers can continue to produce and manage their works in the future, we have worked with each production committee to confirm and organize the rights and transfer the rights to the companies and individuals we deem most suitable.
In order to alleviate some of the debts owed to the many people in the industry, we considered seeking support from our company, but this would have resulted in the unreasonable situation of having to guarantee the debts of the former management team and the former representative director, making it impossible to make sufficient repayments.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the new directors and the companies they represent for their cooperation in the reorganization and transfer of intellectual property and its future management, with the authors and creators as the first priority. We would also like to express our gratitude to the production committee companies for their efforts.
Finally, we are very sad that an animation studio with a history of nearly 40 years has come to an end like this. As for the GAINAX trademark and title, as stated in the release from GAINAX, we have acquired and are managing it ourselves.
In addition, "Gainax" is a separate legal entity from similar companies such as "Gaina Co., Ltd. (Studio Gaina)" and "Fukushima Gaina" (both of which were formerly known as "Fukushima Gainax"), "Gainax International", "GAINAX Kyoto", "Yonago Gainax", "Gainax Niigata Co., Ltd." and "GAINAX WEST", and there are no trademark license agreements between our company and the above similar companies. Please also refer to
Diamond Online's past coverage
of this matter .