The Studio Gainax reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Studio Gainax

Studio Gainax is a an anime studio most famous for the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The studio was formed in the early 1980s as Daicon Film by university students Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamato, Akai Takami, and Higuchi Shinji.

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 is about a little girl who fights all sorts of monsters, robots, and spaceships from earlier science fiction TV shows (including Ultraman, Space Cruiser Yamato, Star Trek, Star Wars, Godzilla, Mospeda, and many others) until she finally reaches a desert plain and pours a glass of water on a daikon radish, which immediately grows into a huge spaceship and beams her aboard. While this animated short was ambitious, its animation quality was rough and low-quality.

But 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 hilights of the little girl's adventures with much better animation quality; then it showed the little 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 Darth Vader, an Alien, a Macross Veritech, a Pern dragon, Power Rangers characters, Spider-Man, and a pan across a vast array of hundreds of other characters) as she surfs through the sky on the sword Excalibur. The action was set to the song Twilight from the group Electric Light Orchestra. This short firmly established Daicon Film as a talented new anime studio.

The studio changed its name to Gainax in 1985.

The bunny girl from the Daicon IV short was parodied in an episode of Furi Kuri, in which the main female character dresses up as her and exhibits some of the same abilities.

Gainax works include:

Gainax has also produced a number of computer games, most recently a strip Mahjong game featuring Evangelion characters, and its most famous game Princess Maker which was later adapted as Puchi Puri Yuushi.