Hideaki Anno

Evangelion is the weather system around everything Hideaki Anno has made. The Japanese animator and filmmaker, born in Ube in 1960, built a franchise that reshaped both the anime industry and a large part of Japanese popular culture, and his style has been defined ever since by a postmodern approach and by an unusually direct portrayal of what his characters are thinking and feeling, often at the expense of the plot they are supposedly in.

He has told the same story over and over, in public. After the television series came Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion in 1997, then a full theatrical rebuild across Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and, in 2021, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. Directors do not usually get to revise their masterpiece in public across more than two decades, and the accumulated result is a strange, unrepeatable document of a man arguing with his younger self.

Outside that, he directs live action with the same restlessness, from the handheld experiment of Love & Pop to Ritual and then the tokusatsu revivals: Shin Godzilla in 2016 and Shin Kamen Rider in 2023, with a motion capture turn as the title character in Shin Ultraman. He also acts. Hayao Miyazaki cast him, a non-actor, as the voice of Jiro Horikoshi in The Wind Rises, and he shows up in The Taste of Tea, Funky Forest: The First Contact and Last Letter, plus documentaries about Studio Ghibli including The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.