Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gainax was a Japanese animation studio based in Musashino, Tokyo, active from the mid-1980s until its dissolution on the 11th of December 2025. It produced Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, FLCL, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, among others.
The Evangelion franchise reportedly grossed over 150 billion yen. A claim made at the 2006 Tekkoshocon placed the figure at over 2 billion US dollars, and Yasuhiro Takeda stated in 2002 that the series sold record numbers of laserdiscs in Japan and that the DVD was still selling well at that time.
Gainax president Takeshi Sawamura and tax accountant Yoshikatsu Iwasaki were arrested on the 13th of July 1999 for accounting fraud. The studio had concealed 1.56 billion yen in income by routing money through related companies and storing 90 percent of those sums as cash in safe deposit boxes, resulting in 560 million yen in unpaid corporate taxes.
Gainax was founded by university students Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Hiroyuki Yamaga, Takami Akai, Toshio Okada, Yasuhiro Takeda, and Shinji Higuchi, who first worked together under the name Daicon Film. The studio changed its name to Gainax in 1985, taking the word from an obscure Tottori Prefecture term meaning "giant" and adding the suffix -x because it sounded, in the founders' words, "good and was international."
Gainax filed for bankruptcy with the Tokyo District Court on the 29th of May 2024, citing financial mismanagement and debt that exceeded 380 million yen as of 2020. The studio ceased operations on the 7th of June 2024 and was formally dissolved on the 11th of December 2025.
Daicon IV was an animated short produced by Daicon Film for the 22nd Annual Japan National SF Convention in 1983. It featured a bunny-suited woman battling hundreds of science fiction characters to the Electric Light Orchestra song "Twilight". Because the group failed to properly license the song, the short never received an official DVD release, making the limited laserdisc edition rare and highly sought after.