>>102668167>I think he's talking about the general japanese socioeconomic malaise of the nineties, but to put its popularity solely (or even perhaps majorly) down to that is reductive.Even Evangelion's creators like character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto think that Anno's depressed outpourings in Eva came out at just the right time as the economic downturn in Japan was hitting hard and depression was rampant.
Eva has the ignoble distinction in the West as "babby's first adult anime" due to its run on Adult Swim. It was many American teenagers' first encounter with an anime that challenged them to think(and most still don't, so many years later) and wasn't wrapped up with a neat little bow.
>>102667302>The factors that went into Anno running out of budget?That they ran out of money in the end is mostly a myth. In truth, they just ran out of time. Anno wanted to go with a huge, spectacular finale, but had blown a great deal of the show's already modest budget on the earlier episodes and kept waffling on how he was going to actually end the show.
So much so, that Episode 24, the Kaworu episode, didn't get delivered to the TV studio(by bicycle courier) until 20 minutes before it was set to air. The last two episodes were really rushed with the artists and directors pulling all-nighters to get SOMETHING out for broadcast.
Despite his insistence that the TV's ending wan't a bad thing(bottom left of pic related), he did put together old and new footage and released Death and Rebirth to theaters to help fun End of Evangelion to be the definitive ending to the series and replace the last two TV episodes.
