In a recent interview with Anime News Network, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto stated he is no longer interested in working on the Evangelion franchise.
As an anime industry worker, for me Evangelion has been just another job, and I need to get work apart from Evangelion to keep going. It’s a franchise I don’t really want to work on anymore at this point – but it’s an important franchise in Japan and there are many fans, so I take it seriously.
Along with being the character designer for the series for 20 years, Sadamoto also wrote and illustrated the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga (which took him nearly 20 years to finish).
Now, it doesn’t sound like Sadamoto is going to jump ship before the Rebuild of Evangelion movies are finished, but it does sound like he is eager to work on other things. Furthermore, he almost seems to be as much in the dark as fans are when it comes to the next and last entry in the film series, stating, “The thing is, I don’t understand what’s cooking inside [Hideaki] Anno’s head (laughs).” Hideaki Anno is the original creator and writer for the Evangelion anime series and Rebuild films.
In the interview, Sadamoto also mentions another series returning from the grave, FLCL, but his involvement is still up in the air. When it comes to resurrecting FLCL, or even Evangelion for that matter, he had this to say:
The fans are important, of course. Fans want their series to come back, as in the case of FLCL, and it’s great they can fulfill their desires. But the people who really determine whether or not a series returns are the sponsors. Evangelion or FLCL, for example, are series which had a lot of success. They’re series with zero risk to sponsors, and they know they’ll be making money if they take part in those kind of returning projects.
As an artist, the feeling that shakes me is “why do we spend money on projects that aren’t new ideas or new stories?” I know that’s how the industry works, but I wonder.
I have always been a fan of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, whether it is from Evangelion, .hack, Summer Wars, and so on. I look forward to seeing what he does next, though I wouldn’t mind seeing the Rebuild movies finally reach their conclusion.
