- [on getting into the anime industry] If you want to get into anime, my best advice to you as a creator is to please have diverse interests in things besides animation. Look outward, first of all. Most anime makers are basically autistic. They have to try and reach out, and truly communicate with others. I would guess that the greatest thing anime has ever achieved is the fact that we're holding a dialogue right here and now.
- [on his beliefs] Japanese spiritualism holds that there is kami (spirit) in everything, and that's closer to my own beliefs.
- Once you hold the prejudice that you can't use anything but cels to represent characters, you've finally become a fetishist...
- About Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990): Actually, I felt sad when I watched Nadia, which I directed. I felt Nadia was too childish.
- About Shinji Ikari, the Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) protagonist: The reason why the main character is fourteen years is that he is no longer a child but not yet an adult. He lives alone, but is attached to others. In past centuries, he would soon celebrate his coming of age. Back then, life expectancy was fifty years, so people had to grow up in fourteen years. Considering 'age fourteen' as that in which an independence of mind starts manifesting, I found it proper to include this in my work.
- About Space Battleship Yamato (1974): Yamato used to be the best in the quality of the picture in those days, so it is very old. The young animation fans might not be satisfied with it since they have high appreciation as far as picture quality is concerned. But I want them to watch it at least once.
- About Japanese animation's beautiful women: Japanese animation is an industry that is, for the most part, male, and as is quite evident, everything is made for their gratification. Further, it is more gratifying for us to draw this sort of character, rather than old grandmothers.
- [about discovering Gainax selling off production materials from under him] I could have shrugged off the loan that never got repaid, but we were anxious to preserve the production materials we had poured blood, sweat, and tears into.
- [about his falling out with his former colleagues at Gainax] I am disappointed, not as a manager at a company that lent them money, but as a friend from our university days. And my biggest disappointment is that I'll never be able to regain the relationship with them that I had in those days gone by.
- [on why he didn't produce the Rebuild Evangelion films with his former colleagues at Gainax] There are a number of reasons for this. It would be hard to bring in a fresh vibe at the studio that made it in the past, there was another TV series being planned at Gainax at the time, and the younger generation of staff would continue to hold back on expressing themselves out of deference to me as their senior. But the biggest reason was so that I could control the production budget and ensure that the staff and employees could get the benefits and returns that they were owed."
- [on Godzilla] Godzilla exists in a world of science fiction, not only of dreams and hopes, but he's a caricature of reality, a satire, a mirror image. Recently, Japan has also been careless in the way it has attempted to depict him
- [on the character of Rei] Rei is someone who is aware of the fact that even if she dies, there'll be another to replace her, so she doesn't value her life very highly. Her presence, her existence-ostensible existence-is ephemeral. She's a very sad girl. She only has the barest minimum of what she needs to have. She's damaged in some way; she hurts herself. She doesn't need friends.
- [Regarding otaku culture] I don't see any adults here in Japan, the fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn't have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that's what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.
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