When Gainax was originally founded as Daicon Film, Sadamoto served as animator on the second animated project, the
Daicon IV opening animation. His first assignment as a character designer for Gainax was the film
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, released in 1987, he continued to design characters for Gainax with the series
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water,
Neon Genesis Evangelion,
FLCL, and
Diebuster.
The official manga adaptation of Evangelion, published between 1994 and 2013, was fully written and illustrated by Sadamoto. He also collaborated with director
Mamoru Hosoda to provide character designs for the films
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,
Summer Wars, and
Wolf Children. According to
Yasuo Otsuka, who guided Sadamoto as a newcomer, there are only three people whom he regarded as more skillful than himself that he has met during his career. One of them is Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. The other two are Sadao Tsukioka who became a visual creator, and
award-winning director
Hayao Miyazaki. When Otsuka met the three men, he seems to have felt that he was taking off his hat to them at once. However, he thinks that only Miyazaki completely mastered a genuinely superior animation technique at present. He guesses, "A too excellent person might despair in the group work". In a 2013 interview with Japanese Entertainment website Nihongogo, it was revealed that Sadamoto is a stickler for details and wouldn't feel comfortable illustrating anything too unfamiliar to him. "In general, I don't want to draw something that I have to study further in order to draw. For example, I could not draw a medical manga because it's impossible for me to make a lie about medicine. Also things like Soccer and Baseball. I am unfamiliar with these worlds so it would be too difficult to show the actual plays." When asked about dream collaborations he revealed an interest in working with
Robert Westall and
Philip K. Dick but apologized "These are all deceased people, sorry."
Criticism On August 9, 2019, Sadamoto criticized on
Twitter a statue featured in the "After 'Freedom of Expression'?" historical art exhibition at the Aichi Prefecture Museum of Art,
Statue of Peace (2011), by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sang memorializing
comfort women, girls who worked in wartime brothels in World War II for the Japanese military. The statue was first installed by its creators in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul as a form of political protest. He also criticized a movie in the exhibition that showed a picture of the Emperor of Japan being burned and then stomped underfoot, he referred to it as "indistinguishable from a certain country's style of propaganda". Sadamoto said "I wanted it to be an art event with academic contemporary art at its core...Remove the crazy [propaganda]-affirming media and the exhibition could still be redeemed." he follows "I'm not going to completely reject the act of turning propaganda into art, but honestly speaking, it did not speak to me at all on an artistic level." His comments have been criticized by some Koreans and English speakers who replied to his tweet with displeasure of his views. Later, Sadamoto claimed he merely disliked the statue's design, but liked Korean idols and even had Korean friends. After
3.0, Sadamoto did not return to work on the final
Rebuild movie,
Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, and has had a diminishing role in the tetralogy. Character design, as well as authorship for the spin-off manga
Evangelion 3.0 (-120 min.), was instead handed to
Hidenori Matsubara for most of the
Rebuilds, with Sadamoto being credited instead as "original character design" in
2.0,
3.0 and
3.0+1.0, with diminishing involvement in a supervisory role for
2.0 and
3.0. He was also not interviewed for the last two films. Many fans, primarily Korean ones, protested at Sadamoto's statements, and asked if he was still involved with the new
Eva movie. Sadamoto denied this and stated he had completely resigned from Khara and had "no involvement whatsoever". ==Works==