Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

Sadamoto is smiling!

Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (貞本 義行) is the Character Designer for Neon Genesis Evangelion. He was, along with Hideaki Anno, Takami Akai and Shinji Higuchi, one of founding members of Gainax anime studio. Sadamoto was an animator for the Daicon III and IV opening animations. In 1987, his first work as a character designer was seen in the Gainax production of Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise and was later the character designer for other Gainax works such as Gunbuster (1988), Nadia: The Secret of Bluewater (1990), FLCL (2000), Diebuster (2004), Melody of Oblivion (2004) and will also be the character designer for the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. Other anime that Sadamoto did character design for include .hack, Cutie Honey, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Sadamoto is the creator of the Neon Genesis Evangelion-based manga series, his first full manga work, which is an alternate continuity to that of the original series. He is also the author of the shorter 60 page manga Route 20 (1991), as well as the author of 2 short novels Dirty Work and System of Romance. When he was 19, his manga work was published in the Akita Shoten weekly Shonen Champion. He decided to become a manga artist, "[r]ight about the time I was in elementary school and middle school, Mazinger Z by Go Nagai, and Leiji Matsumoto's Battlefield manga series were just coming out. About that time I thought it might be nice to become a manga artist."

His art has been published by Viz in the two books Der Mond ("The Moon") and Der Sterne ("The Stars") as well as several Groundworks books. He also painted the cover of Eric Clapton's album, Pilgrim.

In Der Mond, he tells about the brainstorming sessions between him and Hideaki Anno about the Evangelion project. This includes suggesting to Anno to make the lead character a boy instead of a girl, pushing the name "Evangelion" over "Alcion", using the "the dead mother is inside the robot, which is operated by mental/psychical bonding with the child" after learning about the A10 nerve from a program on NHK, and making the series for TV instead of an OVA.

In 2008, he produced a two-part manga called Archaic Smile with his mangaka wife, Mako Takaha, that appeared in Monthly Shonen Ace.

Notes

• Sadamoto came up with the idea of Pen Pen being a hot springs penguin.

• According to an Interview from April 1996 which was published in the original Japanese Manga Volume 2, Sadamoto stated that he "wrote the script of the manga using the anime as a base", implying that the Evangelion anime was first.