Hideaki Anno Is Anime’s Ultimate Wife Guy

The anime and manga industry might not flaunt romances between its creators, but it certainly has its share of “it couples.” Arguably, the most beloved is the duo of Hunter X Hunter’s Yoshihiro Togashi and Sailor Moon’s Naoko Takeuchi. But during Anime Expo and Japan Expo weekend, I witnessed a quieter but equally powerful couple in Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno and his wife, acclaimed manga artist Moyoco, who showed off their bond in the most anime way imaginable: having Hideaki’s Studio Khara produce an animated short honoring the 20th anniversary of Moyoco's magical girl series, Sugar Sugar Rune. 

In tandem with Khara’s release of a CG prologue of Sugar Sugar Rune— directed by Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time CG director Yusuke Matsui—came with the announcement of the series getting a full anime adaptation. But as far as I and my Twitter timeline were concerned, the real headline wasn’t the adaptation. It was Hideaki being anime’s reigning “wife guy.” What I didn’t realize at the time though was that this sweet gesture was just one of many adorable, deeply supportive moments the Annos have shared over their 23-year marriage. Turns out, the couple’s love story has been quietly unfolding like a real life slice-of-life series, and they might just be my new favorite couple in the industry. 

In my own sleuthing on the couple over the weekend as Aftermath’s resident anime correspondent, I stumbled across this gem of a Twitter post. It referenced an old interview with Hideaki Anno, where he was asked about his ideal woman. Without hesitation, he simply replied, “My wife, of course.”

While this answer was the best he could have given, it hit me a little harder than I expected. Anno, like his mentor Hayao Miyazaki, is often reduced online to a caricature of himself—a brooding auteur with a mecha fixation and a backlog of unresolved self-esteem issues poured especially thick into Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Shinji Ikari. 

This was something else. This was the sign of a man who routinely oscillates between perfectionism and overwork being visibly healed by his partner’s love. Somewhat tastelessly, some fans have joked about Moyoco needing to divorce him or something so his downward depressive spiral would yield another work like Eva, missing the entire point of how their partnership gave way to the rehabilitating theme of the Rebuild movies. The remakes of Evangelion’s narrative in movie form immortalized Anno’s love for Moyoco through Mari Illustrious Makinami. Despite Moyoco and Khara’s pushing back on Mari being literally Moyoco, she is still a lot like Moyoco.

On a surface level, Mari’s addition to the sequel-meets-remake animated films disrupted the long-standing Rei vs Asuka discourse Eva fans are still debating over (the correct answer is Misato). However, knowing the real-life inspiration behind Mari makes her role resonate differently with me now. It’s not a stretch to see Shinji as a stand-in for Hideaki himself—an emotionally withdrawn guy burdened by legacy and locked in a strained relationship with his father. And then Mari comes parachuting into his life (literally). She’s bold, irreverent, blunt, and tonally different from anything in the series. She doesn’t just shift the narrative into uncharted waters; she shifts its emotional current for the better as a chaotic symbol of new transformation breaking through the static of an otherwise doomed narrative. 

In Thrice Upon a Time, Mari is the one who reaches out to a once-doomed kid along the way with gentle nudges as he finally makes peace with his father and steps into adulthood. Given that Mari was modeled after Moyoco, its ending, which shows the two as grown-ups leaving a train station hand in hand, becomes even more meaningful. It also helps that his wife was a character designer for the film and is a managing director at Khara alongside Anno’s friends Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hiroyasu Kobayashi, and Nobuo Kawakami. 

Hideaki and Moyoco’s love is a collaborative and creative two-way street. Beyond drawing her take on Eva's characters and actors in Shin Godzilla, Moyoco has also pulled a page from Takeuchi’s playbook in penning an autobiographical manga called Insufficient Direction. In it, she chronicles the quirks and joys of being married to Hideaki. My favorite moments from the manga was when she revealed that Anno wore Kamen Rider cosplay at their wedding, and that she helped him overcome his picky eating tendencies by introducing zucchini into his diet. 

In a world where Hideaki is so often reduced to a creative who's at his best when he’s going through it like anime’s Adele, it’s genuinely heartwarming to see a different portrait emerge online of him, one which paints him in a softer hue. What’s more, Moyoco didn’t just “fix” Hideaki, as many have joked about online. As she notes, being with him helped her embrace her otaku soul. For me, their relationship is a rare kind of alchemy where their personal and professional lives manage to converge in ways that are equally healing and wildly creative.