*deep breath*

Why Darling in the Franxx is not a Trigger anime

A big thread.

Little disclaimers before starting, I didnt work on the show or know personally people who did, so i'll try my best to not make personal assumptions on them, and rely on proofs and correlated material i found working on this.

I also don't have a text, so you'll forgive me if i repeat myself or forget something, I'll try to not forget anything important tho.

Alright let's go

So to start with the base, what is a Darling in the Franxx for those who don't know but still are interested in japan animation, and why are we talking about it ?

Darling in the Franxx is a 2018 sci-fi dystopian ecchi romance mecha anime made by the studios CloverWorks, A-1 Pictures and Trigger. It's basically an anime about a dystopian society, teenagers piloting robots in a very weird way, and falling in love.

It had the ambition to be biggest hit of this year, and when it premiered in Winter 2018... It did ! It really hit the charts, and became a massive success, it found an extremely big community, especially oversea, and its fans where very vocal about it too !

Except something happened and it was the end of the anime, it was very controversial amongst anime fans at the time, most people deeming it as terrible, to say the least, and its hardcore fans praising its genius (not trying to tell who's right, im stating facts here...i hate it)

So naturally, when something goes wrong, people search who's to blame for it, and they collectively decided to point at Trigger studio, because too many of their tropes were present in the end and "ruining it", and the fans found who to idolize and harrass for a season 2

But is it really that simple ? No, not at all, it's actually very complicated, and that it's very unfair to throw the blame on Trigger, but let's start at the beginning.

So we're in 2016, and Atsushi Nishigori, an ex-Gainax animator that worked on such monuments as Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, FLCL and even a bit on Kill La Kill and the second Little Witch Academia OVA, now employed at A-1 Pictures, reaches out to CloverWorks, and Trigger studio.

Cloverworks also was, back then a studio working for A-1 Pictures, so this is basically for most of the story A-1 being the producers, and Cloverworks their animators.

Quoting a 2018 interview of him :

So during this meeting, it was decided to create a new original anime, using the resources of A-1 and CloverWorks, and the name power of Trigger, and to let Nishigori direct it. The chara design was to be handled by Shigeto Koyama and Hiroyuki Imaishi (Trigger Studio)

But then that's where we can notice things going the wrong ways. In the artbook Initial Designs of Darling in the Franxx, we can notice a lot of different designs from Trigger studio, including a complete all female team (with the exception of one character)

and a lot of very different mecha designs than in the final version. Considering all of them were rejected, despite some being very close to fruition, A-1/CloverWorks had a problem with some of the designs, even rebooting the idea of a completely feminine team to put more men.

This situation ended with Atsushi Nishigori and Masayoshi Tanaka doing the final versions of most characters, and mech designs of the anime, meaning Trigger didnt actually design the anime, in contrary to people's beliefs.
Here, quotes from Hiroshi Wakabayashi and Nishigori

Tanaka and Nishigori being credited as the character designers despite having announced prior to this that Imaishi and Koyama would do this job sounds like a turn of events in the calendar.

Furthermore, in Anime Expo 2018 Panel, Trigger admitted that the pre-production didnt go smoothly because they were not going along well with the inputs CloverWorks were making on the plannification of the series, and how they vetod a lot of their ideas and storyboards.

But fast forward until the start of the anime's airing.

So the anime comes out and it's a massive success, but some people start on hating on it because of "Trigger's tropes" and their presence in the animation, because yes, Trigger animated it... until episode 15 last trace of involvement with Trigger freelancers in the anime.

So what happened there is unclear, but it seems like the anime being a massive success, it was deemed better financially for A-1 and Cloverworks to completely take over the project as continuing to work with Trigger would interfere with Trigger's working agenda.

Since Trigger was working on 2 different animes to come, SSSS.GRIDMAN and BNA, with Gridman planned for Autumn 2018, and a film, Promare, planned for Winter 2019, and them having little involvement in the creative process since the production started (quote from Wakabayashi)

It was better for Trigger to leave the project to put more time and energy on their personal works, as they didn't really have any creative input on what happened in the anime since it started. Actually, the anime also had a very strange way of being written, as Nishigori tells :

and remember, Nishigori did the direction, the writing, the designs, the script, the animation direction, the episode direction (for the episodes that were made by A-1, Trigger episodes were more mediated by Nishigori than actually directed) etc etc...

And I said mediation because this is how Nishigori qualified his own work as a director, having to go from one studio to another, answer questions, and go back to working on the episodes, there was no contact whatsoever between the two studios outside of Nishigori.

So really, any creative input made was A-1, and Trigger was on the production only for the first half. Why was there so many "trigger tropes" then ?? Why the aliens, why going into space ? And this is where we look at why creatively it's not a Trigger anime either : the scenario.