[p_l]

Ask not why GAINAX bankrupted, ask how the hell it survived so long.

Memes about GAINAX running out of money to finish series go all the way back to Gunbuster, which was their fourth production, and second under the name GAINAX.

The second production, Daikon IV, survives thanks to piracy because they didn't license them music used :V

[GuB-42]

My favorite "no budget" moment was in Kare Kano, a lesser known Gainax adaptation of the shoujo manga of the same name.

The second half as a whole is clearly made on the cheap, but episode 19 is special, it is all paper cutouts on a stick, most likely from the storyboard, on top of recycled backgrounds.

[jcl]

My favorite was toward the end of the Evangelion series, where they generated flashback footage by shooting the backs of earlier cels.

[jandrese]

Gunbuster ran out of money to pay colorists by the end of the series, which was only 4 episodes. Evangelion also clearly ran out of budget by the end of the series, and that was after some blatant cost saving scenes repeatedly appearing in the show, like very very long elevator rides where nobody moves and the only action is a floor counter ticking down, or watching the counter on a Walkman slowly tick by. Almost taunting the audience with the counters on the obvious padding scenes.

[p_l]

The funny thing is, the studio claims last episode of Gunbuster was done black&white on purpose - in fact, that black&white was more expensive the way they did it than otherwise.

Unfortunately I suspect that outside of the people directly involved we won't ever hear properly. The rumours flew around since early 1990s, and there is the part that Gunbuster was originally supposed to be a TV series (AFAIK), and as result the plot was extremely compressed into those 6 episodes that we got ultimately.

And it's not like the studio was not known otherwise for wild swings even when they didn't run out of money... (anyone remembers how Mahoromatic ended?)

[justsomehnguy]

I think it's true (at least partially), you transfer the outline to a cel and then colour it, any issues are covered by the paint.

With B&W you need to transfer the shading and you can't just (literally) fill the gaps with a colour.