Creator Breakdown/Anime

• The most famous instance of this in anime is Hideaki Anno and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The latter half of that show and the subsequent movies are a testament to his depression and conflict with the otaku lifestyle at the time; in the end, all of that eventually merged with Gainax's serious financial difficulties to create the infamous, dark and Mind Screwing last two episodes.
  • Which is interesting because the first half of the show was created off of the depression, but the latter half was made while he was in therapy. And it shows. The first half is moody, but it's quiet moody - the "I've got problems and I don't want to talk about them" moody. Shinji in particular is a depressed, quiet, emotionless blob for the first half. Then comes the second half, where Anno starts his therapy sessions. Shinji becomes suddenly competent and gets eaten twice. Asuka gets mindraped. Rei's emotional development is undone as she's replaced by another clone who has her own issues. Misato finally ends things with Kaji, witnesses Ritsuko's emotional breakdown, and then sobs her heart out as Kaji is shot dead for having done the right thing. It's like all the bottled emotion in the first half gets let loose in the second. And then there's the movie...
  • FLCL was then reportedly created by Kazuya Tsurumaki as a vacation for the staff afterwards -- Anno's only contribution to the series was providing the voice of a non-anthropomorphic cat. Some people even consider this to be too much.
  • Interestingly, this trope is inverted in Rebuild of Evangelion. Hideaki Anno is a much different man than he used to be years ago, and now that he is not only sane, but also happily married and the director of one of Japan's most successful franchises ever, the characters are slightly saner and braver (especially Shinji), and the series' general tone seems to hold a "Light at the end of the tunnel (Somewhere past the train)" mentality. It is rumored that the new movies will end in a different way when compared to the famous past movie...
    • The visit to the sealife preserve alone was enough to create some distance from the original series. Where the first series was largely dominated by the fatalism of Seele and Gendo, the very existence of the preserve and the hopes of one day using it to repopulate the seas shows more human spirit in ten minutes than we saw in most of the original.
    • And then his depression returned with a vengeance due to the movies' Troubled Production, and it seems to be the reason behind the extremely dark turns the second and third films took. With help of his wife Moyoco and Hayao Miyazaki, he's been working on it.
• The other (in)famous example is Yoshiyuki Tomino. Reportedly, the famed director struggled with depression for decades, and this was expressed by the high body count of many of the series he directed, such as Space Runaway Ideon, Aura Battler Dunbine, Zeta Gundam, and Victory Gundam. Not surprisingly, this earned Tomino the nickname "Kill'Em All". In his defense; however, he likes to do what he can to insure that his series will not have a sequel. After his battle with depression his work lightened considerably with his work like Overman King Gainer having almost no deaths while Turn a Gundam had a positive message unlike the cynicism of Zeta Gundam. His next Gundam series, Gundam G in Reconguista, is nowhere as dark at Zeta either.
  • Also, like Anno, he remade Zeta Gundam into a movie series but with a better ending after he got over his depression.
• Noriaki "Tite" Kubo is said to have suffered two intense ones in his career:
  • His first manga, Zombiepowder, only lasted four volumes due to low sales. In a veiled reference on the inside cover of the final volume, Kubo acknowledged a nervous breakdown also contributed to its cancellation.
  • Some months after the end of Bleach, he revealed on Twitter that the tenth year of publishing was incredibly hard on him due to stress and bad health. Then a letter gave him his spirits back - it was from a deceased 10-year-old Ill Boy, whose Last Request was to have an anonymous letter with encouraging words given to him after his death. At the end of the reveal, Kubo asked for leads about the boy's family's whereabouts, intending to find them. (And around a year later, he did.)
• In-Universe example: In Princess Tutu, Drosselmeyer traps the entire town of Kinkan in a story after the villagers began to fear his story-turning-into-reality powers and cut off his hands. That story? Written with his own blood from the stumps of his arms where his hands were cut off. Which, of course, explains why the man is so insane and obsessed with tragedy.
• The author of Bitter Virgin, Kusunoki Kei, explains that a character's stillborn child in the story was written in after her own miscarriage. As it is often with Creator Breakdowns, the writing has emotional honesty and power, which stands out in the story's somewhat melodramatic tone.
• In-Universe example: Yusuke Yoshino of Clannad. Meeting a group of kids in a hospital that are fans of his music made him question his singing for his own sake, preventing him from writing new songs. Then, when the biggest of said fans committed a huge crime, he blamed himself and let that bitterness crawl into his work. It eventually led to a downward spiral where he left the music scene a broken man..
• Osamu Tezuka's, in the wake of personal betrayal, having his manga altered in serialization and anime adaptations, and health problems. His stories always had a certain 'edge', but you can see him subverting and deconstructing the ever living life out of some of his previously innocent characters and archetypes. The most blatant product of this is Alabaster.
• Yukito Kishiro suffered one shdn , leading to the abrupt and confusing ending of Gunnm (or as it's known in the US, Battle Angel Alita). After trying his hand at a new series which sadly never caught on, he returned to his staple franchise and picked up where he left off, rewriting the events that concluded first installment.
• A particularly ugly and messy example for Kentarou Yabuki, the creator of Black Cat and illustrator for To Love Ru. The cancellation of the latter manga was abrupt due to his terrible divorce from his ex-wife Shiho, the woman said to be the inspiration behind the sweet and lovely Girl Next Door Haruna.
  • Which is a double shame considering the writer of the manga didn't base the character on Shiho, making one wonder how the story would have turned out if he had hired a different illustrator with a more happy and stable family life.
    • After a lot of drama, a sequel series has been established with both the original writer and the original artist. Said sequel series almost picks up where the original left off.
• One Piece fandom has speculated that the business with Portgas D. Rouge, Ace, and Roger was at least partially a product of Eiichiro Oda's anxiety over his wife Chiaki Inaba's pregnancy and himself becoming a father.
  • On a more humorous note, it's been joked (and outright stated) by the anime staff that the reason the amount of fanservice spiked upward was because of Oda getting married to Chiaki and being horny for her all the time (dude, she's a gorgeous Cosplay Otaku Girl) - and to the displeasure of fans who liked the general lack of such things in the manga early on. For a guy who prefers not emphasizing romance that's not an obvious huge joke in his stories, he sure is a massive softie for his family.
• In-universe example in Bakuman｡. Ryu Shizuka, author of "True Human" (a manga about the conflict between the "true humans" and the normal "old" humans), kills off all the human males and focuses the story around the young women serving the "true humans" around the time he starts going to cabaret clubs and socializing with the hostesses. His editor takes him to a tea date with Aoki and her assistants, along with Hiramaru and his editor, which turns out to be quite awkward due to Shizuka's poor social skills and gloomy demeanor. Shizuka realizes that the hostesses were only paying attention to him for money, and plans on writing about their false love in "True Human"
• One of the reasons why the Gundam SEED movies ended up in Development Hell was the very serious illness (unspecified for a long time, then confirmed to be a nasty combo of depression and cancer) suffered by Chiaki Morosawa, head script writer and wife to director Mitsuo Fukuda. Morosawa ultimately passed away in 2016.
• More of a fanwork example, but the Doujinshi Takotsuboya K-ON Trilogy involves Azusa being unable to find success as a musician, Mio being extremely jealous at Yui for her success, and Ritsu resigning herself to a low level job because she believes she lacks talent. All of these can apply to the creator, TK, who tried for decades to become a published mangaka, but never could.
• In 2006, Nitroplus' Gen Urobuchi confessed in his afterword to the first volume of Fate/Zero to a loss in the ability to write heartwarming stories and a "tragedy syndrome" which compels him to make things tragic for the characters he conceived. Such tendencies showed up in spades in Fate/Zero, which was a much darker prequel of Fate/stay night, and then, in 2011, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Judging by the Bittersweet Ending of that anime though, he appears to have gotten better.
• Regarding Detective Conan, when playwright Hisashi Nozawa committed suicide in summer 2004, fans also wonder if Nozawa already had a breakdown when he penned the series' Non-Serial Movie Phantom of Baker Street about 2 years prior. This is fuelled by the fact that there has been a constant suspicion that the local Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds One-Scene Wonder, Hiroki, was Nozawa's Author Avatar--and, well, this movie Starts with a Suicide...
• Yuu Watase has had at least two of these:
  • When working on Fushigi Yuugi Genbu Kaiden, she was thinking of retconning Takiko's death and let her live.. Then, her best friend died in an accident and she decided otherwise, killing Takiko off in a rather heart-rendering manner.
  • As she was working on Arata Kangatari, Watase had HUGE Creative Differences with one of her editors, who vetoed near everything she did and was a massive pain in the ass. Watase suffered such a massive burn-out from this deal, she seriously thought of leaving the manga world altogether. Fortunately the editor was replaced by one who was more flexible and understanding, and everything got sorted out.
• One of the Candy Candy authors, the writer Keiko Nagita aka Kyouko Mizuki, wrote the Candy novel that would later be adapted into the manga and TV series as a way to deal with her orphanhood.