Company history

Toei Animation began in January 1948 as Nihon Doga — a small Tokyo studio, founded in the ruins of the war, that set out to carry Japan’s prewar tradition of 漫画映画 (cartoon films) into a proper animation industry. Renamed Nichido Eiga in 1952, it was bought in 1956 by 東映 (Toei), one of the big film studios, and became Toei Doga. Toei’s president, Hiroshi Okawa, gave it a deliberate ambition — to be “the Disney of the East,” Japan’s first company built to make full-length theatrical animation.

The ambition produced landmarks. In 1958 the studio finished Hakujaden, Japan’s first feature-length colour animation, and for two decades Toei Doga was the acknowledged “head temple” of the Japanese animation industry — the place that trained a generation of directors and animators. It moved early into television, launching Ken the Wolf Boy, its first TV series, in 1963 and converting its programmes to colour from 1967, and it built the deepest production bench in the country.

But the studio had been built as Toei’s production arm, and that defined how it earned. The parent held distribution and the box office; Toei Doga took a fee for making the films. From 1973 it went further and began farming the labour-intensive drawing work out to cheaper studios in the Philippines and South Korea. On both counts — the channel that sold its films and the hands that drew them — the company’s value lived in what it made while the leverage sat with others. In 1979 it took the first step out of that arrangement, releasing Galaxy Express 999, the first theatrical feature it produced and financed itself.

Galaxy Express 999 (1979), the studio’s first self-produced and self-financed feature, was a hit — and it proved a point: Toei Doga could stand on films it owned rather than films it merely made for its parent. Through the 1980s and 1990s it turned that lesson into a library. Dragon Ball (1986), from Akira Toriyama’s manga, became a runaway long-run series whose broadcast, film and merchandise income remade the studio’s finances; Sailor Moon (1992), from Naoko Takeuchi’s manga, followed as a second worldwide property; and One Piece (1999), from Eiichiro Oda’s manga, became the third — a series still running more than two decades later and the company’s single largest revenue pillar today.

What changed was not just the hits but who paid. As the same characters were licensed abroad — Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon reached American television in 1995 — a growing share of income came from lending out copyrights rather than from production and broadcast fees. The studio also pushed early on technology, completing its own in-house digital production software, CATAS (Computer Aided Toei Animation System), in 1991 and beginning to digitise television production later in the decade. In 1998 it wrote the global ambition into its name, changing from Toei Doga to Toei Animation.

In December 2000, fifty-two years after its founding, the company listed its shares — first over-the-counter, then on JASDAQ in 2004 — and expanded a network of overseas sales subsidiaries, in Hong Kong (1997), Los Angeles and Paris (both 2004), to sell its programmes and licence its characters directly into foreign markets. Its ownership took on the shape it still has: the former parent, Toei, remained the largest shareholder, and in 2007 the broadcaster TV Asahi lifted its stake above 15%, leaving two large media shareholders standing side by side over the company.

On screen the franchise machine kept adding pillars — Digimon Adventure (1999) and the long-running Pretty Cure girls’ series (2004) joined the big three — while the studio continued to lean on overseas labour for the drawing itself, incorporating its Philippine outsourcing partner as a subsidiary and building tablet-based digital workflows. A run of market reorganisations (JASDAQ, then the merged Tokyo exchange in 2013) and the scrutiny of a listed market pushed the company to make explicit what had long been implicit — that its most valuable asset was not its production capacity but the copyrights it held.

The 2010s turned Toei Animation into a very different kind of business. Copyright income — theatrical releases, streaming licences and character merchandising built on the big three franchises plus Pretty Cure and Digimon — overtook broadcast fees as the main driver of results, and margins widened dramatically: group revenue roughly tripled in a decade, from about $413.6M (¥33bn) to over $673.6M (¥101bn), at operating margins around a third. The COVID-era streaming boom accelerated it — global platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll) bid hard for anime rights, and revenue jumped more than 50% in the year to March 2023 alone.

The other half of the decade’s work was reclaiming what the studio had long outsourced. Having relied since 1973 on cheaper drawing hands in the Philippines and Korea, Toei Animation opened the New Oizumi studio in 2018 to bring the whole pipeline in-house and fully digital — drawing tablets and 3DCG — and in 2023 it opened its own drawing academy to train animators internally, as an industry-wide labour shortage made control of the craft a strategic question. Its unresolved problems are the mirror image of its strengths: a profit base concentrated in a handful of ageing franchises, and a governance built around two large media shareholders, Toei and TV Asahi, whose interests it must balance against its own.