Toei buys the studio: building Japan’s answer to Disney (1956)

A studio built to make, not to sell

When Toei bought the small Nichido studio in 1956 and set Hiroshi Okawa’s ambition of an “Eastern Disney” on top of it, it gave Japan its first purpose-built feature-animation company — and, in Hakujaden (1958), the country’s first colour feature. For twenty years the result was the acknowledged centre of the Japanese animation industry, the studio with the deepest bench of directors and animators in the country. The scale of the ambition is exactly what created the capability, and that capability is what would later carry Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and One Piece to the world.

But the studio was built as the parent’s production arm, and that decided how it earned. Toei held distribution and took the box office; the studio took a fee for making the films — its value lived in what it made, while the money lived one step upstream. That structural dependence, deepened from 1973 by outsourcing the drawing itself to cheaper studios abroad, is the counterweight to the creative strength. The whole later history — self-production from 1979, the accumulation of owned copyrights, the reclaiming of the craft in the 2010s — reads as a long effort to close the gap between what this company makes and what it controls.