About the studio
AIC, short for Anime International Company, was founded June 15, 1982 by Kazufumi Nomura along with staff who'd come from Mushi Production and Tezuka Productions. Based in Nerima, Tokyo, AIC spent the 1980s through 2000s as one of the industry's most prolific studios, the name behind Tenchi Muyo!, Bubblegum Crisis, and Video Girl Ai. *That's a serious run of genre-defining anime for one studio.* Its story gets rockier after that: AIC was acquired by Oizumi Corp. in 2010, then by Aplix IP Holdings in 2011, before being sold back to founder-era leader Toru Miura in 2014 for a symbolic ¥8,000, roughly the price of a nice lunch. The production arm dissolved entirely in 2016, with a spinoff, AIC Rights, left holding onto some of the old copyrights. Four decades after its founding, AIC's legacy is less a going concern and more a reminder of how fast even influential studios can fade.