About the studio
If you grew up on the World Masterpiece Theater series, literary adaptations like Anne of Green Gables, A Dog of Flanders, and Tom Sawyer, that's Nippon Animation. Founded June 3, 1975 by Kōichi Motohashi, the studio descended from Zuiyo Eizo (est. 1969), and it employed a young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata years before they'd go on to found Studio Ghibli. *Another entry on the long list of studios that quietly trained anime's future legends.* Based between Ginza (administrative HQ) and Tama City (production studio) in Tokyo, Nippon Animation built its identity on one remarkable run: the World Masterpiece Theater anthology aired 23 consecutive seasons from 1975 to 1997, adapting classic Western literature into some of the most emotionally earnest anime ever made. Fifty years on, it remains one of the defining studios of anime's literary, coming-of-age storytelling tradition, the kind that shaped how an entire generation understood empathy through cartoons.