About the studio
Studio Pierrot was founded in May 1979 by four former Tatsunoko and Mushi Production animators: Yuji Nunokawa, Hisayuki Toriumi, Mitsuo Kaminashi, and Masami Annou. Based in Mitaka, Tokyo, it's the studio behind two of the biggest shonen franchises ever made, Naruto and Bleach, along with the darker, more modern Tokyo Ghoul. *Two ninjas and a soul reaper walk into a studio, basically.* The company briefly went by Pierrot Co., Ltd. starting in 2002, before officially reverting to Studio Pierrot on its 46th anniversary in August 2025. Few studios can claim to have produced multiple franchises that each ran for hundreds of episodes and defined an entire generation's Saturday mornings, or in Naruto's case, weekday afternoons after school. Forty five plus years since its founding, Studio Pierrot remains one of the names most closely tied to the shonen genre as fans know it today.