---
title: 'The Two Sides of Studio MAPPA | Anime Studio Spotlight'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=7guCSs-gQs4'
video_id: '7guCSs-gQs4'
date: 2026-06-16
duration_sec: 0
---

# The Two Sides of Studio MAPPA | Anime Studio Spotlight

> Source: [The Two Sides of Studio MAPPA | Anime Studio Spotlight](https://youtube.com/watch?v=7guCSs-gQs4)

## Summary

Studio MAPPA began as a creative haven under founder Masao Maruyama, producing passion projects like *Kids on the Slope* and *Yuri on Ice*. However, after Maruyama left, the studio shifted to high-volume adaptations (e.g., *Jujutsu Kaisen*, *Attack on Titan*), often overworking staff and relying on outsourcing. This video explores MAPPA's evolution from a risk-maker to a hit-maker, highlighting the industry's overproduction crisis and the human cost behind its success.

### Key Points

- **MAPPA's Changing Identity** [0:09] — The studio has shifted from making shows no one else would to accepting work from major companies like Aniplex and Netflix, losing its risk-maker title.
- **Founder Masao Maruyama** [2:05] — Maruyama started in 1963, co-founded Madhouse, and later founded MAPPA to recreate Madhouse's creative freedom.
- **Madhouse's Decline** [4:14] — After NTV bought Madhouse in 2011, the creative culture collapsed, leading to an exodus of directors and animators.
- **MAPPA's Early Goals** [5:53] — Maruyama aimed to make passion projects, starting with Shinichiro Watanabe's *Kids on the Slope* and later *Rage of Bahamut*.
- **3D Animation and Young Directors** [8:09] — Maruyama prioritized 3D training for directors like Yuichiro Hayashi and gave opportunities to younger talent.
- **Yuri on Ice's Success** [9:43] — Despite production difficulties, *Yuri on Ice* became a massive hit, confirming MAPPA's new direction under producer Manabu Otsuka.
- **Maruyama's Departure** [10:44] — Feeling deja vu from Madhouse, Maruyama left MAPPA to found M2 Studio, leaving Otsuka as president.
- **Overproduction and Control Issues** [11:23] — MAPPA increased output but rarely invested enough to control schedules, leaving staff at the mercy of external producers.
- **Decline of Original Anime** [12:23] — MAPPA now focuses on adaptations; directors like Hiroko Utsumi chose Bones over MAPPA for original projects.
- **Industry Overproduction Crisis** [14:10] — Rising profits led to more anime being made, but not enough animators, causing burnout and reliance on foreign freelancers.
- **Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan** [15:55] — These hits showcase MAPPA's ability to deliver quality under tight schedules, but at the cost of worker exploitation.
- **Foreign Animator Exploitation** [18:13] — MAPPA heavily outsources to foreign animators, using them as cheap repair crews without career advancement.

## Transcript

It can be difficult to talk about Studio MAPPA.
What I’d say in 2015 would be very different
from what I can say about the studio today,
on its 10th anniversary. The company has changed
a lot, as has the anime industry as a whole,
and instead of fighting the trends, MAPPA
has firmly adapted to them. They’ve earned
the title of hit-maker but lost the title
of risk-maker.
At the time, MAPPA was referred to as the
team that would make the sort of shows nobody
else would. But now, the studio has changed,
focusing instead on accepting work from companies
like Aniplex, Shonen Jump, Netflix and Crunchyroll,
rather than letting their directors develop
new ideas themselves. They’re often referred
to as goats, but it’s more accurate to say
they’re sheep to an industry that continues
to burn out its most valuable artists.
[baah]
Sorry, that joke genuinely was awful. There
is plenty to love about MAPPA, from the creativity
of Zombie Land Saga, to the trusting of Yuri
on Ice’s creators, and the incredible animation
of Jujutsu Kaisen but these successes have
sacrifices.
Hello and welcome to The Canipa Effect. This
is an anime studio spotlight on Studio MAPPA.
MAPPA shows can be great and more significantly,
popular. But popularity was never truly the
goal, but rather, something the studio fell
victim to, warping the philosophy of its founder.
And so, to learn about MAPPA, we need to learn
about the man in the name. MAPPA. Maruyama
Animation Produce Project Association. Let’s
get to know him.
Masao Maruyama started out in the industry
in 1963, same year as Hayao Miyazaki. And
like Miyazaki, he’s refused to retire since.
He joined Mushi Production, owned by the founder
of TV anime, Osamu Tezuka and when the company
went bankrupt in the early 70s, it exploded
into a fountain of talent, who went on to
create TMS Entertainment, Sunrise, Kyoto Animation,
and of course Madhouse, assembled by Maruyama’s
own group of friends. Each of these creators
was shaped in some way by Tezuka, and thus,
so is the anime industry as we know it today.
Madhouse started out as a way of making cool
shows with his cool friends, but over time,
Maruyama found more friends. These included
Made in Abyss director, Masayuki Kojima. Cardcaptor
Sakura director Morio Asaka. Yuri on Ice director
Sayo Yamamoto, Mob Psycho’s Yuzuru Tachikawa,
Steins Gates’ Hiroshi Hamasaki, Devilman
Crybaby’s Masaaki Yuasa. Sword Art Online’s
Tomohiko Ito, Attack on Titan’s Tetsuro
Araki. Mamoru Hosoda. Satoshi Kon. Sunao Katabuchi.
Takeshi Koike. And many many more. Basically,
he made a creative haven for the industry’s
most creative directors and helped launch
their careers, recognising them as director
material. No other producer has the breadth
and quality of Masao Maruyama’s career.
The focus at the time was always on shows
that were interesting to those at the stuio
and there was always a good mix. Plenty of
shows that the creators at Madhouse wanted
to make, along with shows that other companies
wanted them to make. This culture was important
and is the reason so many industry-defining
directors stuck around so long. Madhouse was
a place where they could generally do what
they wanted.
That was until 2011 when NTV bought the studio.
Suddenly, the culture was gone. The rule used
to be, if you can convince Maruyama it’s
interesting, you can make it, but now there
was a parent company to deal with. This sparked
a massive exodus where everyone from director
to animator left the studio. Mamoru Hosoda was in
the middle of making Wolf Children, and so
he created Studio Chizu to finish it off,
rather than stick with Madhouse.
“Madhouse literally was represented by Mr.
Maruyama and yeah, without him all the creators
were like, “Well, what am I going to do?
Can we stay here and still make the anime
that we want to?” Obviously, if another
company owns it, not really, right? So then
I had no choice but to create Studio Chizu
on my own.”
And so while everyone else went on to create
Science Saru, Studio Chizu and join a bunch
of other teams, Maruyama did what he knew
best. He made a new studio. And now, we’re
back to Studio MAPPA.
For him, starting from scratch was an opportunity.
As Madhouse had gotten larger, he’d found
it more and more difficult to make creative
works. Unfortunately, it’s always going
to pay better to make the show that a large
company wants you to, rather than a passion
project of your own making. But he still fought
this. Satoshi Kon films never performed well
at the box office, but Maruyama kept trying
over and over again, because he’s the best
director anime’s ever had, who cares if
it’s not making money.
MAPPA started out with the goal of bringing
back those earlier days of Madhouse, where
it’s a bunch of friends making cool anime.
And so he started by ticking one goal off
the bucket list. Work with Cowboy Bebop director
Shinichiro Watanabe. Watanabe exists on originality,
but despite his critical acclaim, he’s not
exactly a hit-maker. After Samurai Champloo,
he’d been working at Studio Madhouse on
new projects, but the funding would always
get pulled out from under him.
Maruyama was frustrated, so when he was offered
the chance to adapt Kids on the Slope, he
handed the manga to Watanabe telling him,
here, you’re making this. And of course,
Watanabe accepted, because in his words, nobody
refuses Maruyama. But he did have a catch.
He wanted to bring on a producer from Studio
4C called Manabu Otsuka to help them. He’ll
come up later.
Kids on the Slope was MAPPA’s first show
and it kind of defined the bucket list nature
of the studio. Maruyama wanted to finish making
his new film with Sunao Katabuchi so he did.
He wanted to make a Garo anime, so he did.
He wanted to work with Tiger and Bunny director
Keiichi Sato, so he did. In fact, the show
they made, based on Cygames’ Rage of Bahamut
was pitched to the studio purely because a
Cygames producer was entranced by Kids on
the Slope.
Rage of Bahamut: Genesis itself created a  wave of opportunity for the new studio. Keiichi Sato created a series that people would later
refer to as too good for TV anime. It’s
a mindblowing production, with plenty of well-directed
moments with incredible animation. And it
might as well be an original series, with
how much creative freedom Sato was allowed.
For me, it was the show that put Studio MAPPA on
the map and Cygames agreed. Ever since Bahamut,
they’ve funded the studio’s projects and
when they set up their own animation studio,
CygamesPictures and bought background company
Kusanagi, they’ve returned the favour on
stuff like Attack on Titan: The Final Season
and Yuri on Ice.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. At this point, each show had a goal in mind.
Maruyama predicted that 3D animation would
become essential in anime in the future, so he gave Yuichiro Hayashi the mission
of learning how to direct 3D animation for
Garo: The Animation. And in fact, that was
another goal, he felt it was his responsibility
to give opportunities to younger directors
rather than other old men. So in those early days, he helped produce
Shin Itagaki’s Teekyu and for Punch Line,
he hired Yutaka Uemura, one of the last remaining
talents at the collapsing Studio GAINAX at
the time.
And Punch Line perhaps is the main differentiating
point between Maruyama and other old men like
Hayao Miyazaki. They’re both stubborn, but
Maruyama recognises that there’s plenty
of great shows that aren’t necessarily his
thing. So there’s things like Ushio and
Tora, which he’s specifically a fan of and
wanted to make with the Hunter x Hunter team,
but stuff like Punch Line, he greenlit it because
they told him it would be about panties, and
he jokingly thought, hey it’ll be easier
to animate if they don’t have clothes on.
He later found out that the show had mechs,
which made that point entirely redundant.
As an aside, Punchline is fantastic and it’s
not actually about underwear at all. But while
he was working on these shows, that producer
Shinichiro Watanabe had hired, Manabu Otsuka
was earning his paycheck as well. The schedule
was already pretty full, but Otsuka and animation
producer Fuko Noda had heard that director
Sayo Yamamoto was pitching a show about figure-skating.
And so they went ahead and asked to make it,
thinking it would become a hit.
And it kinda was.
Manabu Otsuka was good at this. He can determine
what sort of shows will be popular, even when
everyone else is giving up on them. Yuri on
Ice, Banana Fish and Zombie Land Saga were
all shows that producers from outside of the
company were struggling to pitch. But he believed
in them when few others would, using MAPPA’s
prestige to secure funding from other sources.
It would be easy to say Yuri on Ice was the
turning point, but Otsuka was already wanting
to ramp up the amount of anime produced at
the studio, leading to six different shows
airing in 2017. But the success of Yuri on
Ice became a confirmation. It suffered production
difficulties, but it made a load of money.
Welcome to the new Studio MAPPA.
The thing about Yuri on Ice is that it was greenlit knowing that the studio was already
swamped. In fact, the staff were working so
close to the deadline that different broadcasters
got different versions of the same episode.
With the increase in productions and the studio
expanding, Masao Maruyama felt deja vu for
the last days at Madhouse. As a company gets
larger, it becomes harder to make creative
passion projects and things become too much
about money, and so for this reason, he left
a studio with his namesake yet again, founding
the new M2 Studio. The new president would
be Yuri on Ice producer Manabu Otsuka.
The amount of shows MAPPA was producing was
concerning, but what was worse, was the level
of control the studio had over these productions.
To control things like the schedule and budget,
a studio needs to invest financially in the
thing they’re making. But MAPPA either rarely
does this, or doesn’t invest enough to overrule
the bigger anime companies. It’s not too
much of a problem if you’re not making all
that much, but instead, MAPPA left their workforce
in the hands of producers from publishing
companies and megacorporations.
“The most important part of a producer’s
job is making money. Animation is a product,
so selling that product and making sure it
turns a profit is our most important job.”
These are the kind of people who control MAPPA’s
fate. And while the studio now has the money
to invest, they’re not doing so nearly as
much as they could.
Director-focused originals are a point of
pride for a studio. It’s basically the point
where they say, “You’ve seen what we can
do with other people’s stories. Now here’s
what we can do with our own.” But not only
does MAPPA do very few of these, but in the
case of Gymnastics Samurai created by director
Hisatoshi Shimizu, they didn’t stand behind
it, letting Aniplex control the show’s difficult
schedule instead. This is the same reason
why I’m worried for Masafumi Nishida’s
water polo anime RE-MAIN. What’s the point
in creating an original anime if the creators
don’t have time to make it amazing.
And this is putting aside stuff like Kunihiko
Ikuhara’s Sarazanmai, a show that despite
MAPPA being credited, they ended up having
very little to do with its creation, with
it largely being planned and produced at Lapin
Track instead.
MAPPA just isn’t the place for creative
original anime anymore. When Aniplex found
a director for Banana Fish, they requested MAPPA
to help them make it. But when that same director
went on to pitch her own original project,
SK8, she went and asked Bones instead. She’s
not the only one. After Maruyama left the
studio, Shinichiro Watanabe stopped pitching
to MAPPA, instead heading back to Studio Bones
to make Carole and Tuesday.
Bizarrely, despite their prestige, instead
of funding and giving time for the shows the
staff wants to make, MAPPA is even picking
up after other companies, like with Granblue
Fantasy the Animation and Attack on Titan,
making their staff needlessly anxious about
not being able to live up to fans’ expectations.
In a later interview, Maruyama stated that
if MAPPA directors want to create the sort
of shows they want to make, they should come
visit him over at M2 instead, where they’re
currently working on a passion project adaptation
of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto.
All of this isn’t necessarily a MAPPA specific
issue, but rather an overproduction crisis
that’s been stretching the anime industry
to its limits. Due to the rise in international
streaming from both the United States and
China, anime has become more profitable than
it ever has been before. And so, with profits
raising, they decided to pay all the animators
on their shows a liveable wage, right? Nah,
fuck that. They decided to use it to make
even more anime. And now every company in
Japan, and a few abroad, want to fund the
creation of a load more anime series. From
a fans perspective, this is great. But the
reality is, there’s not enough people to
actually make these shows. Masao Maruyama
himself has chimed in, saying that there’s
too much anime being made, which is burning
out talented artists far too quickly.
Different companies have had different ways
of dealing with this. Some have held fast,
rejecting offers that would overburden them.
But MAPPA has a different approach:
“There are some in the industry who think
that the number of anime being made should
decrease, but I think that is just averting
your eyes from the task in front of you. There
is a lot of demand for anime, so the question
is how to deliver high quality works that
meet the demand. Our company is still adapting
to the current climate, but I'm always conscious
of what has to be done. That's why I want
MAPPA to meet the current problems in the
anime industry head on by increasing our production
capabilities.”
Instead of holding fast to the ideals the
company was founded upon, MAPPA is adapting
to the broken system and it’s being put
under more and more strain as time goes on.
The studios who accept this kind of workload
often end up having to put out clunky uninspired
animation for the sake of constantly bringing
in money.
But there is one clear difference and it’s
the reason people wanted me to make a MAPPA
spotlight to begin with. Jujutsu Kaisen and
Attack on Titan: The Final Season.
The studio has a new image. Not one based
around original projects, but instead based
on creating loads of adaptations while still
often managing to retain a level of quality.
Of course, there are plenty of MAPPA shows
that flounder when it comes to its animation,
but directors Sunghoo Park and Yuichiro
Hayashi have been both the saviours and victims
of this image.
I’ll start with Jujutsu Kaisen. By all means,
it shouldn’t be as good as it is. After
delivering his own brand of visceral action
choreography on God of High School, Sunghoo
Park turned his attention to the fan-favourite
Jujutsu Kaisen manga from Shonen Jump. Park
is an animator by trade and mindset, and so
he scouted out artists from that would help
him achieve an ambitious vision. Many of these
animators and episode directors don’t usually
work with MAPPA. But despite everyone being
so damn busy all the time, Sunghoo Park and
character designer Tadashi Hiramatsu collectively
command enough respect to bring in the people
who could help elevate this beyond a bog standard
manga adaptation.
In fact, the one thing letting the show down
is its compositing, which is constantly struggling
to keep up with the ambitious and unique animation.
And while Attack on Titan doesn’t rise nearly
as high as Jujutsu Kaisen, fans have found
a lot to like about its Final Season. The
show was made on an incredibly tight schedule
but due to talented directors and the strength
of the 3DCG team that’s been working with
director Yuichiro Hayashi for years, it was
able to hold together and somehow become literally
the most popular show in the United States.
But what anime fans often aren’t privy to
is the cost. MAPPA leads have talked about
wanting to try and improve conditions for
the workers at the studio, but not only does
their production philosophy run counter to
this, but also most of the people that make
MAPPA shows don’t actually work there. Instead,
the burden is placed on creators outside the
company, or increasingly, outside the country.
There have been more anime being created over
time. And there have also been more foreign
animators working in the industry over time.
And that’s not a coincidence. Generally
production staff prefer to work with animators
in Japan, but when they’ve found it difficult,
they’ve started reaching out over Twitter.
For many, this is a dream come true. All that
childhood doodling has resulted in being able
to actually create anime. But unfortunately,
the industry isn’t thinking of it the same
way and instead of using them for their specific
skills, foreign animators are being used as
an essential repair team, making sure the
episodes are able to be finished but not being
paid based on how essential they really are.
MAPPA is especially guilty of this. They know
from the outset that they are incapable of
producing this many shows themselves, and so
they’re consistently taking on more and
more work with the knowledge that they’ll
have to heavily outsource it as early as Episode
#2. Unlike animators in Japan, there’s no
advancement as a part of this repair crew.
There’s no directing dreams ahead when you’re
not able to work face-to-face. But foreign
animators are increasingly becoming the backbone
of too many anime, and it’s often younger
animators, in high school or university with the
time spare to save MAPPA’s ambitions.
And this is only happening after they’ve
already exhausted the Japanese industry. Altair:
Record of Battles has key animation from ten
different companies. This trend of relying
on outsourcing at Studio MAPPA is so prominent
that SakugaBlog predicted in 2019 that only
MAPPA would be large and reckless enough to
take on Attack on Titan: The Final Season,
when they were offered a schedule that no
other studio wanted. Exploitative is just
one word for it.
This has been a pretty negative video, and
that’s kind of one of the issues with covering
the anime industry in 2021. I imagine most
people wanted a 10 minute gush about how great
Jujutsu Kaisen is. And it is incredible animation,
Yasuke will be brilliant, Chainsaw Man is
going to blow everyone’s minds. But when
talking about MAPPA, it’s easy to forget
about the people behind the scenes.
The directors who are constantly shifted from
one project to another. The animators, both
local and overseas who are being given strict
deadlines without the pay to match. And the
production assistants, who have to handle
this nightmare, every single day.
Thanks for watching The Canipa Effect. And
thanks to Abhi and Eric from The Cartoon Cipher
for voicing Mamoru Hosoda and Manabu Otsuka
respectively, and Kennedy from Red Bard for
voicing Kadokawa producer Sho Tanaka. They’re
both great channels that are dedicated to
researching anime accurately. But before I
go, I’d like to thank these incredible people
for supporting the channel. In particular,
I’d like to thank Austin Hardwicke, deadermeat,
Eddie Lehecka, Edwin Shale, Frizzy Canadian,
Frog-kun, Jacob Bosley, JRPictures, my own
mother, Noland Soga, Quentin Alchin-Smith
and Ronald McDonald-san.
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