Companies / The Housewives' Workshop That Became Kyoto Animation

In 1981 a woman in Uji gathered her neighbors to paint other studios' cels. It took 22 years, one department at a time, to lead its first TV series.

2026-11-02 · Full story free

In 1981, in Uji, a city just south of Kyoto, a woman named Yoko Hatta started a small business: painting color onto animation cels for studios in Tokyo.

Her workforce was her neighbors. Hatta recruited local housewives to fill in the colors on the hand-drawn frames that Tokyo studios sent out to subcontractors. It was about as far from the spotlight as the anime business gets. The little workshop called itself Kyoto Anime Studio.

Four decades later, the company that grew out of it, Kyoto Animation, would be one of the most admired animation studios in the world, with a recognizable look, a devoted international fan base and an unusual way of running a studio. Getting there took 22 years before it led its first TV series, a tragedy no company should face, and a series of choices that ran against the way most of its industry works.

A brother at the start of anime

The story starts with family. Hatta's older brother, Taku Sugiyama, was there almost at the beginning of Japanese TV animation. Born in 1937, he joined Toei Doga's first trainee intake in 1956 — about 800 people applied and 10 were accepted — and later went to Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Production, where he worked on Astro Boy and became a director.

Sugiyama has told the rest himself. In a 2019 blog post, he recalled that back in the 1960s his younger sister asked him about working in animation. He introduced her to Mushi Production, where she did coloring work.

Later, she moved to Kyoto for a different job, met Hideaki Hatta, married him, and settled in Uji. Then, in 1981, she asked her brother again: could he help her find coloring work? He introduced her to Daikichiro Kusube, a former Toei colleague who was then running Shin-Ei Animation. Shin-Ei sent work. She gathered housewives from the neighborhood, and the workshop was in business — as Sugiyama remembers it, a sole proprietorship called Kyoto Anime Studio. That workshop, he writes, is the direct origin of today's company.

Climbing the ladder, one department at a time

In 1985 the workshop became a company, Kyoto Animation. What followed was a slow climb up the anime production chain. Painting cels is one of the last steps before filming, and the studio worked backwards from there: in 1986 it set up its own animation department, drawing the in-between frames it had previously only colored.

The credits tell the story. Zillion, in 1987, was in effect its debut as a lead studio. In 1992 it co-produced Noroi no One Piece. From 2000 it worked on episodes of Inuyasha, and in 2002 it was co-lead studio on Nurse Witch Komugi. It was steady, skilled work, much of it on other studios' shows.

None of that made Kyoto Animation a name most viewers knew. The studio's own official list of works begins in 2003, with Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, its first TV series as lead studio, and the original OVA MUNTO. By then, 22 years had passed since the workshop began.

Then the world noticed

What came next happened quickly. AIR came in 2005, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya followed in 2006. K-On! arrived in 2009, Sound! Euphonium in 2015, and the film A Silent Voice in 2016, which went on to compete at the Annecy animation festival. Violet Evergarden aired in 2018, was picked up by Netflix, and got its own feature film in 2020.

Pop-culture expert Ryusuke Hikawa, speaking to NHK in 2019, said Kyoto Animation "demonstrated that a top brand can come from outside the capital."

The opposite of the industry

How does a former subcontractor outside the capital end up with that reputation? In our reading, largely by doing the opposite of what most of its industry does.

It brought most of the work in-house. Anime production typically spreads work across a web of subcontractors and freelancers. Kyoto Animation, which had spent two decades as one of those subcontractors, pulled much of the work inward. Today it describes doing most of the production process, from planning to filming, inside the company. When the same team handles a show from start to finish, a studio can hold a visual standard that's hard to enforce across dozens of outside vendors.

It hired people instead of buying drawings. The industry leans on contractors and freelancers. Kyoto Animation hires much of its staff full-time. When it reopened recruitment in 2020, Cartoon Brew reported that full-time animators were offered a monthly salary of 202,000 yen, a figure that included 30,000 yen of fixed overtime pay. In 2019, the company had 160 employees, with studios in Uji and Kyoto and only an office in Tokyo.

It trained them itself. The company runs professional training courses for animators and for art and backgrounds, with the stated aim of training its own staff. The company describes the idea behind them with a motto that roughly translates as "making people is making works." In our reading, it is the housewives' workshop scaled up: when the skills you need aren't available locally, you teach them.

It started owning the stories, not just drawing them. This is the least-known part of the model. Kyoto Animation has run its own fiction prize, the Kyoto Animation Award, and has its own book imprint, KA Esuma Bunko, which publishes many of the winners. Violet Evergarden won the award's grand prize, became a novel on the company's imprint, then a TV series, then a film, with merchandise sold through the studio's own KyoAni Shop. A studio that began by coloring other people's frames now finds, publishes and animates its own stories.

Loss, and continuity

On July 18, 2019, an arson attack on the company's 1st Studio killed 36 Kyoto Animation employees and injured at least 32 others. In January 2024, the Kyoto District Court sentenced the perpetrator to death.

The studio kept going. It reopened hiring in 2020, and its works page now lists a new title for 2027. In February 2026, its long-time president Hideaki Hatta — Yoko Hatta's husband — died at 76, and Shinichiro Hatta became president.

The company's official outline still gives just two dates: founded in 1981, established in 1985. Everything else is in the credits.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

Kyoto Animation's path was: do the invisible piecework, learn each step of the craft from the inside, then bring those steps in-house until you own the product and the story behind it. Which unglamorous subcontracting job in your industry is someone's first step toward owning the whole chain? And what would it take to build a world-class studio somewhere nobody expects one?