Studio Mappa is one of the most successful and well known anime studios.
They are responsible for some of the most popular animes out there,
including the final season of Attack on Titan, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Banana Fish and many many more.
The anime industry is rapidly growing and the studio is growing with it,
now being one of the fastest growing ones out there.
They are known for working on multiple projects simultaneously,
instead of doing them one by one.
However, they have receive a bunch of backlash for the work environment of the studio
It’s notorious for it’s poor working conditions. MAPPA fans are worried on how the employees are dealing with the stress.
Despite all of these claims, most of the community is unaware of what’s going on behind the scenes
and Mappa’s success continues to increase.
Other than that, their rise to success is super interesting and impressive
and they’re on their way to surpass every other studio.
MAPPA also known as Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association,
was founded 10 years ago on June 14, 2011,
by Masao Maruyama, a co-founder and former producer of Studio Madhouse,
that left after seeing the problems that developed within the studio.
Maruyama’s goal was to escape the corporate restrictions that Madhouse was going through,
giving him creative freedom to produce the anime he wanted, in whatever way he wanted.
He brought together great artists and made several unique projects.
Initially, the aim was to produce "In This Corner of the World"
and MAPPA had a production room for the film since it was established.
Maruyama first started working on the film in 2010 during Madhouse era,
but it took three years to start the production due to difficulties to raising funds.
The film finally released in 2016 with great success, allowing MAPPA to continue working on new projects.
Kids on the Slope was the Studio's first ever anime that released in 2012.
It follows a heartwarming story of friendship, music, and love
that follows three unique individuals brought together by their mutual appreciation for jazz.
While the characters are animated plainly and simple, their inner character and style is what drives this series.
The Studio can be divided into two distinct periods:
Maruyama’s era, which started in 2011 where he was in charge of most of the projects
and was fully managing the company up until April 2016.
The second period, Manabu Otsuka’s era, where Maruyama resigned his position as a CEO in the studio and became the chairman,
and handed the reigns to Otsuka as the new representative director and CEO.
MAPPA was Maruyama’s dream:
a place where he could do the things he liked, using his contacts to bring in strong directors and animators.
The big problem was that the studio grew, and now more and more business responsibilities were placed upon the studio,
which prevented Maruyama from having that freedom.
He left the studio in the hands of one of his young but promising producers.
Before the change, the studio managed to make 9 different shows including
Hajime no Ippo: Rising, a sequel to New Challenger and was co-produced with Studio Madhouse.
And Terror in Resonance which is one of their original works.
To say the least, 2016 was a good year for the studio.
The first anime released after the CEO change was Yuri on Ice.
It was a very important project for the studio. There was a lot of faith that it would be a success.
The problem was: the production of Yuri on Ice was extremely chaotic.
The deadlines for delivering the episodes were ridiculously short,
it took a lot of outsourcing and outside help for the project to get delivered on time.
Other than that, it was a huge success.
The following year in 2017, MAPPA’s style of mass producing anime had begun.
By this time they had more employee’s than ever before, currently sitting at 250 staff members.
They released six separate projects in 2017, including Kakegurui, which was licensed by Netflix for steaming.
Shortly after, Inuyashiki was released and they were both successful.
A year later in 2018, they released Zombieland Saga and Banana Fish.
A pretty slow year in terms of releases, but they would make up for it next year in 2019,
where they released eight different projects including Dororo and the second season of Kakegurui.
In 2020, again they released eight different projects including Dorohedoro, The God Of High School, Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan’s Final Season.
In 2021 and currently 2022, they released Zombieland Saga Revenge,
which is the second season of the show.
And Jujutsu Kaisen 0, a movie and a prequel to the first season of the show.
They’re still continuing work with Attack on Titan and starting production with Chainsaw Man.
However, all of this work placed on the employees came with some downsides and consequences.
Studio MAPPA became the complete opposite of what Maruyama wanted.
He wanted the studio to produce works focused on the creativity of his collaborators,
giving space and freedom for everyone’s skills to flow, but that’s no longer what they seek.
While their projects are still crammed with talented people,
they don’t have a positive environment in which to develop their skills due to the stressful schedules the studio accepts.
Popular freelance animator Mushiyo compared the working conditions to a factory.
On the 14th of May 2021, he explained in a series of tweets why he chose to leave the studio.
He explained that he regrets working hard to join MAPPA and revealed that employees are obligated to work excessively. He wrote:
He described the experience of being asked to fix drawings over and over again until the sun came up.
They criticized the studio’s decision to work on four shows at the same time
instead of properly training its team so that such corrections wouldn't be necessary.
Adding another comment,
Several months after these accusations,
MAPPA’s director of the upcoming Chainsaw Man anime, responded by offering better than average pay and benefits.
The company has since been very public about its efforts to improve working conditions at the studio.
They recently opened its new Ogikubo location.
Which features more modern, spacious work areas and facilities for employees to relax in.
As well as other benefits such as paid time off, family allowances, and a yearly bonus.
They will reportedly pay these new hires a monthly salary of $2,100.
Which is higher than the industry average for new animators.
The building was originally designed to be a clinic but was repurposed as an animation studio
with the 1st and 2nd floors dedicated to production and the 3rd floor intended to be used by management.
MAPPA has lost it’s founder, several animators and directors. They now find themselves in an unfortunate situation:
an excellent team working in a complicated environment.
Problems in the industry are not unique to MAPPA. The Japanese animation industry as a whole is all screwed up.
MAPPA has become a company focused mainly on high productivity.
The main problem is that the studio often ends up taking on more projects than they can produce while being on extremely tight schedules.
Yes, they are making a profit, but they are sacrificing their employees in the process.
The current CEO intends to continue to increase the studio’s productivity while seeking to maintain its quality.
Remember when some Attack on Titan “fans” went on Twitter to harass and attack MAPPA’s episode directors?
Attack on Titan, or AoT for short, had a ridiculously tight schedule.
No other studio wanted to accept producing the anime with such a short time,
but Otsuka agreed to do it in his studio.
He took steps, such as calling everyone who was available in the studio
to serve as the production team for the project.
Due to its bad schedule, several episode directors and animation directors were needed to complete each episode,
reaching the limit of absurdity in its final episode where six different directors directing the same episode were needed.
MAPPA only had 9 to 10 months for the season, while WIT Studio had a much longer time during the previous seasons.
There's a few reasons to why WIT dropped AoT:
1. They were already busy with other projects.
2. They're a much smaller studio compared to MAPPA.
3. They don't get paid enough compared to the amount of work they put in.
They get paid before it starts airing and wont get any penny higher, no matter how popular the anime gets.
4. They were already struggling with the third season.
Yuichirou Hayashi and Sunghoo Park are standing out as two of the best directors at the studio.
Hayashi manages to extract the most from the adaptations, always creating an aesthetic that matches the project.
Meanwhile, Park demonstrates a great skill with action animes,
having animated and directed incredible fights in The God of High School and Jujutsu Kaisen.
The reason I'm bringing them up is because the studio ends up depending a lot on them.
Park went on to direct Jujutsu Kaisen right after doing The God of High School.
He was sub-character designer on every episode, storyboarder on 10 out of the 13 episodes,
episode director on 5 episodes, animation director on 2 episodes, and participated as a key animator on 6 episodes,
doing many long scenes while still overseeing the entire project.
Right after all of this work, he was moved to Jujutsu Kaisen, another extremely ambitious show.
During the Kyoto Goodwill Event arc, some animators complained about how the final version of their work turned out.
Many animators did only the primary key animation or the base of the animation,
leaving the secondary key animation, or finishing, to other artists instead of having the same artist do both.
This was perfect in theory,
because it allowed the animators who made the primary key animation—many of them extremely skilled—to focus themselves on other episodes.
However, in many cases, this resulted in the loss of the animator’s style,
as the secondary key animator often failed to capture the original idea of ​​the animator who made the primary key animation.
Now that we have gone through the whole story behind MAPPA,
it's safe to say that the company has completely deviated from its original purpose.
They could end up falling into the same fate as their older brother, Maruyama’s former studio Madhouse.
Where most of their major staff left due to overworking and the lack of freedom.
Only time can tell what will happen in the future,
but it's safe to say they will continue producing anime and meet the demand and standards we expect from them.
As always, thank you all for watching, this is the end of the video. It took a while to make, a lot longer than I expected.
If you made it this far, I seriously appreciate it. Feel free to check out my previous videos.
And again thank you all and take care