Brain's Base: Mawaru Penguindrum and the Unsung Mid-Tier Studio

Brain’s Base turned thirty in 2026, and the catalog at that anniversary tells a particular story. The studio produced Mawaru Penguindrum in 2011 with Kunihiko Ikuhara, ran Natsume’s Book of Friends through its first four seasons, animated Durarara!! across its 2010 debut, and made Spice and Wolf and Princess Jellyfish in adjacent years. By 2020 the production line had thinned; by 2024 most of the staff that defined the studio’s identity had moved elsewhere.

Brain’s Base is the canonical mid-tier prestige studio — never the largest, never the loudest, but during a specific window the most reliable home for projects that wouldn’t have found support at a bigger house. Here is the studio’s arc, why the 2010s catalog looks the way it does, and what the contraction tells you about how mid-tier anime studios survive — or don’t.

The 1996 founding and the mid-tier identity

Brain’s Base was founded in 1996 by ex-Sunrise and ex-Madhouse animators looking to run a smaller production house with more selective project intake. The early years were thin — sub-contracting and assistant work through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s — and the studio’s first lead production credits came in 2002 onward.

The pattern that defined the studio’s identity by the late 2000s was a willingness to take projects that bigger studios passed on. Spice and Wolf (2008-2009) was a slow medieval-economic romance with talking-wolf-deity dialogue scenes that ran twenty minutes at a stretch; no major studio wanted it. Brain’s Base made both seasons and animated the economic dialogue with the same care it gave to the romance.

This is the mid-tier studio’s strategic position. The major houses (Toei, Sunrise, MAPPA in the 2020s) take franchise work and shōnen hits. The boutique houses (Ghibli, Trigger) take auteur-driven projects under one signature director. The mid-tier studios sit between — large enough to handle TV production schedules, small enough to take work that doesn’t fit either of the other two niches.

Natsume’s Book of Friends and the long-runner

The studio’s most durable property is Natsume’s Book of Friends, an adaptation of Yuki Midorikawa’s slow supernatural manga that Brain’s Base produced for its first four TV seasons (2008-2012) and several theatrical films. The series is built around a quiet protagonist who can see yōkai and returns their names to them — episodic, melancholic, deliberately under-dramatic.

Natsume worked because Brain’s Base understood the manga’s register. The studio’s animation prioritized stillness over motion: long held shots of fields, restrained character work, a soundtrack by Makoto Yoshimori that operated below the dialogue rather than over it. Most studios would have pushed the supernatural elements harder; Brain’s Base let them sit at the edge of frame.

The later seasons (5, 6) moved to Shuka — a studio founded in 2014 by ex-Brain’s Base staff specifically to continue this kind of work — and the production continuity stayed intact across the studio handoff. Shuka’s staff diaspora from Brain’s Base is one of the recurring threads in the studio’s 2010s story.

Durarara!! and the ensemble city show

Durarara!! (2010, with a 2014-2016 continuation that moved to Shuka) is the studio’s most stylistically ambitious work and the one that got the broadest international attention. Adapted from Ryohgo Narita’s light novels — set in Ikebukuro, with a sprawling cast that includes a headless Irish dullahan riding a black motorcycle — the show interleaves a dozen plot threads across its 24 episodes.

The production handled the structural complexity by leaning into it visually. Color-coded text bubbles for online chat sequences, multiple parallel character introductions, deliberate withholding of which character was actually the protagonist. The first season is one of the more confident pieces of ensemble television anime from the early 2010s.

When the sequels (Durarara!!×2 Shou, Ten, Ketsu) moved to Shuka in 2015-2016, the visual language stayed consistent because the staff was substantially the same — just operating under a different studio name. This handoff pattern is unusual in anime, and it’s worth understanding as a workaround for studio-level production capacity rather than a creative break.

Mawaru Penguindrum and the Ikuhara collaboration

The studio’s most experimental project is Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), Kunihiko Ikuhara’s first TV series after Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997). Ikuhara had spent fourteen years between TV projects; Brain’s Base was the studio willing to host the return.

The production constraints Ikuhara worked under are part of the show’s character. Twenty-four episodes, a TV broadcast schedule, a limited budget by Ikuhara-standards — but with creative freedom to construct the show’s dense allegorical structure (the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō subway attacks, family curse mythology, repeating visual motifs of trains and apples and pengwin hats). The show ranks among the most discussed TV anime of the 2010s for academic and fan analysis.

That Brain’s Base could host Penguindrum at all is the point. The studio’s mid-tier position made the project feasible — a bigger studio would have demanded more commercial concessions, a smaller one couldn’t have absorbed the production load. The Ikuhara collaboration is the clearest example of the niche the studio occupied.

Princess Jellyfish and the josei moment

Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime, 2010) is the studio’s quietest catalog standout. Adapted from Akiko Higashimura’s josei manga about a group of women living in a shared apartment building, it ran for eleven episodes and never received a second season — the manga continued for years afterward, but no studio (Brain’s Base or otherwise) committed to more anime.

The production is worth noting because josei is a chronically under-adapted demographic in TV anime. Brain’s Base picking up the title fits the pattern of taking projects that wouldn’t find homes elsewhere. The animation is restrained, the comedy works on character beats rather than visual gags, and the result is one of the rare TV josei adaptations of the era that takes its source material seriously rather than treating it as a romance vehicle.

The 2020s contraction

The catalog thins visibly after 2018. Brain’s Base produced fewer than four TV series in most years of the early 2020s, compared to seven or eight in its 2010-2014 peak. The reasons are structural rather than dramatic: staff diaspora to Shuka and other studios, the rising production cost of TV anime in the streaming era, and the increasing concentration of high-profile projects at MAPPA, CloverWorks, and the bigger houses.

The studio still operates in 2026, still takes projects, but the prestige catalog now belongs to its successors. The Natsume seasons go to Shuka. The ensemble-comedy register has moved to CloverWorks and Doga Kobo. The experimental TV anime that Penguindrum exemplified has become rarer industry-wide.

Brain’s Base in 2026 is the case study for how mid-tier anime studios contract. They don’t typically fail dramatically. They lose key staff to spinoffs, see prestige work move to better-funded competitors, and shrink their output without ever fully closing. The studio that made Penguindrum still exists; the conditions that made Penguindrum possible at that studio mostly don’t.

Why the catalog still matters

The Brain’s Base catalog rewards revisiting because it represents a specific possibility in TV anime that the 2020s industry has largely lost. Mid-tier studios with the budget and staff to take experimental TV work, willing to host auteur projects without absorbing them into franchise expectations, were a meaningful part of the 2010s production landscape.

When Mawaru Penguindrum was made in 2011, the production was unusual but not impossible. By 2026, a comparable project would struggle to find a studio with both the capacity and the willingness to take it. The contraction at Brain’s Base is part of why that’s true.

The studio’s catalog with TMDB-verified credits and current platform availability sits on the studio page. Penguindrum, Natsume, Durarara, Spice and Wolf, and Princess Jellyfish remain among the most rewarding mid-tier TV anime of their decade.