CloverWorks: How A-1's Spinoff Became Anime's Most Versatile Studio

CloverWorks did not exist in 2017. In May 2018, A-1 Pictures — the long-running anime studio inside Aniplex’s corporate structure — spun off its Kōenji production line as a separate studio and named it CloverWorks. The reasoning was operational: A-1 Pictures was producing too many shows simultaneously and the Kōenji line had developed enough of a distinct identity that running it as a sister studio under the same parent made more sense than continuing to absorb it.

Seven years later, CloverWorks has produced Spy x Family, My Dress-Up Darling, Bocchi the Rock!, Horimiya, Wonder Egg Priority, the Persona 5 the Animation series, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, and roughly 25 other productions. It is the most versatile studio in the Aniplex stable and one of the most commercially successful new studios of the streaming era.

This is how the studio works, why its catalog looks the way it does, and what it tells you about how anime production is restructuring in the late 2020s.

The A-1 spinoff and what changed

A-1 Pictures was founded in 2005 as an Aniplex production subsidiary, primarily to handle the company’s anime production internally rather than commissioning external studios. The studio grew through the late 2000s and 2010s on the back of shows like Sword Art Online, Anohana, Erased, and Your Lie in April. By 2017, A-1 was producing six to eight TV series a year, with a staff size that was straining the production model.

The Kōenji line — A-1’s secondary production office in the Suginami ward — had developed its own director relationships and staff identity, particularly around shorter-form character work. Director Tomohisa Taguchi (Persona 5 the Animation), Mamoru Hatakeyama (Kaguya-sama: Love Is War), and producer Yuichi Fukushima had been running projects out of Kōenji that were distinctly less franchise-oriented than A-1’s main output.

The 2018 spinoff formalized that. CloverWorks took the Kōenji staff, the in-development projects, and the production relationships, and became a separate Aniplex subsidiary. A-1 Pictures continued as the larger, more franchise-focused studio. The two share a parent and occasionally collaborate, but they operate independently.

The structural lesson here is worth noticing: anime studios don’t typically spin off divisions the way film and TV studios do. The CloverWorks formation is an exception. It worked because Aniplex’s corporate structure made it cheap to do — both studios remained inside the same parent — and because the Kōenji line had genuinely developed a distinct production identity.

The Promised Neverland Season 2 disaster

The studio’s worst production decision, and the one that almost defined its early reputation, was The Promised Neverland Season 2 (January-March 2021). The first season, also at CloverWorks (2019), was widely praised as a faithful adaptation of the first arc of Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu’s manga. The second season was supposed to cover the Goldy Pond arc, one of the manga’s most-popular sequences.

Instead, the eleven-episode second season skipped the Goldy Pond arc entirely, compressed five subsequent manga arcs into the remaining episodes, and produced what is now widely considered one of the worst manga adaptations of the 2010s or 2020s. The reasoning given afterward — by producer Yuichi Fukushima and director Mamoru Kanbe — was a combination of broadcast scheduling pressure, a desire to give the manga’s actual ending screen time rather than spending the full season on intermediate arcs, and IP licensing constraints.

The decision is worth understanding because of how the studio recovered from it. CloverWorks did not retreat into franchise work. The studio’s next major productions — Wonder Egg Priority (2021), Horimiya (2021), and Sonny Boy (2021) — were three back-to-back director-led works that re-established the studio’s reputation as a serious production house. The 2022 catalog (Bocchi the Rock!, Spy x Family, My Dress-Up Darling) consolidated that.

The Promised Neverland S2 episode is the one example in CloverWorks’ catalog where the production failed badly, and the studio’s response to it is part of why it has the reputation it has now.

Spy x Family and the co-production model

The studio’s most commercially significant project is Spy x Family, the adaptation of Tatsuya Endo’s manga that began airing in April 2022. The notable production decision is that the series is co-produced with Wit Studio, alternating between the two studios across cours. This is unusual in anime — most series are produced by a single studio — and reflects an attempt to manage the workload of a 25-episode-per-year hit show without forcing either studio into the kind of overcommitment that has defined MAPPA discourse.

The co-production has worked. The series has maintained consistent visual quality across both studios, with subtle differences in animation emphasis that fans can identify but that don’t disrupt the watching experience. Director Kazuhiro Furuhashi (at CloverWorks) and Takahiro Harada (at Wit) coordinate to maintain consistency.

The Spy x Family model is being watched carefully by other studios. If co-production can be made to work for a long-running TV series without either studio being overworked, it represents a meaningful alternative to the current model where one studio takes on a project and either delivers or burns out. Whether the model scales beyond Aniplex’s specific corporate structure is the open question.

The slice-of-life identity

What CloverWorks is best at — and what most of its critically acclaimed work falls into — is character-driven slice-of-life with strong art direction. Bocchi the Rock! (12 episodes, 2022) is the canonical example: a low-key story about an anxious girl joining a band, animated with deliberate visual experimentation (the show’s “Bocchi POV” sequences use a mix of stop-motion, claymation, and 2D inserts in ways that other studios wouldn’t attempt for a slice-of-life series). The show became a global hit and established director Keiichirō Saitō as one of the studio’s defining voices.

My Dress-Up Darling (12 episodes, 2022) is the same template applied to a romantic comedy. Horimiya (13 episodes, 2021) is the same template applied to a high school romance. The studio has effectively cornered the prestige slice-of-life market.

This is a specific niche. Most major anime studios optimize for shōnen action or fantasy. CloverWorks has built a catalog around character-driven low-stakes comedy/romance, executed with the kind of art direction usually reserved for prestige drama. It is the most coherent stylistic identity any new studio has built in the last decade.

The Wonder Egg Priority problem

The studio’s most ambitious and most troubled original project is Wonder Egg Priority (April-June 2021, plus a special in December 2021). The 12-episode psychological drama, written by Shinji Nojima and directed by Shin Wakabayashi, was widely praised through its first nine episodes for its visual ambition (Wakabayashi’s storyboarding is some of the most distinctive TV anime work of the early 2020s), its handling of difficult subject matter (the show addresses teenage suicide, abuse, and trauma), and its character work.

Episodes 10-12 went off the rails. Production delays — the final episode was delayed by three months and aired as a “special” rather than as the season finale — meant the show’s intended ending was rushed, partially rewritten, and widely regarded as a disappointment. The cause was, by various accounts, a combination of Wakabayashi’s storyboarding pace not matching the broadcast schedule and Nojima’s screenplay needing revisions that compressed the studio’s animation timeline.

Wonder Egg matters in CloverWorks’ history because it’s the studio’s clearest example of what its production model gets wrong. The studio is excellent at executing character-driven projects at TV pace. It is less good at handling ambitious auteur-style projects where a single creative voice needs flexibility beyond what the broadcast schedule allows.

What the catalog looks like in 2026

CloverWorks in 2026 is on its third “wave” of work. The 2022-2023 wave (Bocchi, My Dress-Up Darling, Spy x Family) established the studio’s commercial identity. The 2024-2025 wave (Akebi’s Sailor Uniform Season 2, Vivy Fluorite Eye’s Song theatrical compilation, Persona 5 the Animation - The Strikers, continued Spy x Family) consolidated it. The 2026 catalog includes:

A new Wakabayashi-led original announced for 2026, with production constraints designed to avoid the Wonder Egg situation.

Continued Spy x Family with the second movie in development for 2027.

Bocchi the Rock! Season 2, finally confirmed for 2026 after delays through 2025.

A new shōnen action adaptation that the studio has not yet announced publicly but that has been referenced in Aniplex’s annual financial filings.

The full CloverWorks catalog with TMDB-verified credits and current platform availability across 15+ Arab countries is on the studio page.

Why CloverWorks matters

The studio’s significance, looked at structurally, is that it has demonstrated three things the industry needed to learn.

First, that spinning off a production line as a separate studio can preserve creative identity while reducing the operational stress of running too many simultaneous shows. The A-1 Pictures / CloverWorks split is a model that other large anime studios will probably emulate.

Second, that the co-production model (with Wit on Spy x Family) can sustain a long-running TV series without forcing either studio into MAPPA-style overcommitment. This is a meaningful alternative to the current dominant production model.

Third, that there is a commercial niche for character-driven slice-of-life with prestige-level art direction. Western anime discourse has historically treated slice-of-life as a lower-prestige genre; CloverWorks’ commercial success with Bocchi and My Dress-Up Darling has changed that perception inside the industry, if not outside it.

CloverWorks at eight years old is one of the most operationally interesting studios in modern anime. Whether the studio sustains its current catalog quality across the next decade depends on whether it can keep its production model intact as Aniplex’s commercial demands scale. The 2026 and 2027 catalog will test that.