Studio Trigger After Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and the Studio's Second Act

For most of its first decade, Studio Trigger was the anime studio that other anime studios pointed to when they wanted to explain “we’re not doing that.” The studio’s visual language — exaggerated motion, supersaturated color, faces that distort into impossible expressions for a single frame and snap back — was inherited from late-stage Gainax. The aesthetic worked. Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia, SSSS.Gridman. The shows had a small, fervent audience. None of them broke through.

Then in September 2022, Netflix released Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a ten-episode original anime set in CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 universe. The show was directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi (Trigger co-founder, the director of Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill), animated entirely at Trigger, and scored by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame. It became Netflix’s most successful anime project of the year. The Cyberpunk 2077 game saw a sales resurgence the following weeks that exceeded what the game’s own DLC had managed. And Trigger, for the first time, became a name that mainstream gaming and streaming press wrote about.

This is what happened to the studio between 2022 and 2026, and what its catalog looks like now.

The Gainax exit

Trigger was founded in August 2011 by Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masahiko Ōtsuka, both veterans of Gainax. Gainax was the studio behind Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Gurren Lagann, and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. By 2011 it was in serious financial trouble; senior staff had been leaving for years over royalty disputes that would eventually result in court rulings against Gainax’s management.

Imaishi and Ōtsuka took the explicit creative inheritance with them. The Trigger aesthetic — what’s sometimes called “Imaishi style” in animation circles — is descended directly from the Gurren Lagann house style: heavy character animation, almost cartoonish motion, a deliberate rejection of the realist anime palette of the late 2000s. They also brought a production approach that prioritized small project teams with strong director identity over the larger production-committee model that dominated the rest of the industry.

The first Trigger project to make noise was Inferno Cop (2012), a low-budget web short. Then Kill la Kill (2013-2014), the studio’s first TV series, which became a cult favorite without quite breaking into the mainstream. Little Witch Academia (2017), a Studio Ghibli-influenced shorter project funded partly through a Kickstarter, did better but still niche. By the late 2010s, Trigger had a clear identity but a ceiling.

Why Edgerunners worked

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the project that broke that ceiling, and it’s worth understanding why specifically.

The show was financed by Netflix and CD Projekt Red. That meant Trigger had a budget significantly above what the Japanese production-committee model would have provided for a ten-episode original anime. It also meant the show had a global marketing push that Trigger’s previous catalog had never received. The series came out three weeks before the Cyberpunk 2077 game’s major Edgerunners-tied update, with marketing across both companies’ channels.

But the budget and marketing alone wouldn’t have made the show stick. What made it work was that Hiroyuki Imaishi’s house style turned out to be a near-perfect fit for the source material. Cyberpunk 2077 is a neon-saturated, body-horror-leaning, kinetically violent setting. The standard Western response to adapting it would have been to push toward grounded realism. Trigger went the opposite direction: even more exaggerated motion, even more saturated color, character expressions that distort the way the studio had been distorting them since Kill la Kill, but now with Western audiences who had no prior exposure to the studio’s catalog.

The result was a show that felt simultaneously like a new visual language and like the natural extension of an existing one. For Western viewers, it was a discovery. For people who had been watching Trigger since 2013, it was the studio finally getting the budget it needed for the kind of project it had been building toward.

The Netflix relationship and what came next

Edgerunners established Trigger as a Netflix studio in a way that no Japanese anime studio had been before. Most studios produce for the Japanese broadcast committee system and then license internationally; Netflix’s anime division has historically funded one-off projects rather than building studio relationships. Trigger was an exception.

The next Trigger project after Edgerunners was Brand New Animal (BNA) — actually produced before Edgerunners but released on Netflix, with the studio now framed as the “Edgerunners studio” in post-launch marketing. Then came Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty (announced 2024, in production through 2026), a follow-up project tying into the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion of the same name.

Outside Netflix, Trigger continued its standard catalog. Promare (2019), an original feature film. Star Wars: Visions episodes “The Twins” and “The Elder.” A handful of music video commissions. And announced for 2026: a new original TV series, currently untitled, directed by Akira Amemiya (SSSS.Gridman, SSSS.Dynazenon).

The pattern that emerges is interesting. Trigger has not used the Edgerunners money to scale up the way MAPPA scaled after Attack on Titan. The studio remains relatively small. New projects continue to be small-team, director-led, with the same recognizable visual signature. The studio appears to have decided that the Edgerunners money buys it independence rather than expansion.

What Trigger does that the rest of the industry doesn’t

Three things about Trigger’s working method are worth understanding if you want to predict how the studio’s future projects will look.

Imaishi-style character animation requires specific training. The studio’s senior animators have, in interviews, talked about how new staff coming from other studios need months to adjust to Trigger’s character animation philosophy — the willingness to break a face for a single frame, the comfort with exaggerated body language, the rejection of “anime model sheet” rigor. This is why the studio’s identity has remained so consistent: it’s effectively training each new generation of staff in a specific tradition.

Project sequencing is deliberate. Trigger does not run multiple TV productions simultaneously the way MAPPA or A-1 Pictures do. The studio releases roughly one major project a year, sometimes two. This is partly a capacity choice and partly an aesthetic one — the Trigger house style is labor-intensive in ways that don’t scale linearly.

The director-as-author model. Imaishi for Edgerunners, Akira Amemiya for SSSS.Gridman, Yoh Yoshinari for Little Witch Academia. Each Trigger project is identified more with its director than with the studio brand. Compare with MAPPA, where the brand has increasingly subsumed individual director identity. This is closer to how Madhouse and Studio Ghibli have historically operated.

The 2026 catalog and where to start

If you’re new to Trigger:

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the clear entry point. Ten episodes, available globally on Netflix, fully self-contained. You don’t need to have played Cyberpunk 2077 to follow it, though the game’s setting gives certain background details more weight.

Kill la Kill (2013-2014) is the strongest argument for the studio’s earlier style. 24 episodes, the show that established what “Trigger” means visually.

Little Witch Academia (2017) is the studio’s most accessible production. 25 episodes of a fantasy school setting, lower-stakes than the studio’s action work, with an art style influenced by Ghibli and the kind of character writing that broke through on Western platforms before Edgerunners did.

SSSS.Gridman (2018) and its sequel SSSS.Dynazenon (2021) are the studio’s contributions to the tokusatsu/mecha tradition. Akira Amemiya is the director on both; they’re the closest the studio comes to genre exercise as opposed to original concept.

Promare (2019) is the studio’s feature film calling card. 110 minutes, a stylized “fire vs ice” action piece that demonstrated the Trigger aesthetic at theatrical scale before Edgerunners proved it could work as a TV series.

Full catalog with release windows and licensed availability across 15+ Arab countries is on the Trigger studio page.

The structural question

The interesting thing about Trigger in 2026 is what it isn’t doing. The studio isn’t scaling staff aggressively. It isn’t taking on three or four simultaneous TV productions. It isn’t building a brand template that subsumes director identity. In an industry where the dominant trajectory of the last five years has been “scale up to meet streaming demand,” Trigger has done the opposite. It has used the Edgerunners money to preserve the small-team, director-led, visually distinctive production model that the studio was built on in 2011.

Whether that model survives the next decade depends on whether the next two or three projects perform commercially the way Edgerunners did. The studio has bet that its visual signature, applied to the right material with the right director, can produce hits without scaling. The 2026 and 2027 catalog will test that bet.