Toei Animation: The Studio That Has Outlasted Almost Every Peer

One Piece crossed its thousandth television episode in November 2021, and was still in active weekly production five years later. There is no other ongoing anime in that bracket. There hasn’t been one in decades. The studio that has produced every one of those episodes — and that produced Hakujaden, Japan’s first color theatrical anime feature, in 1958 — is the same company. That continuity, more than any single show, is what Toei Animation is.

This article is about the studio rather than any one of its properties. Toei is the institution that trained the founders of Ghibli, that ran Dragon Ball through three eras of audience taste, that licenses Sailor Moon and Saint Seiya and Pretty Cure, and that in 2022 was knocked offline for weeks by a ransomware attack. The corporate body is older than commercial television in Japan. The catalog is unmatched. The current production model is also openly stressed, and that tension is worth looking at directly.

The 1948 founding and Hakujaden

Toei Animation’s institutional history starts in 1948, when the company that would become its core was founded as Japan Animated Films (Nichido Eiga). The Toei Company, a major film studio, acquired Nichido in 1956 and renamed it Toei Doga — what the English-language industry now calls Toei Animation. That makes the studio’s continuous operating history older than nearly every peer. Mushi Production, the other foundational studio of the modern industry, was founded in 1961 and went bankrupt in 1973. Toei did not.

Hakujaden — The Tale of the White Serpent, 1958 — is the reason historians cite Toei first. It was Japan’s first color theatrical anime feature, an 80-minute production adapted from a Chinese legend, and it was made with the kind of polished animation budget that Japanese studios would not consistently afford again until the late 1980s. Hakujaden did not invent anime, but it established that a Japanese studio could compete with Disney on theatrical animation production values. Every subsequent Japanese animation studio is downstream of that decision.

The training-ground role

What makes Toei’s early period historically heavy is not the films it released but the staff it trained. The animators who built the rest of the industry came up through Toei Doga in the 1960s.

Hayao Miyazaki joined Toei in 1963 as a low-level in-betweener. Isao Takahata was a director there from 1959, and made Horus, Prince of the Sun in 1968 — a production that lost money but is now regarded as one of the most influential animated films in Japanese history. Yasuo Otsuka, the senior animator who taught both of them, was a Toei staff member. Yoichi Kotabe, who later became the senior animation director on Nintendo’s Mario character designs, started at Toei. The two founders of Studio Ghibli met at Toei. So did most of the staff of Nippon Animation. So did the directors who went on to start Mushi’s successor studios.

Toei in the 1960s functioned as the de facto film school for the Japanese animation industry. Nobody who came up in that period made it through without spending years on a Toei production. That training-ground role is part of why the studio’s institutional weight is heavier than its current output suggests.

The franchises

The Toei catalog is built on a small number of very long-running properties. Each one has cycled through multiple generations of viewers.

Dragon Ball. The original Dragon Ball ran from 1986 to 1989. Dragon Ball Z followed from 1989 to 1996, became the studio’s first major North American export, and remains one of the most recognizable shonen brands worldwide. Dragon Ball GT (1996-1997), Dragon Ball Super (2015-2018), and Dragon Ball Daima (2024-2025) extended the line. Akira Toriyama’s death in March 2024 closed the manga side; the anime production rights still sit with Toei.

Sailor Moon. The 1992-1997 original series adapted Naoko Takeuchi’s manga across five seasons and 200 episodes, and exported the magical-girl genre globally. The 2014-2017 Sailor Moon Crystal reboot updated the property for streaming-era audiences.

One Piece. Eiichiro Oda’s serialization began in 1997; the anime started in October 1999 and has not stopped. By 2026, the broadcast count is past 1100 episodes. Toei announced a reanimation project in 2023 — “The One Piece,” produced with Wit Studio for Netflix — that will redo the early arcs at modern production values without ending the main run.

Pretty Cure (Precure). Launched in 2004 with Futari wa Pretty Cure, the franchise has produced a new annual season every year since, rotating casts and themes while keeping the core mahou-shoujo structure. By 2026 the franchise has 20+ entries. No other anime line has matched that release cadence.

Slam Dunk and Saint Seiya and Digimon and GeGeGe no Kitarou. Each is its own multi-decade property, each licensed and re-licensed across markets, each still generating revenue. The First Slam Dunk, Inoue Takehiko’s 2022 recap film, was a global theatrical hit and the largest Japanese animated film release of the year in China.

The point is not that any one of these is the best anime ever made. The point is that no other studio holds this many continuously active franchises at once.

March 2022 and the ransomware attack

In early March 2022, Toei Animation’s production network was hit by a ransomware attack. The company disclosed the incident publicly. Multiple productions were delayed by weeks — One Piece episodes 1015-1018, the Delicious Party Pretty Cure premiere, the Digimon Ghost Game broadcast, and others all slipped. Toei’s public statement was minimal; the industry response was extensive.

What the attack exposed was how centralized Toei’s production infrastructure had become. A single shared network connected the studio’s in-house animation pipeline to the outsourcing partners who handle most of the in-between work. When the network went down, every active production stalled simultaneously. There was no offline workflow to fall back on.

The disclosure also clarified how much of Toei’s actual frame-by-frame animation is done outside the building. The shutdown affected partner studios in Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam who could not receive files. Toei’s recovery timeline was determined less by its own IT response than by how quickly the network could be re-secured for those external pipelines to resume.

The outsourcing model in the 2020s

The ransomware incident clarified something the industry already knew: Toei in 2026 is closer to an IP-holding and production-management company than to a working animation house. Most key animation on its long-running shows is contracted to outside studios, in Japan and abroad. The in-house staff focuses on direction, storyboarding, and quality control. The actual drawing happens elsewhere.

This model is what lets Toei sustain output across so many simultaneous productions. It is also why the studio’s house animation style has trended toward serviceable rather than prestige across the late 2010s. One Piece episodes vary widely in animation quality from week to week because they’re produced by different rotating partner teams. The film projects — The First Slam Dunk, the One Piece Film: Red — pull harder talent and look it. The weekly television product does not.

This is a deliberate choice. Toei’s catalog is too large to animate to the standard of a Ufotable or a Kyoto Animation episode-by-episode. The studio has bet, correctly, that audience retention on long-running shows is driven by story continuity rather than peak animation. That bet has held for forty years.

The longest-running studio

There is no other animation studio in the world with Toei’s combination of operating tenure, catalog depth, and active production volume. Disney’s animation division is older but has cycled through corporate restructurings that broke its production lineage. Most Japanese peers are younger by a decade or more. The studios that were Toei’s contemporaries — Mushi, Tatsunoko in its original form, the original Nippon Animation lineage — have either dissolved or transformed past recognition.

What Toei is in 2026 is the institutional memory of the Japanese animation industry. It still produces. It still holds the IPs. It still trains junior staff who will go on to work elsewhere. The output is uneven, the model is stressed, and the studio has not made a prestige-tier television production in years. But the lights are on, and they have been since 1948.

That continuity is the studio’s actual product. The full Toei catalog — every series and film with TMDB-verified credits and current platform availability — is browsable on the studio page.