MAPPA: The Studio Behind Attack on Titan's Finale, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Chainsaw Man

MAPPA — Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association — was founded in 2011 by Masao Maruyama, a co-founder of Madhouse who left after that studio was acquired by Nippon Television. Maruyama's stated intention was to build a studio with a specific creative culture, and the early MAPPA productions — "Terror in Resonance" (2014), "Yuri!!! on Ice" (2016), "Banana Fish" (2018) — established the studio as capable of work of unusual ambition and emotional complexity.

The studio's scale and profile changed dramatically between 2019 and 2021, when it acquired the productions of several major franchises: "Jujutsu Kaisen," "Chainsaw Man," "Attack on Titan: The Final Season," and "Vinland Saga" Season 2, among others. This concentration of major properties in a single studio is unusual in the anime industry, where production is typically distributed across many studios to manage scheduling and capacity. MAPPA's rapid expansion meant it was simultaneously producing multiple large-scale projects for multiple streaming platforms, with schedules that industry observers described as implausible given the studio's available staff.

The consequences became public knowledge through reports and statements from MAPPA animators and production staff. Accounts described working weeks of extreme length, schedules that required overseas outsourcing to meet deadlines, and working conditions that were described, specifically and by name, as incompatible with the quality of animation that the studio's reputation required. The studio was simultaneously producing some of the most visually impressive action animation in anime — the "Attack on Titan: The Final Season" episodes and the "Jujutsu Kaisen 0" film contain sequences of extraordinary quality — and doing so through a production process that its own participants found damaging.

The anime industry's labor problem is not specific to MAPPA — it is structural, a consequence of production schedules that consistently require more hours than sustainable work allows — but MAPPA's situation brought it into focus because of the studio's visibility. The series it was producing were watched by tens of millions of people globally; the conditions under which those series were produced were described by people who worked on them in terms that were impossible to ignore.

Whether MAPPA's model is sustainable — whether a studio can maintain this production volume at this quality level without burning through its workforce — is a question the industry is watching with the specific attention of people who have their own stake in the answer. The studio continues to produce major properties; the quality of individual productions continues to vary in ways that tracks with the constraints of specific schedules; and the structural conditions that created the problem remain largely unchanged.