Toei Animation
Toei Animation Co., Ltd (東映アニメーション株式会社 Tōei Animēshon Kabushiki-gaisha) is an animation studio based in Japan and owned by Toei Company, Ltd. They are responsible for most of the animation produced for the Generation 1 television series. They are known for animating many American and Japanese cartoons, such as G.I. Joe, Devilman, Sailor Moon, Voltron (aka Golion), Tranzor Z (aka Mazinger Z), Getter Robo, Steel Jeeg, Grendizer, Daiku Maryu Gaiking, the Dragonball franchise, One Piece, Digimon, The Real Ghostbusters, Zatch Bell, Bobobo-bo-Bobobo, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Pryde of the X-Men, Kinnikuman... look, it might just be shorter to list the stuff they haven't worked on.
Transformers work
Toei Studios animated the entirety of season 1 of the Generation 1 cartoon, including the three-part pilot episode More Than Meets the Eye. Following that, season 2 got split up between Toei, AKOM and an unnamed studio from the Philippines[1], with Toei animating 39 episodes[2], whereas the other two studios would handle the remaining ten episodes.
Toei also animated The Transformers: The Movie and the Scramble City OVA (which contained 15 minutes of all-new footage) as well as all the animated television commercials, the title sequences for season 1, 2, 4 and 5 (4 and 5 being comprised of commercial animation Toei had done), all the season 1 and season 2 bumpers and all five public service announcements.
Season 3 (Transformers 2010 in Japan) saw a decline in Toei's participation, as they were gradually outsourced by AKOM's more cost-efficient animation, thus only producing 13 episodes for this season. The short-lived Season 4 (the three-part "The Rebirth" series finale) was then handled entirely by AKOM.
Despite that, Toei would be solely responsible for the unique animation seen in all Transformers toy commercials, even during and after 1986, when the animated series itself had largely switched to AKOM.
After Hasbro stopped funding further Transformers cartoon episodes, Takara would retain Toei to animate all of the Japanese-exclusive cartoons: Headmasters (35 episodes using all-new footage), Super-God Masterforce (43 episodes), Victory (38 episodes) and the Zone OVA.
In 1998, eight years after animating Zone, Toei were called upon once again to animate the Beast Wars II segment of the Beast Wars Special Super Lifeform Transformers theatrical movie, "Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger!".
Notes
- Perhaps unflatteringly, Toei is notorious among Western anime distributors for their difficulty to work with. For distributers releasing their material outside of Japan, Toei often refuses to provide quality video masters. The masters they do provide are often of terrible picture and sound quality, and some times are even incomplete in their material. The masters for The Headmasters cartoon Toei provided to Metrodome for UK release contained none of the before credits recaps and next episode segments; unfortunate, as some of those segments contained new content and not just clips. For the US releases of Scramble City, Sony was provided the video but refused the soundtrack (forcing them to replace it with a non-optional audio commentary). Shout! Factory fared even worse, being outright denied in their request for Scramble City entirely, citing, "Toei has no interest in licensing to third parties". Toei's stubbornness to cooperate with Western companies is infamous outside of Transformers, particularly among Western distributors of Sailor Moon material.
