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, Fist of the North Star, Kinnikuman, 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... 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 "Scramble City: Mobilization" (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 composed 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!". In 1999, they hosted the 1999 Summer Toei Anime Fair which distributed the Beast Wars episode "Cutting Edge" in Japan.
The Trouble with Toei
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 routinely of inferior picture and sound quality, and sometimes are even incomplete in their material.
The masters for The Headmasters cartoon Toei provided to Metrodome, Madman Entertainment and Shout! Factory for Western release contained none of the before credits recaps and next episode segments. This was unfortunate, as some of those segments contained new content and not just clips. The Super-God Masterforce and Victory masters provided by Toei did not include the clip show episodes. In the case of Masterforce, they were vital for making the plot of the series coherent.
For their US release of Scramble City, Sony was provided the video but refused the audio track, forcing them to replace it with a non-optional audio commentary. Metrodome and Madman Entertainment circumvented Toei entirely, releasing a low-quality fansubbed version of the OVA with burnt-in subtitles. Shout! Factory attempted to negotiate with them professionally, but were outright denied in their request for Scramble City, leaving them no choice but to omit it from their releases of US and Japanese Transformers cartoons.
Toei later denied Shout! Factory a distribution license for the Zone OVA. How Metrodome and Madman Entertainment got around them is unknown, though they likely used an unlicensed copy of Zone as they did with Scramble City.
Toei's stubbornness to cooperate with Western distributors is infamous outside of Transformers. Western distribution of Sailor Moon material was forbidden for many years after DiC's license lapsed. Toei did not permit a new license until Viz Media finally worked something out in 2014. Toei rigorously oversees the localization of Digimon material in Western markets, often forbidding necessary edits or forcing inexplicable changes. How Funimation gets along with them so well regarding their Dragon Ball Z license is a freakin' mystery.
