Japanese entertainment giant KADOKAWA has announced the creation of KADOKAWA Creators, a new anime studio aimed at cultivating young talent.
KADOKAWA Creators will hire young people as employees, and the projected career path that the website lays out will see them handling in-between animation work after around six months, key animation work after two or so years, and animation direction (the process of checking and correcting animators’ work for consistency and quality purposes) after about five years.
According to the press release, the training programs will include an “Animator Drill” that “condenses” anime studio Doga Kobo‘s know-how.
The background for KADOKAWA Creators’ establishment contains many familiar refrains about the anime industry, such as turnover rates (roughly 25% in the past four years, and 68% in the past eight, according to KADOKAWA), mentor figures being unable to pass on knowledge due to their workload, and lack of personnel that makes it difficult to secure external resources. The new studio will not just serve to train new animators, but provide anime studios under the KADOKAWA Group a source of in-between and key animation for their productions.
KADOKAWA Creators is the second part of KADOKAWA’s “Tsukuru hito o tsukuru. Tsukuro tokoro o tsukuru” (“Create people who create. Create places that create”) concept, following the reveal of the so-called Studio One Base that will open in Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City this fall. Studio One Base is described as an animation production base which will, among other things, bring several KADOKAWA Group anime studios together physically, and the currently Chiyoda-based KADOKAWA Creators may possibly end up there in the future.
KADOKAWA is also eyeing closer cooperation between its educational outfits, and is aiming for a “human resource development ecosystem” involving said outfits, KADOKAWA Creators, and its production studios.
The anime studios under the KADOKAWA Group include ENGI, Doga Kobo, Kinema Citrus, Bellnox FIlms, Raging Bull, Studio KADAN, and Chiptune.
A few days ago, it was announced that activist investor Oasis Management Company Ltd. had displaced Sony as the KADOKAWA shareholder with the highest voting rights on March 18, 2026. Oasis’s voting rights percentage had gone up from 10.03% to 11,89% after obtaining more stock. The previous increase to 10.03% was itself a recent achievement, taking effect on March 16, 2026.
Source: Press release
