Zuiyo Enterprise

Nippon Animation

Type	Animation film studio
Industry	Media and Entertainment
Founded	1962 (as Zuiyo Eizo) June 1975 (as Nippon Animation)
Headquarters	Koganei, Tokyo, Japan
Products	Animated feature films (Anime)
Number of employees	2010+
Website	www.nippon-animation.co.jp/

Nippon Animation (日本アニメーション, Nippon Animēshon) is a Japanese animation studio. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, with chief offices in the Ginza district of Chūō and production facilities in Tama City.

Nippon Animation is famous for producing numerous anime series based on works of literature such as Anne of Green Gables and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, co-founders of the famous Studio Ghibli, directed several episodes in the World Masterpiece Theater series.

What is now Nippon Animation is descended from Zuiyo Eizo (Zuiyo Enterprises), an animation studio that produced several popular series in the early and mid-1970s, including 1974's Heidi, Girl of the Alps, an adaptation of Johanna Spyri's popular children's book Heidi. The Heidi anime was enormously popular in Japan (and later in Europe, and the feature-length edit of the TV series saw a U.S. VHS release in 1985). Zuiyo Eizo soon found itself in financial trouble because of the high production costs of a series (presumably Maya the Bee) it was attempting to sell to the European market.

In 1975, Zuiyo Eizo was split into two entities: Zuiyo (not Zuiyo Eizo), which absorbed the debt and the rights to the Heidi anime, and Nippon Animation, which was essentially Zuiyo Eizo's production staff (including Miyazaki and Takahata). Officially, Nippon Animation Co., Ltd. was established in June 1975 by company president Koichi Motohashi. The newly rechristened Nippon Animation found success right away with Maya the Bee and A Dog of Flanders (both of which began as Zuiyo Eizo productions), which became the first entry in the World Masterpiece Theater series to be produced under the Nippon Animation name. Hayao Miyazaki left Nippon Animation in 1979 in the middle of the production of Anne of Green Gables to make the Lupin III feature The Castle of Cagliostro.