"I was grateful that Maruyama gave me the freedom to do what I wanted as soon as I joined MAPPA. Specifically in the area of company management. At 4°C, I was only thinking about the productions themselves, but at MAPPA, I became interested in how to raise money and work in order to run an animation studio. I didn't think, 'I want to be president,' but as a producer, I started to understand the company's numbers when I was working on a production."
"This is not within the small framework of the animation industry, but as a company. When we thought about what we needed to do to achieve this, the first thing we needed to do was to increase productivity. It is difficult to catch up with the quality of Kyoto Animation and ufotable in a short period of time, and it is too late for MAPPA as a backward-looking company to try and reach that level over 20 or 30 years. So we had to take a different approach to the studios that were ahead of us. So we thought about how we could produce a lot and gain experience while maintaining a high level of quality, and at the same time brand the studio and join the race with the top studios in the shortest possible time."
"It was good that we were able to produce a hit film, but the amount of money coming into the studio was very small for a simple production contract. What I mean by less is that the studio's income is small in relation to the overall business scale of the productions. I felt that if we didn't improve that, it would be impossible for us to survive and grow strongly as a company. So from 2016 onwards, we aimed to maintain an environment where we could continue to produce animation while focusing on production conditions that would bring in more money for the studio, and from around 2018 we also started non-animation production businesses such as rights and events."