Japanese anime studio MAPPA announced on February 25 that it will absorb Studio Contrail, MAPPA Group’s subsidiary, through a merger, as reported by gamebiz. Following the merger, Contrail will officially disband, with MAPPA taking over all of the company’s rights and obligations. However, according to anime director and studio head Sunao Katabuchi, while Contrail is set to go through a management shift and lose its independence as a company, it won’t be “disbanding” as a studio.
“Our management will be consolidated, and we will cease to be an independent company, but we won’t disband. The Studio Contrail name will remain,” Katabuchi wrote on his X account.
Studio Contrail was established under the MAPPA umbrella in 2019 by animation director Sunao Katabuchi following the success of his anime In This Corner of the World, with the goal of producing another animated feature film. While Contrail has been steadily working on its upcoming project, The Mourning Children: Nagiko and the Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black, it seems like the decision to disband as a company and merge with MAPPA might have come from its poor financial results and huge amount of debt in recent years.
Though the official reason for the merger hasn’t been confirmed, according to their financial results for the fiscal year ending March 2025, Contrail became insolvent, facing a loss of over 68 million yen (about $437,000 USD).
Based on this background and Katabuchi’s statement, it seems like the animation team at Contrail will continue working on The Mourning Children under MAPPA’s wing, with the latter taking over the studio’s corporate obligations.
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2019 again. I wonder if lockdowns had anything to do with financial debt mounting up, but you’d think that would have been an issue far sooner. Maybe anime grew too big too fast, mismanagement or money going overseas is at fault. I feel many are pirating anime to avoid growing cost or Western localization issues to where Japan isn’t collecting any of the profits and things are compounding. For a very long time now some of these things have been ignored and fans asked for overseas for more direct ways to support anime and manga, yet never been provided.