With the recent successes of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and the Heaven’s Feel films,
it’s a really good time to be a Ufotable fan right now. Their combination of digital
techniques with stylish 2D animation has made each of their shows an absolute joy to watch.
Here are 5 things you need to know about the studio.
A lot of studio names are kind of meaningless,
or their name is some vague reference to something a long time ago. But Ufotable is real, or
rather, a table shaped like a UFO is real. The studio president Hikaru Kondo is a fan
of furniture and around the time he was creating the studio, he was trying to get his hands
on a European table in the shape of a UFO. He was thinking of it as the sort of table
that everyone can gather around and share ideas, but ultimately it’s just the only
thing he could think of when he finally had to choose a name. He now does own that table
and takes it to events sometimes, like a company mascot.
Ufotable have put out many series and films over the years, from game to manga adaptations,
but they haven’t had the opportunity to make an original series in a while. But they
have announced one, to be produced in collaboration with Type Moon. Girls Work is an anime that
was initially announced in 2010, but has since received no news, or even a cancellation.
At this point, we’re fairly sure it’s never coming out, but it’s amusing to think
that it’s still on its way.
Anime studios generally don’t have that many sources of revenue. They can make anime,
but that’s a long process for studios like Ufotable that don’t do a lot of outsourcing
work and prefer to focus on their own shows. Therefore, the studio has opted to expand
into creating their own restaurants and cafes across the country. Right now they own five
cafes and one restaurant, and they’ll do collaborations with their own and others’
properties. Unsurprisingly, they’re currently collaborating with Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no
Yaiba. In the anime industry, it’s generally common
to have some staff as permanent employees of a studio, but directors and most animation
staff will be freelancers who are invited to work on a project-by-project basis. But
Ufotable’s production model generally involves focusing on promoting their own staff into
directorial roles. So even though Ei Aoki directed Fate/Zero at the company, every Fate
anime since has been directed by an employee at the studio. In this way, the director will
always have a complete understanding of the capabilities of the team.
So therefore, collaboration is the key to Ufotable’s success. People talk about them
having a higher budget than other studios, but in reality, their quality is to do with
the close communication between all of Ufotable’s different departments. Incongruity between
CG, digital, and 2D elements are often down to the studio having to outsource all of these
different parts and struggling to keep up communication between studios across Tokyo,
but for Ufotable, all of these different groups are mere feet away and have worked together
for years.