TMS Entertainment

TMS Entertainment is a Japanese animation studio owned by Sega Corporation and based in Nakano, Tokyo. It was formerly known as the Kyokuichi Corporation and began in 1946 as a textile manufacturer, entering animation when it merged with the studio Tokyo Movie Shinsha, one of the five major studios of the early Japanese animation industry. It is known for franchises such as Detective Conan, Lupin the Third, D.Gray-man and Anpanman, and besides animation it handles program sales and character licensing. Its production headquarters runs several numbered studios, and it owns subsidiaries such as Telecom Animation Film. Through the 1980s and 1990s it animated for Western and Japanese companies, but since the early 2000s it has largely stopped supplying services to Western studios because of rising costs.