Eiko Tanaka

Career

Tanaka studied Japanese language teaching methods at university and intended to become a Japanese language teacher abroad, but abandoned that plan after a motorbike accident. She worked for an advertising agency, then followed her boss into the animation industry at Nippon Animation. Shortly after joining, she had a falling out with that boss and was moved from the planning department to the production department. When Nippon Animation was handling three TV series at once, Tanaka single-handedly filled the roles of line producer, production manager, and production assistant. She worked as a line producer for Studio Ghibli on My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. At the Ghibli production site, she met Kōji Morimoto and Yoshiharu Sato, who asked her to set up a studio for them. In 1988 she founded a studio with them as a place for a group of creators, becoming its producer; the studio began with everyone paying rent together in an ordinary one-story private house where she had lived. She was still employed by Nippon Animation at that time. The studio temporarily broke up around 1993 because members took individual jobs, blurring group work. It then moved to a studio in Kichijoji and produced the film Memories by Katsuhiro Otomo. The studio became a limited company in 1999 and a joint-stock company in 2007.