MAPPA has officially absorbed and dissolved Contrail, its own subsidiary animation studio, taking over all of its rights and obligations.
The announcement came through Japan’s Official Gazette, the kind of dry corporate notice that rarely turns heads, but this one is a big deal for anime fans who’ve been following the work of director Sunao Katabuchi.
Contrail was founded in September 2019 by Katabuchi himself, best known internationally for directing the critically acclaimed In This Corner of the World, the 2016 film produced by MAPPA that became a beloved modern classic.
The studio had one clear mission from day one: bring his new feature film to life. That film is The Mourning Children: Nagiko and the Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black, an original animated feature set in 10th-century Kyoto during the Heian period, following the real-life literary figure Sei Shōnagon, author of The Pillow Book.
The story dives into the lives of women in an era that’s usually romanticized, but here is portrayed as it really was, a city devastated by plague, with tens of thousands dead and corpses abandoned in the streets.
The staff behind the project is seriously impressive: chief animator Masashi Ando (Princess Mononoke, The Deer King), artistic director Yuji Kaneko (Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia), and composer Akira Senju (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).
The film even had a Work in Progress presentation at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2025, where Katabuchi and his wife and co-director Chie Uratani showed early footage alongside MAPPA CEO Manabu Otsuka, who has been producing the project from the beginning.
Why did Contrail disappear?
The studio ran into serious financial trouble. Contrail posted a net loss of 68 million yen, roughly $434,000 USD, for its most recent fiscal year, accumulating debts that made it impossible to continue as an independent entity.
Long, detail-heavy projects like this one are expensive and slow by nature, and when a small studio is built entirely around one single film, there’s very little room to absorb those losses.
MAPPA’s solution was straightforward: take over the studio, assume its debts, and keep the project moving forward under its own roof.
Director Katabuchi has since clarified on social media that the Contrail brand will continue to exist even after the studio is formally dissolved.
What happens to The Mourning Children now?
The film isn’t going anywhere, MAPPA is seeing it through. For a studio generating the kind of revenue that Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man bring in, absorbing Contrail’s losses is very manageable.
The Mourning Children was already deeply tied to MAPPA from the start, so this is more of a formalization than a dramatic shift.
What’s less certain is whether the creative environment that allowed In This Corner of the World to exist, the patience, the intimacy, the freedom to spend years obsessing over historical details, will hold up inside one of the biggest and busiest anime studios on the planet.
Are you excited to see The Mourning Children finally come to life under MAPPA, or does this news make you a little worried for the project? Let us know what you think!