How was the Attack on Titan anime made?

By a brand-new studio, at full sprint, in public.

The anime was entrusted to Wit Studio, founded in 2012 as a Production I.G spinoff, and it became the young studio’s defining job. Director Tetsurō Araki brought the visual grammar from his earlier work: speed lines, swinging camera moves through the vertical maneuvering gear’s wire-work, and horror staged as scale, a human figure measured against a Titan’s hand. The first season ran 25 episodes from 7 April to 29 September 2013 on MBS.

The production strain is part of the record. Mid-run, character designer Kyoji Asano publicly appealed on Twitter for active animators to join the production, an almost unheard-of admission that became famous precisely because the finished episodes did not look rescued. The season sold an average of 52,067 discs per volume in Japan, the best-selling television anime of 2013, and its music made Hiroyuki Sawano’s name worldwide. Season 2 (2017, 12 episodes) and Season 3 (2018–19, 22 episodes) completed Wit’s tenure before the move to MAPPA.

Attack on Titan Animation Side guidebook cover — **ANIMATION SIDE**ANIMATION SIDE, the official guidebook to how the anime was produced.

THE WIT TENURE

2013 to 2019

Season 1 · 2013

25 episodes. Araki directing, Asano designing. The season that turned a manga hit into a global one and won Animation of the Year at the Tokyo Anime Award.

Season 2 · 2017

12 episodes, Masashi Kō’zuka directing with Araki as chief director. Four years of silence, then a short, dense return.

Season 3 · 2018–19

22 episodes in two parts on NHK. The political arc and the return to Shiganshina, and the point where Isayama began asking the anime to fix his own pages (see the Isayama page).

How was the Attack on Titan anime made?

THE WIT TENURE

THE FIRST WORD