Millepensee

• 1. Introduction

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  Millepensee is a Japanese animation studio founded in 2013 and based in the Nerima district of Tokyo. At its heart is an unusual creative partnership: director Shin Itagaki and producer Naoko Shiraishi, who are married to each other and who together built the studio from the ground up. What does it take to run an animation studio where the founding director and the founding producer share a home as well as a production? And how did a studio born in 2013 grow into one producing adaptations of some of manga's most beloved and challenging material? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Founding Partnership

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  Naoko Shiraishi established Millepensee in 2013, taking on the role of producer at the studio she created. Shin Itagaki joined from the very beginning and has directed every one of the studio's main productions since its inception, with a single notable exception. The two are married, making Millepensee a studio in which the creative and organizational leadership are bound together in an unusually direct way. That exception to Itagaki's unbroken run as director involves the Wake Up, Girls!! films, where a different director stepped in. Those films brought director Yutaka Yamamoto to Millepensee, with the two Wake Up, Girls! film entries released in 2015. Both were co-animated with another studio, Ordet.

• 3. A Catalog Built on Adaptations

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  The manga by Roots and Piyo provided Millepensee with two of its earliest television projects. Takamiya Nasuno Desu! and Teekyuu both began their first runs on the 6th of April 2015. While Nasuno ran for twelve episodes through June of that year, Teekyuu extended across multiple seasons under Millepensee's direction, eventually accumulating seventy-two episodes by September 2017. The studio's adaptations have ranged widely in source material. Usakame, adapting a manga by Roots and Juzo Kirisawa, ran in 2016. Cop Craft, which launched in July 2019, drew from a light novel by Shoji Gatoh. So I'm a Spider, So What? arrived in January 2021 as an adaptation of a light novel by Okina Baba and ran for twenty-four episodes. The studio has shown a consistent appetite for light novel and manga properties across a span of a decade.

• 4. Berserk and Larger Ambitions

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  the 1st of July 2016 marked the start of Millepensee's most prominent adaptation: the anime series Berserk, drawn from the manga by Kentaro Miura. The series ran through June 2017, spanning twenty-four episodes. It served as a sequel to Berserk: The Golden Age Arc and was co-animated with a studio called GEMBA, with production cooperation from Liden Films. Bringing in two outside collaborators for a single project pointed to both the scale of the work and Millepensee's willingness to build partnerships rather than work in isolation. That collaborative instinct appeared again in a different form in February 2020, when Millepensee announced a partnership with Sanzigen to form a new 3DCG animation studio named lXlXl.

• 5. Into the 2020s

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  the 8th of January 2021 brought So I'm a Spider, So What? to television, with the studio handling twenty-four episodes of the adaptation through July of that year. In April 2023, I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too began airing, this time with Shingo Tanabe joining Itagaki as co-director. Tanabe returned alongside Itagaki for Okitsura: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Know What She's Saying, a twelve-episode series that ran from January to March 2025 and adapted a manga by Egumi Sora. A further television series, With You, Our Love Will Make It Through, began airing on the 14th of October 2025, adapting a manga by Chihiro Yuzuki, with Hiromi Kimura joining Itagaki in the director's chair for the first time.