What Happened at Kyoto Animation

I found out about this while researching something else. Years after the fact. If you came to anime after 2019, there is a reasonable chance you do not know either, so here it is, plainly.

What happened

July 18, 2019. Kyoto Animation's Studio 1, in the Fushimi ward of Kyoto. A man walked in carrying roughly 40 liters of gasoline, poured it out, and set it on fire.

Thirty-six people were killed. Thirty-four were injured. It was the worst mass killing Japan had seen in decades.

The man who did it was arrested in May 2020, once he had recovered from his own burns. He pleaded guilty in September 2023 and was sentenced to death in January 2024. He withdrew his appeal and the sentence was finalized in January 2025. His stated reason was that the studio had plagiarized a novel he submitted. The studio's records showed the draft failed initial review and shared nothing with anything they produced. That is the whole of what he gets in this post.

Why this studio

Here is the part that took me longer to understand, and the part that actually explains why the loss landed the way it did across the whole industry.

Animators in Japan work hard for very little. That is not a slogan, it is arithmetic. Most animation work is contracted out and paid per drawing or per cut, which means no floor, no benefits, and no guaranteed minimum wage. One freelancer's example that gets cited often: 2,500 yen a cut, roughly 15 dollars, at ten cuts a month. You cannot live in Japan on that. A 2019 survey by JAniCA, the Japanese Animation Creators Association, put mean income for animators aged 20 to 24 at about 1.55 million yen a year, somewhere near 10,000 dollars. Entry-level salaried positions have improved since, running about 200,000 to 240,000 yen a month at studios that offer them, but salaried positions were never the norm.

Now stack that against the training curve. Studio leadership quoted in industry reporting puts it at three to five years to become halfway competent and about ten years to become fully competent. So the industry asks for a decade of skill-building and pays per drawing while you build it. People wash out. Of course they do.

Kyoto Animation did it differently, and had for a long time:

• Salary, not piece rate. Staff were employees, not contractors. A steady paycheck instead of payment by the drawing.
• They trained their own. The studio ran the Kyoto Animation School, taught by its own staff, and brought people up in house rather than hiring finished animators off the open market.
• Benefits that barely existed elsewhere in the field, maternity leave among them.
• They hired women and promoted them, at rates and into roles that other studios did not.

People point at the look of a KyoAni show, the small gestures, the way a character shifts weight standing still, and call it a house style. It is not really a style. It is what you get when animators are not being paid by the drawing and can afford to spend the extra hours on a shot nobody asked them to fix. The quality was downstream of the employment model.

That is what makes the target specific. It was not a random building. It was the studio that had figured out how to make the work sustainable and had proved, over years, that treating animators well and making money were not opposed.

After

Survivors began returning to the company's other studios within a month. By October 2019, 27 of the 33 surviving victims were back at work. The company went from 176 employees to 137.

Studio 1 was demolished by April 2020. In July 2024 a monument went up in a park in Uji, called Monument Connecting Will. It carries 36 birds.

Kyoto Animation is still making shows.

Why I am writing this

Animators already go through a stressful work life. That is true on an ordinary day at an ordinary studio, before anything goes wrong. This was done to the one place that had built something better, by someone with a grievance that never existed.

Ridiculous and callous. Sending good energy toward everyone affected by it.

If you did not know about this either, that is not a failure on your part. Now you do. Watch something of theirs.