DMM.com has a new animation studio. The company announced on Tuesday that GLEESTONE is now operating, and that it will handle television series, films and shorts from the initial planning stage through to actual animation production. That last detail is the interesting part: this is not a licensing label or a production committee seat, it is a studio that intends to make the animation itself.
Naokazu Tsuruta, who headed DMM Group’s content creative unit, is president and CEO. Anime producer Kensuke Tateishi is chief operating officer. Kō Shimizu and Kōya Takami are producers.
The name, briefly
DMM’s own explanation is that GLEESTONE combines “glee” and “stone” — the wish to deliver a feeling that makes an audience’s heart race, and to preserve that feeling the way something carved in stone lasts. The company’s stated philosophy follows the same line: works that stay with people a decade later, and works that reach across eras instead of chasing whatever is trending this season.
Company philosophies are cheap, but the wording here is a deliberate contrast to how most new studios introduce themselves. Nobody promises a decade of relevance by accident.
Where DMM sits in the industry
DMM is not new to anime. It established the DMM Pictures label in March 2017, and that label has been involved in more than 120 projects as a licensing company and as part of production committees. The credits include Fire Force, Inuyashiki Last Hero, Rent-A-Girlfriend and Blue Period, and DMM Pictures is credited with the original planning on TROYCA’s Shinobi no Ittoki, which premiered in October 2022.
The company also set up CUE, an animation production arm, in 2023. Rui Kuroki, a former Production I.G executive board officer and production head, was named its president and CEO, and DMM said at the time that the goal was higher quality animation in response to growing worldwide demand.
So GLEESTONE is the third piece, and the first one described as covering everything from planning to finished footage. Read the three together and the strategy is legible: DMM Pictures gets projects onto committees, CUE and now GLEESTONE make the actual animation. That is a lot of in-house capacity for a company that started as a web services business.
Why studios keep appearing
Game and platform money has been moving into animation production for a few years now, and it tends to move in the same direction. Konami built its own studio, KONAMI animation, and is using it on Suikoden: The Anime, which is now on Crunchyroll. CyberAgent owns CygamesPictures. Toho bought stakes in studios and picked up GKIDS. The pattern is that the companies with the money for production committees decided they would rather own the people doing the drawing.
The reason is partly scheduling. Anime production in Japan is still bottlenecked by a small pool of experienced animators, and a company with a reliable in-house team can commit to projects without waiting in a queue. A studio founded with a stated goal of planning its own works from the start is also a studio that does not need to be handed a project by somebody else.
Whether that produces better anime is a separate question. New studios take years to build a track record, and the first GLEESTONE title will be scrutinised in a way that an established studio’s would not. What DMM has bought is optionality: a pipeline it controls, staffed by people it chose, at a moment when demand for anime production outstrips almost everyone’s capacity to supply it.
What to watch for
No projects have been announced, which means the honest answer to “what is GLEESTONE making” is that nobody outside DMM knows. The names to remember are Tsuruta, Tateishi, Shimizu and Takami. When the first title is revealed, that credit list will say more about what kind of studio this is than any philosophy statement.
The other thing worth tracking is whether GLEESTONE works on DMM Pictures productions only or takes outside work. A studio tied exclusively to one company’s slate is a production arm. A studio that takes commissions is a business. DMM has not said which one it built.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: The GLEESTONE logo, the new animation studio established by DMM, via Anime News Network.
