Toei Animation Co., Ltd (東映アニメーション株式会社 Tōei Animēshon Kabushiki-gaisha) is an animation studio based in Japan that was established on January 23, 1948, and Toei Company, Ltd. is the largest shareholder. In terms of anime, they are known for animating shows such as Devilman, Sailor Moon, Golion (aka Voltron), Mazinger Z (aka Tranzor Z), Getter Robo, the Dragon Ball franchise, One Piece, Digimon, Fist of the North Star, Kinnikuman, Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers and many, many more.

In the 1980s, American animated series were frequently outsourced to Toei (though Toei abruptly discontinued the practice in 1989). Some American cartoons Toei animated include G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, The Real Ghostbusters, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Pryde of the X-Men, Inhumanoids, My Little Pony, Jem, Robotix, Dungeons & Dragons, and just about every other show you can think of.

Transformers work

(*Toei Company is Toei Animation's parent company that handles the distribution of their studios' work as well as the occasional project by other studios).

The trouble with Toei

Perhaps unflatteringly, Toei is notorious among Western anime distributors for their difficulty to work with. For distributors releasing their material outside of Japan, Toei often refuses to provide quality video masters. The masters they do provide are routinely of inferior picture and sound quality, and sometimes are even incomplete in their material.

The masters for The Headmasters cartoon Toei provided to Metrodome, Madman Entertainment and Shout! Factory for Western release contained none of the before credits recaps and next episode segments. This was unfortunate, as some of those segments contained new content and not just clips. The Super-God Masterforce and Victory masters provided by Toei did not include the clip show episodes; while this would not normally be a serious issue, in the case of Masterforce the clip shows were vital for making the rather convoluted plot of that series coherent.

For their US release of Scramble City, Sony was provided the video but refused the audio track, forcing them to replace it with a non-optional audio commentary. Metrodome and Madman Entertainment circumvented Toei entirely, releasing a low-quality fansubbed version of the OVA with burnt-in subtitles. Shout! Factory attempted to negotiate with them professionally, but were outright denied in their request for Scramble City, leaving them no choice but to omit it from their releases of US and Japanese Transformers cartoons.

Toei later denied Shout! Factory a distribution license for the Zone OVA. How Metrodome and Madman Entertainment got around them is unknown, though they likely used an unlicensed copy of Zone as they did with Scramble City.

Toei's stubbornness to cooperate with Western distributors is infamous outside of Transformers. Western distribution of Sailor Moon material was forbidden for many years after both DiC & Cloverway's licenses lapsed in 2005, and even before that they never granted permission for the final season of that series (Sailor Stars) to be distributed in North America by either entity. Toei continued refusing new potential Sailor Moon licencees until Viz Media (a Japanese-owned company) finally worked something out in 2014. Toei rigorously oversees the localization of Digimon material in Western markets, often forbidding necessary edits or forcing inexplicable changes. Just about the only Western distributor they do get along with is Funimation (the licensee for almost everything Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Toriko), but that most likely has to do with the company's founder, Gen Fukunaga, whose uncle had been a Toei producer in the past.[4]