Bee Train Production

Bee Train Production (ビィートレイン株式会社, Biītorein Kabushikigaisha), commonly referred to simply as Bee Train, is a Japanese animation studio founded by Kōichi Mashimo in 1997. Since their involvement with Noir, .hack//Sign, and Madlax (among other series) they have a strong following in the yuri fandom for being involved in series portraying strong female leads with speculatively ambiguous relationships.[3]

BEE TRAIN Production Inc.
Native name
ビィートレイン株式会社
Kabushiki kaisha[1]
Animation studio
IndustryAnimation (Anime)
Genrevarious
FoundedTokyo, Japan June 5, 1997 (1997-06-05)[1]
FounderKōichi Mashimo
Headquarters
Kichijōji, Musashino, Tokyo[1]
,
Japan
Number of locations
3 (Kokubunji, Kichijōji, Karuizawa)[1]
Key people
Kōichi Mashimo, CEO
Kenji Horikawa, Director
ProductsNoir (2001)
.hack//Sign (2002)
Madlax (2004)
Tsubasa Chronicle (2005–06)
.hack//Roots (2006)
El Cazador de la Bruja (2007)
Total equity¥ 10,000,000[2]
Number of employees
70 (April 2007)[1]
ParentProduction I.G (1997 – 2006)
DivisionsBee Train Digital (defunct)
Studio Road
C-Station (2009–12)
D-Station (defunct)
Websitewww.beetrain.co.jp

History

The studio Bee Train was founded on June 5, 1997 by Kōichi Mashimo, who was previously a director at Tatsunoko Productions and the founder of Mashimo Jimusho, a small freelance staff working for other studios. Originally, Bee Train was a subsidiary of Production I.G along with Xebec but in February 2006, it ended its relationship and became independent.

Koichi Mashimo's goal when he founded Bee Train was to create a "hospital for animators", an animation studio interested in nurturing young talents and artistic quality of production rather than in corporate strategies and profit. This studio-as-hospital approach was allegedly invented by Mashimo during his prolonged stay in an intensive care unit (after a severe skiing accident) and has been Bee Train's official strategy ever since.[4]

The first projects published by the studio in 1999 were anime adaptations of video game franchises popular in Japan: PoPoLoCrois, Arc the Lad, Wild Arms: Twilight Venom, and Medabots. Later, Bandai Visual joined forces with Bee Train to produce an anime OVA based on the famous .hack video game series. Simultaneously, they decided to promote the games with an anime television series, that aired in 2002 as .hack//Sign and is among Bee Train's most famous works. The OVA became known as .hack//Liminality and its four episodes were added as bonus material to each of the original four games of the franchise. In 2006, Bee Train produced .hack//Roots, a prequel anime to the .hack//G.U. games and a spiritual successor to Sign.

Bee Train's first independent project was Noir. Aired in 2001, the series was produced at the same time as Sign and became the first installment of Bee Train's "girls-with-guns" trilogy.[4] After Noir had become widely successful in Japan, France, the United States, Germany, and other Western countries, the second series, Madlax, was produced in 2004 and the third, El Cazador de la Bruja,[5] went on air in April 2007. Although the "girls-with-guns" series are considered Bee Train's and, particularly, Mashimo's signature works, the original idea belonged to their common executive producer Shigeru Kitayama.[4]

From 1997 on, the studio's headquarters were located in Kokubunji, Tokyo, although in 2001, it moved to another part of the city. Two more studio locations were acquired in 2004 (in Karuizawa, Nagano) and 2006 (Kichijōji, Musashino, Tokyo).[1] Currently the main office now resides in Musashino, Tokyo with C-Station Co., Ltd. department in the Kokunbunji office.

The company has been dormant since 2012 due to Kōichi Mashimo's retirement from the anime industry.

Style

One frequent technique that Mashimo uses as part of his studio-as-hospital strategy is brainstorming new anime concepts with his colleagues in the state of alcohol intoxication. For example, according to him, that is how the idea of the supernatural connection between the two female leads of Madlax was born.[4]

Another typical Bee Train gesture is to invite Japanese voice actors who have already worked on some of their projects to voice the characters similar to the ones they voiced before. For example, this list includes Hōko Kuwashima (Kirika Yuumura in Noir, Margaret Burton in Madlax), Aya Hisakawa (Chloe, Limelda Jorg, Jodie Hayward in El Cazador de la Bruja), and Kaori Nazuka (Subaru in .hack//Sign, Shino in .hack//Roots).

The famous Japanese composer and music producer Yuki Kajiura has created musical scores for multiple projects by Bee Train since Noir (whose appeal lay to a large degree in its soundtrack). Kajiura has provided music for Sign, Liminality, Madlax (as part of FictionJunction Yuuka), Tsubasa Chronicle, and recently El Cazador de la Bruja. When explaining his preference for Kajiura's work, Mashimo once commented that "she's a storyteller who just happens to know how to write music".[4] Another frequent collaboration is that between Bee Train and the musical duo Ali Project (Noir, Avenger, .hack//Roots). Generally, the music plays a just as important role in Bee Train's works as visuals and dialogue do,[4] sometimes even drowning the latter (heard, for example, in .hack//Sign, Avenger, and Madlax).

Works

In the works
YearTitleTypeEpsDirectorWriterComposer
1999Popolocrois MonogatariTV25Kōichi MashimoAya MatsuiKow Otani
1999Arc the LadTV26Itsuro KawasakiAkemi OmodeMichiru Oshima
1999Wild Arms: Twilight VenomTV22Itsuro KawasakiHideki Mitsui
Itsuro Kawasaki
Aya Matsui
Akemi Omode
Chinatsu Houjou
Hideki Mitsui
Kenji Kamiyama		Kow Otani
1999Medabots (first season)TV52Tensai OkamuraRyōta YamaguchiOsamu Tezuka
2001NoirTV26Kōichi MashimoRyoe TsukimuraYuki Kajiura
2001Captain Kuppa Desert PirateTV26Kōichi MashimoKōichi MashimoHayato Matsuo
2002.hack//SignTV26Kōichi MashimoKazunori Ito
Hiroaki Jinno
Kōichi Mashimo
Kirin Mori
Akemi Omode
Mitsuhiko Sawamura
Michiko Yokote		Yuki Kajiura
2002.hack//LiminalityOVA4Kōichi MashimoKazunori ItoYuki Kajiura
2002.hack//GiftOVA1Kōichi MashimoKazunori ItoYuki Kajiura
2003AvengerTV13Kōichi MashimoHidefumi KimuraAli Project
2003.hack//Legend of the TwilightTV12Kōichi Mashimo
Koji Sawai		Akatsuki Yamatoya
Satoru Nishizono		Yuji Yoshino
Yoko Ueno
2003Immortal Grand PrixTV5Kōichi MashimoKōichi Mashimo
Yuki Arie		Fat Jon
2004MadlaxTV26Kōichi MashimoYōsuke KurodaYuki Kajiura
2004Meine LiebeTV13Kōichi MashimoAkemi OmodeYoshihisa Hirano
2005Tsubasa Chronicle (first season)TV26Kōichi MashimoHiroyuki KawasakiYuki Kajiura
2006Meine Liebe wiederTV13Shinya KawamoAkemi OmodeYutaka Minobe
2006.hack//RootsTV26Kōichi MashimoKazunori Ito
Miu Kawasaki		Ali Project
2006Spider RidersTV52Kōichi Mashimo
Takaaki Ishiyama		Yōsuke KurodaFumitaka Anzai
Nobuhiko Nakayama
2006Tsubasa Chronicle (second season)TV26Kōichi Mashimo
Hiroshi Morioka		Hiroyuki KawasakiYuki Kajiura
2007Murder PrincessOVA6Tomoyuki KurokawaTatsuhiko UrahataYasufumi Fukuda
2007El Cazador de la BrujaTV26Kōichi MashimoKenichi KanemakiYuki Kajiura
2007Spider Riders: Yomigaeru TaiyouTV26Kōichi MashimoYōsuke KurodaFumitaka Anzai
Nobuhiko Nakayama
2008Blade of the ImmortalTV13Kōichi MashimoHiroyuki KawasakiKow Otani
2008Batman Gotham Knight: Field TestVideo1Hiroshi MoriokaJordan GoldbergChristopher Drake
2009Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~TV26Kōichi MashimoGen Urobuchi
Yōsuke Kuroda
Hideki Shirane
Noboru Kimura
Tatsuya Takahashi
Yukihito Nonaka		Hikaru Nanase
2010Halo Legends: HomecomingOVA/ONA1Koji SawaiHiroyuki KawasakiMartin O'Donnell
2010Psychic Detective YakumoTV13Tomoyuki KurokawaHiroyuki KawasakiR・O・N
2011Hyouge MonoTV39Koichi MashimoHiroyuki KawasakiKow Otani

Other participations

Bee Train also participated in the following works as a general for hire company, handling such tasks as animation.

Other divisions

Bee Train Digital was Bee Train's small special effects and other works area that has mostly provided additional production support to projects such as effects, finishing and photography work for .hack//SIGN, .hack//Liminality, Avenger, and Murder Princess. It also created the special effects for Toaru Majutsu no Index and 2D works in ending theme of Canaan. Studio Road, which resides within the studio's offices, provides animation finishing services for Bee Train and several other studios. Through the 2009-2010 year, two new divisions were added. C-Station Department, which served as its animation design department and D-Station Department, which was reorganized from Bee Train Digital, is the digital production and digital photography works. In 2012 C-Station broke away from Bee Train becoming independent and D-Station has since been delisted by the company.

gollark: Idea: apiostandardization.
gollark: Including logging, random metadata, the uninstall thing, keyboard shortcuts, superglobals, the code safety checker, chuck norris jokes, compression, the automatic space clearer, some lorem ipsum variants, a UUID generator, the automatic data mining system, settings, screen control, the native raw peripheral API, PotatoNET™, potato_tool, `print_hi`, privileged execution, the random bytestring generator, the registry, PIR, and rot13.
gollark: PotatOS actually has its own PotatOS API which has zero backward compatibility guarantees whatsoever.
gollark: All the time.
gollark: I bet everyone used all these "CAVEAT PROGRAMMER" syscalls and stuff.

References
  1. "About Bee Train" (in Japanese). Bee Train. Retrieved 2012-02-27.
  2. "FY 2010 Application Guidelines produced" (in Japanese). Bee Train. Retrieved 2009-09-09.
  3. Friedman, Erica (2004-06-28). "Yuri Anime: Bee Train does it again". Archived from the original on 11 April 2017. Retrieved 2007-06-06.
  4. Wong, Amos (March 2005). "Inside Bee Train". Newtype USA: 8–15.
  5. "January 3–10 News". Anime News Service. 2007-01-06. Archived from the original on 3 February 2007. Retrieved 2007-01-19. Following Noir and Madlax, [El Cazador] was the thrid [sic] installment in a series of what Director Koichi Mashimo has referred to as his girls-with-guns genre trilogy.
  6. "That Moment's Expression". Toradora!. Episode 4. October 23, 2008. 22'08" minutes in. TV Tokyo.
  • Yuki, Masahiro. "The Official Art of .hack//Roots". (May 2007) Newtype USA. pp. 101–107.
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