Headquartered in a nondescript office building in Kichijoji, a Tokyo suburb with a bohemian flavor, Studio 4°C hardly looks, from the outside, like the epicenter of anything. Yet this animation production house, founded in 1986 by Eiko Tanaka, Koji Morimoto and Yoshiharu Sato, has made some of the most innovative anime of the past decade.
The company's films may not have hit the box-office heights of Studio Ghibli's fantasies (which Studio 4°C once helped make), but they have screened widely, here and abroad, beginning with Katsuhiro Otomo's omnibus "Memories" (1995), followed by the "Animatrix" project for the Wachowski brothers' SF hit "The Matrix" (1999), Masaaki Yuasa's mind-bending directorial debut "Mind Game" (2004) and Michael Arias' kids-versus- gangsters epic "Tekkonkinkreet" (2006).
Studio 4°C's total output, however, is a mixed, hard-to-categorize lot, ranging from TV shows for kiddies to experimental shorts that display the talents of up-and-coming animators.