Wit Studio is what made Attack on Titan’s first season so special

polygon.com:

The first time George Wada picked up a copy of Attack on Titan, after seeing displays for the manga plastered all over train cars, he instantly made a connection between the characters in Hajime Isayama’s manga and his role in the anime industry.

“It was a story about people being stuck behind a wall,” he told Crunchyroll in 2019. “I synchronized that with my experience as a producer.”

Joining Production I.G in 2005, Wada had managed some memorable titles for the studio: series like Sengoku Basara, Kimi ni Todoke, and one established classic with Psycho-Pass. But it was toward the end of production for 2011’s Guilty Crown that Wada, and fellow I.G animation producers Tetsuya Nakatake and Kyoji Asano, became interested in building an environment filled with top-level talent, a place where they would fully dedicate themselves to working on one project at a time (rather than multiple series at once, which was the case at I.G). Series and films that would have high commercial potential and be of a higher quality than what they were working on at Production I.G. What they desired was to begin building a new brand, and to do that, they needed to form their own independent studio.

But before they could even come up with a name for this new venture, they had to inform their boss, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, who was the president of Production I.G at the time. After hearing his producers’ plan to strike out on their own, Ishikawa not only gave them his blessing, he made them an offer so as to keep them in the fold. Instead of truly leaving the nest to face the uncertainty of establishing a new studio in the highly competitive anime industry, this new studio would become a subsidiary of I.G’s parent company, IG Port. They would be given