[2][3] Telecom Animation Film is a well-established studio known for its production cooperation on films produced by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, including the Japan-US co-production Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, and Isao Takahata's Jarinko Chie.

[3][4] It is known in the industry as a prestigious studio, and has had many famous creators on its roster in the past, including Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Yasuo Ōtsuka, who was their former tutor and animation director on their works, Kazuhide Tomonaga[a], who worked on the car chase scene in The Castle of Cagliostro, Nizo Yamamoto, art director at Studio Ghibli, and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, character designer for Neon Genesis Evangelion.

[8][9] So Fujioka decided to make a full-animation film that could compete with Disney, but in Japan, limited-animation adopted and developed by Osamu Tezuka was the mainstream.

He used a unique method of training the new recruits, such as eliminating the influence of the TV series, as he considered it unnecessary for making a feature film.

[c] Kyosuke Mikuriya took over as director from Miyazaki, and with Telecom leaving to focus on the film Little Nemo, TMS outsourced the animation to Gallop, a fledgling studio.

[15] In the spring of 1981, TMS established a local subsidiary in the U.S. and began full-scale efforts to produce the film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.

[11][12] Under producer Yutaka Fujioka's grand order to "produce a world-class animation film," creators from Japan and abroad were gathered, and many famous people such as Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Osamu Dezaki, Yasuo Ōtsuka, Ray Bradbury, Jean Giraud (Moebius), and Chris Columbus were involved.

Miyazaki and Takahata, who were originally slated to direct the film, left the project, and the staff continued to change one after another, causing confusion.

[21] However, in the middle of production, Fujioka requested that they make a pilot for Little Nemo (produced by Osamu Dezaki and Akio Sugino), and Telecom staff were forced to withdraw from the Akira site.

[17][16] It was the biggest project in the history of Japanese animation, but it ended in failure, and Fujioka took responsibility for it, gave up all rights related to Tokyo Movie, and retired from the industry.

[6] In 2009, Hoshi Shinichi Short-Short, produced by Telecom and broadcast on NHK, won the Grand Prix in the Comedy category at the 37th International Emmy Awards.

credited as Tokyo Movie Shinsha for seasons 1 and 2, TMS-Kyokuchi for seasons 3,4 and 5 co-produced with Sunrise otherwise a compilation of 7 Heathcliff shorts from the 1984 Heathcliff TV series Copyright date says 1980 despite being made in 1978 due to the movie's failing at the box office Credited as TMS-Kyokuchi 2 shorts