Why does Madhouse produce anime with consistently high-quality animation? That may be my personal observation, but I noticed that anime produced by the production company Madhouse have somewhat-consistently high-quality animation.

Even if the anime itself may not be a hit, the quality of drawings seems to be higher than most other production companies.

To list a few of their recent productions:


One Outs - a sports anime were lots of movements and running characters without the usual quirks of inconsistent body part movements.
Death Note - Brilliant drawings of characters with excellent usage of colors to illustrate different personalities.
Akagi &amp; Kaiji - somewhat weird looking characters with bold black outlining, but still manage to fit perfectly into the overall anime atmosphere.
Btooom! - a short (and maybe unknown to many) anime, but still has still with excellent presentation.


The list could really go on and on with HunterXHunter, Trigun, Parasyte, Hajime no Ippo, Ninja Scroll, ...etc.

Is this just a case of a big studio that has lots of money (although I hear that the anime production companies are always running on limited budgets)?

Do they hire only the best illustrators?
There seem to be a few points that have or could have led to high-quality anime coming out of Madhouse.


It is a relatively old company. Having been started in 1972, it has had time to grow and figure out its style, at least compared to many anime studios which are from the 1990s or 2000s.
"Unlike other studios founded at this time such as AIC and J.C.Staff, their strength was and is primarily in TV shows and theatrical features. Expanding from the initial Mushi Pro staff, Madhouse recruited such important directors as Morio Asaka, Masayuki Kojima, and Satoshi Kon during the 1990s. Their staff roster expanded in the 2000s to include Mamoru Hosoda, Takeshi Koike, and Mitsuo Iso, as well as many younger television directors." (x) That shows a relatively strong set of directors.
They have a subsidiary company that focuses on computer graphics and a Korean animation studio that they have invested in and outsource to. Those show effort put into having work being done by those who specialize in it and are good at it.
They've collaborated with a number of big names in manga like CLAMP and Naoki Urasawa.


While the studio itself doesn't seem to be huge (about 70 employees, compared to 130 from Kyoto Animation, 120 from Production I.G., and 2010 from Nippon Animation), it has been a subsidiary since 2011 of Nippon Television, which is a massive television network in Japan. That may give it access to additional funds that would allow them to invest more into animation.