Nippon Animation Co., Ltd. is a Japanese animation studio founded on June 3, 1975. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, with its headquarters in their Tama City studio and an administrative head office in the Ginza district of Chūō.

Nippon Animation is known for producing numerous anime series adapted from works of Western literature as well as original works and manga adaptations such as the World Masterpiece Theater series with entries such as Rascal the Raccoon, Anne of Green Gables, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tales of Little Women, Romeo's Blue Skies among others as well as Maya the Bee, Papuwa, Uchūsen Sagittarius and Chibi Maruko-chan which has become a major hit for the studio in Japan and globally. Amongst many of its past and present staffers include Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, co-founders of Studio Ghibli. Aside from animation production, the company also handles character licensing.

The titular protagonist from Rascal the Raccoon serves as the studio's mascot.

What is now Nippon Animation is descended from Zuiyo Eizo (or Zuiyo Enterprise), an animation studio and planning and production company founded in April 1969 by TCJ former manager Shigeto Takahashi.

Zuiyo Enterprise (瑞鷹エンタープライズ, Zuiyō Entrāpraizu) was the former sales division of the animation studio, TCJ before it spun off in March and was formally established the following month.

The studio has been involved in the planning and production series based on Western literature in the early and mid-1970s such as Moomin, Vicky the Viking and 1974's Heidi, Girl of the Alps, an adaptation of Johanna Spyri's popular children's book Heidi. The Heidi anime was enormously popular in Japan (and later in Europe, and the feature-length edit of the TV series saw a U.S. VHS release in 1985). Zuiyo Enterprise soon found itself in financial trouble because of the high production costs of a series (presumably Maya the Honey Bee) it was attempting to sell to the European market.

The company was involved in the production of animated series for the TV anime staple Calpis Comic Theater (カルピスまんが劇場, Karupisu manga gekijō), later known as World Masterpiece Theater, broadcast on Fuji TV. These series were based on children's literature such as Moomin and Andersen Stories. These earlier series' animation were commissioned to two other studios: Mushi Production and Tokyo Movie Shinsha, while Zuiyo was mainly involved in the planning.

In 1972, after changing its headquarters, Zuiyo Enterprise formed an animation studio division known as Zuiyo Eizo (ズイヨー映像, Zuiyō Eizō). By this time, Zuiyo was working on its first independent production based on Johanna Spyri's Heidi, an ambitious project on which Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki also worked on. In 1967 Takahashi had already produced a short pilot for a Heidi series with TCJ, but the project was shelved. In the meantime Zuiyo also worked on Vicky the Viking, a German co-production with ZDF and ORF, based on Runer Jonsson's eponymous book series. In 1974 Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Vicky the Viking were broadcast in Japan, soon gaining a huge success also in Europe. Nevertheless, Zuiyo Eizo found itself in financial difficulties due to the high production costs of its series, not enough repaid by the selling of its properties to European market. In 1975, Zuiyo Eizo was split into two entities: Zuiyo Co., Ltd., which absorbed the debt and the rights to the Heidi anime and other previous series, and Nippon Animation, which was essentially Zuiyo Eizo's production staff (including Miyazaki and Takahata), which would continue to produce World Masterpiece Theater, retaining the rights of other series on which the studio was working on, such as A Dog of Flanders and Maya the Honey Bee.