The story
Founded by James Wang on Jul 10, 1978.1
Wang Film/Cuckoo's Nest, the studio's original name, was founded by James Chung-Yuan Wang (王中元 Wang Chung-yuan), Hsu Chih-wei and Lu Kuang-chi started the studio in 1978 as a Taiwanese subcontractor for various Japanese animation studios and also an overseas facility for the American animation studio Hanna-Barbera. Hanna-Barbera sent Jerry Smith to help set up the company and eventually owned half the company. Many employees from Chunghwa Cartoon came to work at Cuckoo's Nest Studio along with employees from Ying Ren Cartoon and Shang Shang. Don Patterson was brought on board as a trainer. The company started with about 50 employees but soon had 300.
In the company's first year, 17 episodes were produced for Hanna-Barbera. Quickly, they had contracts with Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal.
With increased wages and foreign exchange rates, Cuckoo's was being priced out of the outsourcing market. Thus the CNS began restructuring. A Mainland Chinese subsidiary was opened in 1990 in Zhuhai, southern Guangdong province. In 1991, Cuckoo's Nest had to lay off 200 employees in Taipei. The company began computerization to reduce costs, while training some that would have been laid off to operate the computers. By 1993, the company had capacity to produce 200 half-hour episodes each year. In 1993, a Shanghai unit, possibly a joint venture, was under consideration with Bangkok as an alternative. Also, internal developed and produced material was expected to start hitting the market in mid-1994.
In early 1991, Hanna-Barbera sold its digital ink-and-paint software to the company which was developed by Marc Levoy.
The company is also notable for their work on the overseas production for Nelvana's Care Bears franchise, Film Roman's Garfield and Friends and Bobby's World, Klasky Csupo's Rugrats pilot and first season, Disney's DuckTales and Stretch Films' Courage the Cowardly Dog. They also helped produce effects for the 1982 film Tron and some Peanuts television specials, production ink & paint matting, and animation assistance.
From Wikipedia’s article on Brilliant Animation Studios, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3