Science Saru

• 1. Introduction

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  The first home of Science Saru, a Japanese animation studio now based in Kichijōji, Musashino, Tokyo, was a small suburban house. Someone had converted it into an improvised animation studio. By the end of 2013, the whole company numbered five people. Among them were Masaaki Yuasa, Eunyoung Choi and a colleague named Abel Góngora. From that cramped start, the studio went on to win prizes from festivals in Japan and abroad. How does a crew that small do work that travels so far? What is unusual about the way its pictures are drawn? And what happens to a studio when its best-known director decides to step away from the top job?

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• 2. Science Monkey

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  Masaaki Yuasa kept drawing himself as a monkey. His self-portraits returned to that image again and again, and the habit gave his new company its name. In Japanese, saru means monkey, so Science Saru translates as Science Monkey. Yuasa did not want a company that was only a monkey, though. He wanted one smarter than that, so he put the word Science in front, aiming for a studio with both instinct and intelligence.

  Eunyoung Choi, his co-founder, described the choice at greater length. The two had weighed many possible names. To Choi, Science stands for logic, business, numbers, plans, technology and new tools. Saru stands for what animators bring to the work, including creativity, intuition, art, enjoyment and playfulness. She called it "a kind of 'monkeying around'". The languages carry meaning as well. Science is an English word, which points to an international outlook, while Saru is Japanese and keeps the studio tied to traditional anime.

  On the 4th of February 2013, Yuasa and Choi founded Science Saru together. They had already worked on numerous projects side by side. Choi had also led Ankama Japan, a studio that used similar digital animation methods and employed a multinational staff.

  The idea of starting a studio first came from Choi during the making of the short film Kick-Heart (2013). That film became the first large-scale Japanese animated project to be crowdfunded successfully on Kickstarter. The new company's first job, however, would come from an American cartoon rather than a Japanese one.

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• 3. Digitally Assisted Animation

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  Adobe Animate is one of several software programs that Science Saru combines with hand drawing, in a method the studio calls digitally assisted animation. Key animation, the stage where the main poses of a movement are set, is drawn by hand. Artists then recreate those drawings digitally for inbetweening, which fills the gaps between key poses to make motion smooth, and for coloring. The source describes this blend of hand-drawn work and Flash animation as a technique not previously used in Japanese animation.

  The payoff is speed and scale. Projects can be finished faster and with a smaller crew. A small team also means that everyone gets a firm grasp of what the director is after. Creators and industry publications have praised the approach.

  The studio stands out in another way as well. According to Choi, staff members are chosen for their skill, whatever their nationality. She argues that bringing in global perspectives helps the studio tell more well-rounded stories, and the multicultural team is unusual among Japanese animation studios.

  Abel Góngora, who now holds the titles of Creative Team Director and Flash Animation Chief, would go on to direct for the studio himself.

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• 4. Small Jobs First

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  Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, gave Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi free rein over the episode Food Chain (2014). Yuasa directed, wrote and storyboarded it, while Choi co-directed. Science Saru made the whole episode in-house. Critics counted it among the best episodes of the series. It was an official competition selection at Annecy and earned a nomination for the Annie Award for Outstanding Television Direction.

  Yuasa's television series Ping Pong the Animation (2014) arrived in the same year. Tatsunoko Production was the primary studio, and Science Saru supplied "digitally assisted" animation production services. The series won a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Grand Prize for Television Animation at the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival. Character designer and longtime collaborator Nobutake Ito took the Best Animator award for individual achievement. The series was later named among the best Japanese animated series of its decade. The studio also assisted on a pair of episodes of Space Dandy (2014), made by Bones, and both drew critical praise.

  Smaller assignments filled the calendar around those highlights. Science Saru animated opening credits for the Garo series in 2014-15 and again in 2017-18. It helped with Yo-kai Watch: The Movie (2014), two Crayon Shin-chan films in 2014 and 2015, and Typhoon Noruda (2015). It also produced the promotional mini-series What's Debikuro? (2014), the music video Song of Four Seasons (2015), and promotional episodes for OK K.O.!: Let's Be Heroes between 2015 and 2017. None of these jobs made headlines, but each added to a reputation that would soon support something far larger.

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• 5. First Feature Films

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  Less than 16 months was all the time Science Saru had for Lu Over the Wall (2017), its first feature film. This family-friendly fantasy used digitally assisted animation. Yuasa directed it and co-wrote it, and it was his first feature built on an original story.

  While that film was in production, the studio was offered a second one. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017) is a comedy romance based on a novel by Tomihiko Morimi. Yuasa had already directed a television version of Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy (2010), and he had hoped to adapt Night Is Short, Walk On Girl right afterward. He could not at the time. When the offer came in 2016, he accepted immediately, so the pre-production of one film overlapped with the post-production of the other.

  Lu Over the Wall was finished first, yet it reached audiences second. Part of the reason was a marketing suggestion that the studio's first film should be based on something Japanese audiences already knew.

  Both films earned immediate acclaim. Lu Over the Wall received the Annecy Cristal du long métrage, the Mainichi Film Awards' Ōfuji Noburō Award, and the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize for Animation. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year, the Ottawa International Animation Festival Grand Prize for Best Animated Feature, and a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. Critics later listed it among the best Japanese animated films of its decade.

  Reiko Yoshida, who shares the writing credit on Lu Over the Wall, is also the credited screenwriter of the studio's next original feature.

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• 6. International Breakout

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  In 2018, the American distributor GKIDS licensed Lu Over the Wall, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and Yuasa's earlier film Mind Game (2004) for North America. Even that was overshadowed by the Netflix release of Devilman Crybaby (2018), based on a manga by Go Nagai. The studio had been running with a staff of 20-25 people. This series forced it to grow, bringing in episode directors and new creative talent.

  Devilman Crybaby was an immediate, enormous hit, and 90% of its viewers were outside Japan. It inspired internet memes, drew a profile from the YouTuber PewDiePie, and set off conversation on Twitter. At the Crunchyroll Anime Awards it was nominated in 7 categories and won Anime of the Year and Director of the Year. It also took a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. Vulture cited one of its sequences among the 100 most influential in global animation history.

  Ride Your Wave (2019), another original story, brought the studio its best reviews so far. It was an official competition selection at Annecy and earned Annie Award nominations for Best Indie Feature and Outstanding Feature Film Direction. It won Best Animated Feature awards at the Shanghai International Film Festival, Fantasia International Film Festival and Sitges Film Festival. That same year, Yuasa and the veteran animator Tomohisa Shimoyama, making his directorial debut, made Super Shiro (2019), an installment of the Crayon Shin-chan franchise created by Yoshito Usui. Yuasa had first animated for that franchise in the 1990s. By the end of 2019, the 2010s were being called his breakout decade.

  Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020), based on the manga by Sumito Ōwara, arrived next. It boosted sales of the original manga, inspired memes, and won the monthly Galaxy Award from the Japanese Broadcast Critics Association. The New York Times and The New Yorker both named it among the best television series of 2020. At the Crunchyroll Anime Awards it was nominated in 10 categories and won Director of the Year and Best Animation. It also won the Grand Prize for Television Animation at the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival and the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize for Animation.

  Later in 2020 came Japan Sinks: 2020, a Netflix series based on Sakyo Komatsu's disaster novel. Yuasa directed with Pyeon-Gang Ho, who made her directorial debut. In Japan, critics attacked it for condemning Japanese nationalism, but it also drew praise for its multiculturalism and inclusiveness. Its first episode won the Annecy Jury Prize for a Television Series, and the series earned two Crunchyroll nominations. A compilation film reached Japanese theaters in November 2020 and won a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

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• 7. Changing Hands

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  On the 25th of March 2020, Masaaki Yuasa stepped down as president and representative director of Science Saru. He said he wanted to rest from directing after seven years of continuous work. He also promised to complete more projects with the studio in the future.

  Eunyoung Choi became CEO and president. She confirmed that Yuasa would stay involved as a creator, and she said the studio would look to develop projects with other directors as well. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic disrupted much of the Japanese animation industry, but Science Saru adjusted quickly and kept producing. In October 2020, it entered a non-exclusive strategic partnership with Netflix covering the development of new series.

  Recognition for Yuasa followed. In early 2021, Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs gave him the Cabinet Minister Award for Media Fine Arts, honoring his career with Science Saru and his earlier work. Later that year the Japanese government awarded him the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon for his contributions to artistic and cultural development.

  The fall of 2021 would test how the studio fared with Yuasa's name on only one of its two big releases.

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• 8. Beyond Yuasa

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  Inu-Oh premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on the 9th of September 2021. Yuasa directed this musical drama, set in 14th-century Japan, about the unexpected friendship between two traveling Noh performers. It is based on a novel by Hideo Furukawa, with character designs by Taiyō Matsumoto, who created Ping Pong. GKIDS handled North American distribution, and the film reached US theaters in August 2022. It was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film and won the Mainichi Film Awards' Ōfuji Noburō Award and the Fantasia International Film Festival's award for Best Animated Feature Film.

  The Heike Story, made at the same time, was directed by Naoko Yamada. It adapts Furukawa's translation of The Tale of the Heike, an epic about the Genpei War, a civil war in 12th-century Japan. The series follows the politics and devastation of the conflict along with the lives and tragedies of women from both warring clans. It premiered on the 15th of September 2021 on the Funimation streaming service in North America. It reached FOD in Japan and Bilibili in China the next day, and Fuji TV broadcast it in January 2022. It was nominated in 3 categories at the 2022 Anime Trending Awards.

  On the 22nd of September 2021, the nine-film anthology Star Wars: Visions premiered on Disney+, with two shorts from Science Saru. Choi directed Akakiri, about a princess and a Jedi. Góngora directed T0-B1, about a droid who dreams of becoming a Jedi. Reviewers singled out the studio's films as standouts.

  Yurei Deco (2022) was an original series directed by Tomohisa Shimoyama and written by Dai Satō, drawn from a concept by Yuasa and inspired by Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tatami Time Machine Blues, directed by Shingo Natsume, is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. It debuted on Disney+ in 2022, and a theatrical compilation film followed later that year. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023), from Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels, was directed by Góngora, and Dandadan (2024), from Yukinobu Tatsu's manga, by Fūga Yamashiro.

  On the 23rd of May 2024, it was announced that Toho would buy all of Science SARU's shares and make the studio a subsidiary. The deal was completed by the 19th of June. Dandadan reached a second season in 2025, the same year Eunyoung Choi's leadership of the studio ended.

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