Science Saru: Masaaki Yuasa and the Auteur-of-the-Line Studio Model

The first thing you notice watching Devilman Crybaby is the line. Faces are drawn with an economy that feels closer to American underground comics than to standard mid-2010s anime. Bodies move in long, unbroken loops of motion rather than the careful key-frame-and-tween rhythm most TV anime uses. The colors are flat. The compositing is digital in a way that doesn’t try to hide that it’s digital.

This is the Science Saru house style. The studio has been refining it since 2013, when director Masaaki Yuasa and South Korean animator Eunyoung Choi founded it to give Yuasa’s particular sensibility a permanent production base. Across the decade that followed, the studio won the Annecy Cristal twice in consecutive years, made one of Netflix’s first prestige anime acquisitions, and became the clearest contemporary example of what an auteur-driven studio looks like when the auteur control extends down to the line itself.

This is the story of how Science Saru got built, what its 2018 Devilman Crybaby moment meant, and why the 2020 leadership handoff to Choi turned out to be the studio’s most interesting structural decision.

A studio founded to house a sensibility

Masaaki Yuasa’s career before Science Saru is the necessary context. He had been working in the industry since the late 1980s — early credits at Ajia-do, animation work on Chibi Maruko-chan and Crayon Shin-chan — but the work that made his name was directorial. Mind Game, his 2004 theatrical debut at Studio 4°C, established the visual sensibility he would carry forward: digital-native, Flash-style animation, willingness to break out of photorealistic conventions, an interest in psychological interiority rendered through impossible spatial transformation.

The 2006-2014 period saw Yuasa direct a series of distinctive projects at other studios. Kemonozume (2006) and Kaiba (2008) at Madhouse, then Tatami Galaxy (2010) — the Tomihiko Morimi adaptation that became a cult landmark for late-2000s anime — and Ping Pong the Animation (2014) at Tatsunoko Production. Each project carried Yuasa’s signature but had to be retrofitted onto a host studio’s production system.

Science Saru, founded in 2013, was the solution to that retrofitting problem. The studio existed to make work that did not have to be translated into someone else’s pipeline. Eunyoung Choi — who had collaborated with Yuasa on previous projects and brought Korean animation training to the partnership — co-founded the studio with him.

The 2017 double Annecy moment

The studio’s early years built up gradually. Subcontract work on other studios’ projects, a few short films, a steady accumulation of the proprietary digital toolset the house style required. By 2017, Science Saru had reached the point where it could put two feature films into theatrical release in the same year.

The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl — Yuasa’s second Tomihiko Morimi adaptation, a companion piece to Tatami Galaxy — premiered in April 2017. Lu over the Wall, an original Yuasa-directed musical fantasy, premiered the next month. Both films went on the festival circuit. Both won the Annecy Cristal — the top prize at the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France, which is the closest thing animation has to an Academy Award.

A studio winning the Cristal once is a major achievement. A studio winning it in consecutive years for different films, with both films released within weeks of each other, is something the festival had never seen from an East Asian studio of Science Saru’s size. The double win established the studio as a name international critics had to know.

Devilman Crybaby and the Netflix breakthrough

The Annecy moment was followed quickly by the studio’s first global streaming acquisition. Devilman Crybaby — Yuasa’s ten-episode adaptation of Go Nagai’s 1972 horror manga — released worldwide on Netflix in January 2018.

Devilman Crybaby is, structurally, an unusual project for Yuasa. The source material is one of the most violent, sexually graphic manga of the 1970s. Adapting it faithfully in 2018 meant putting that violence and sexuality on a streaming service that had previously avoided uncensored content of this kind. The series was rated TV-MA. It contained sequences that other studios would not have animated and that other platforms would not have hosted.

The reception split. Critics largely embraced the adaptation as the most faithful Devilman ever produced, with some calling it the best work of Yuasa’s career. Some manga purists were uncomfortable with specific reinterpretations. Audience reactions varied by region — the series was banned in some markets, celebrated in others.

What is structurally important about Devilman Crybaby for the studio is that Netflix wrote a check large enough to fund the kind of work Science Saru wanted to make without compromise. The series was made with the same line economy and digital-native technique as the studio’s theatrical work — meaning a streaming series that visually resembled an art-house feature rather than mid-budget TV anime. That model — prestige-budget streaming work using the studio’s house style — became the template for what followed.

The Eizouken moment

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! aired in early 2020 — a twelve-episode adaptation of Sumito Oowara’s manga about three high-school girls who form a club to make their own anime. The show is, on its surface, a young-women-make-anime story in the lineage of Shirobako or other industry self-portraits. What separates it is that the imaginary anime the characters are designing get rendered, on-screen, in fully realized Science Saru animation.

Yuasa directed. The series became one of the most acclaimed TV anime of 2020. Its visual approach — switching between the realistic high-school setting and the fully imagined worlds the characters draw — used the studio’s digital tools in a way that no other studio could have replicated, because the tools had been built specifically for Yuasa’s visual logic.

Eizouken was followed quickly by Japan Sinks: 2020, a Netflix series adapting Sakyo Komatsu’s disaster novel; Heike Monogatari (2021), an adaptation of the medieval Tale of the Heike for Funimation; and the theatrical film Inu-Oh (2022), a historical music film that returned the studio to Annecy as a major presence.

The 2020 leadership handoff

In 2020, Yuasa stepped back from his role as studio head. Eunyoung Choi, who had co-founded the studio with him in 2013, took over as the principal head of Science Saru. Yuasa remained as a primary creative collaborator — directing Inu-Oh, contributing to projects in development — but the day-to-day leadership of the company transferred.

This was the studio’s most important structural decision since its founding. The conventional pattern for auteur-driven studios is that the auteur is the studio, and the studio’s continuity depends entirely on the auteur’s continued involvement. Studio Ghibli is the obvious example — its existence has been bound to Hayao Miyazaki’s working schedule for decades, with each potential retirement creating an existential question for the company.

Science Saru did not follow that pattern. The handoff to Choi acknowledged that the studio’s house style — the digital pipeline, the trained staff, the project relationships — was institutional, not personal to Yuasa. Choi’s Korean training and her years inside Science Saru’s production system positioned her to lead the studio without requiring Yuasa to direct every project.

The years after the handoff have validated the decision. Inu-Oh in 2022 confirmed Yuasa could still deliver theatrical work at the studio’s previous level. Other projects under Choi’s leadership have continued the studio’s prestige catalog. The line-economical house style has held across directors.

The auteur-of-the-line model

What Science Saru has built is something genuinely new in the modern anime industry: an auteur studio where the auteur control extends down to the level of individual lines and color choices, not just storyboarding and direction.

This is different from how prestige is usually constructed in anime. The dominant model — exemplified by Ufotable, Wit, or MAPPA — emphasizes high-end compositing, dense effects animation, photorealistic backgrounds, and visual maximalism. Prestige is the result of throwing more resources at every frame.

Science Saru operates the opposite way. Its prestige is built on visual economy, on what gets left out of the frame. The studio’s house style is recognizable not because it is heavy but because it is light. Lines do not pile up; colors do not gradient; backgrounds do not photorealistically render. The aesthetic vocabulary is closer to Tomi Ungerer or Jean Giraud than to mainstream anime.

That choice is only possible because the studio is small and prestige-focused. Science Saru does not have to run at MAPPA’s volume. It can take a few projects a year, give them the time the house style requires, and refuse the work that would compromise it. The output is limited. Each project is distinctive.

Where to start with Science Saru in 2026

If you have not engaged with the studio’s catalog deliberately, the entry points depend on what kind of work you want to see.

For the studio’s signature moment, start with Devilman Crybaby. Ten episodes, the most extreme version of the house style, the project that put the studio on the global streaming map.

For the auteur self-portrait, watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. Twelve episodes about young animators making anime, animated with the full range of the studio’s digital toolset.

For the theatrical achievement, see Inu-Oh (2022) or The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (2017). Both films show what the studio looks like at its most ambitious.

For the early sensibility, go back further — Yuasa’s pre-Saru work at Madhouse, particularly Tatami Galaxy and Kaiba, is the prehistory that the studio was founded to continue.

The complete Science Saru catalog, with release windows and regional availability across the markets Otakira tracks, lives on the studio page.

What that catalog demonstrates, viewed all at once, is the consistency of a single visual sensibility maintained at the level of the line itself. That is the auteur-of-the-line studio model. Science Saru is, so far, the only studio in modern anime that has built it.