to become an animator. Choi's work on Kemonozume as a key animator and episode animation director won praise from fellow animators and fans, and led to her participation in Yuasa's subsequent projects. Kemonozume was awarded a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival, continuing Yuasa's run of critical successes. Before beginning his next project at Madhouse, Yuasa briefly returned to Studio 4°C to direct a short film for the studio's anthology project Genius Party (2007). The film, entitled Happy Machine, centered on an infant's travels through a mysterious and dangerous world. Produced with a small crew of just four key animators, Happy Machine represented a continuation of the development of Yuasa's surreal visual style, winning acclaim both for its atmospheric sense of wonderment, and for Yuasa himself as a leader of Japan's experimental animation scene. The following year Yuasa helmed his next television production at Madhouse, the original sci-fi drama series Kaiba (2008), which he created, directed, and wrote. The project saw an expansion of the collaboration with Eunyoung Choi, who directed and storyboarded episodes of the series, as well as co-writing an episode with Yuasa. A narratively-ambitious series dealing with memory, identity, and societal inequality, Kaiba received an Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival, and earned positive critical attention for its dreamlike visuals and imaginative story, with particular focus on the emotional impact generated from combining childlike imagery with mature themes and at times devastating loss. In 2010, Yuasa completed his third and final television series at Madhouse, the absurdist psychological dramedy The Tatami Galaxy (2010). Adapted from a novel by Tomihiko Morimi, the series follows the misadventures of a nameless student who, via supernatural means, repeatedly relives his final year at college in an attempt to achieve his idealized conceptions of romance and happiness. After being approached with the opportunity to adapt the novel, Yuasa quickly saw the story's appeal and agreed, though the project presented challenges in transferring the witty, dialogue-intensive style of the original work into a visual medium. To capture the appeal of the novel, Yuasa emphasized the use of rapid-fire editing and fast-paced dialogue, in order to convey the protagonist's stream of consciousness narration. Unlike the earlier Kemonozume and Kaiba, which aired on the satellite television network WOWOW, The Tatami Galaxy was broadcast on national television via Fuji TV's Noitamina programming block. The broadcasting deal with Fuji TV marked the