on their next project, the crowdfunded short film Kick-Heart (2013), which Yuasa directed and wrote, and for which Choi served as assistant director. An unlikely love story revolving around a masochistic male wrestler and his sadistic female opponent, the film was produced at Production I.G and was the first large-scale Japanese animated project to be successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter, raising over $200,000 from more than 3,200 backers worldwide. The film received a pair of unannounced surprise screenings on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block which achieved viewer ratings of 708,000 and 618,000, and earned positive reviews for its colorful visual storytelling. Kick-Heart was an official competition selection at Annecy, was awarded a Jury Selection Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival, and won the prize for Best Animated Short Film at the Fantasia Festival. During the production of Kick-Heart, Choi proposed establishing a studio with Yuasa. In February 2013, the new company was established under the name Science SARU. Yuasa and Choi settled on the name, which translates into English as "Science Monkey", in an attempt to combine both an international, technological focus (the 'Science' portion of the name, rendered in English), with a Japanese, traditional animation identity (the 'SARU' portion, rendered in Japanese). Additionally, Yuasa, who frequently drew himself as a monkey in self-portraits, wanted the studio to be smarter than an ape; as a result, he added the word Science in front of SARU with the intent of having a company that possesses both instinct and intelligence. The studio's first production location was a small suburban house converted into an impromptu workspace; by the end of 2013, the company had expanded to a staff of five. Early works at Science SARU Yuasa's new studio began its corporate activities by taking on subcontracting work, as well as by collaborating with other companies. Science SARU's first project was an episode of the American television series Adventure Time; the episode, entitled Food Chain (2014), was directed by Yuasa, co-directed by Choi, and produced entirely in-house. Food Chain received critical acclaim as one of the best episodes of the series, was an official competition selection at Annecy, and was nominated for the Annie Award for Outstanding Television Direction. Later the same year, Yuasa returned to television series direction with an adaptation of Taiyō Matsumoto's sports manga Ping Pong the Animation (2014). In addition to directing the series, Yuasa wrote and storyboarded all of