start of an ongoing relationship with producer Kōji Yamamoto, who served as the chief producer of Noitamina before leaving to found his own development company Twin Engine; this relationship would cover the release of several later projects over the following decade. The Tatami Galaxy was an immediate critical success, winning both the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize for Animation, as well as the Award for Outstanding Television Animation at the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival. As the first of Yuasa's projects to receive a streaming release in North America, the series helped increase awareness of his work globally, and was subsequently named one of the best Japanese animated series of the decade. Following the completion of The Tatami Galaxy, Madhouse was acquired by the broadcasting media conglomerate NTV,. The studio's corporate culture underwent change, and Madhouse's creative head Masao Maruyama left to found a new production company. Yuasa once again sought opportunities with other studios, including briefly joining the production of the A-1 Pictures film Welcome to the Space Show (2010), for which he directed and animated a short sequence. He also directed the short series Shin-men (2010–2012), a group of special episodes embedded within the main Crayon Shin-chan television series. Collaboration, crowdfunding, and the founding of Science SARU Yuasa took advantage of the conclusion of his work at Madhouse to reunite with collaborator Eunyoung Choi, who had left Madhouse after working on The Tatami Galaxy to lead Ankama Japan, a Japan-based subsidiary of the French entertainment and animation company Ankama. The newly-opened studio combined techniques of traditional hand-drawn animation with digital animation created via Adobe Animate and other programs, a new approach which Yuasa had not previously used. The studio was not only an international business enterprise, but a creative one as well, with 25 European animators working in the Tokyo-based studio. In a reversal of their prior roles, Yuasa joined a project which Choi had organized, an episode of the company’s Wakfu animated series entitled Noximilien the Watchmaker (2010); Choi directed the episode, while Yuasa served as character designer. Shortly after completion of the episode, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami occurred and Ankama closed the Japan studio. However, the experience at Ankama Japan, which mixed an international animation crew with a production method utilizing both traditional and digital animation, served as a model for Yuasa and Choi's later studio, Science SARU. Yuasa and Choi continued their collaboration