Production
The film's production was announced on May 20, 2018, followed by the announcement on October 27, 2020, that production started on a full-scale and that the film would be released in early 2022, with investment from Avex Pictures, Asmik Ace and others.[12][13] Signal.MD was originally attached to animate the project, but its production was temporarily suspended. Then Production +h, a new studio established by Fuminori Honda with personal debt after he left Signal.MD, took over the project.[14][15][16] It was later revealed that the film is split into two parts, with the first part premiering on January 28, 2022, and the second part premiering on February 11, 2022.[17]
The project began at the beginning of 2014.[18] Mitsuo Iso, who has been discussing his next work with Avex Pictures producer Tomohiko Iwase for several years, began writing a proposal after watching the film Gravity and realizing that "Space = Science Fiction" no longer the case.[18][19][20] Iso then invited Kenichi Yoshida to create his new work in 2016 and showed him over a dozen candidate projects, and he immediately chose this work.[21] Yoshida was not so much involved in the scenario creation itself, but Iso decided on many aspects, including the roles of the characters, based on his reactions.[22][23]
Iso wanted to make an original work of juvenile fiction, but a completely new and original project in that genre has a very high hurdle to clear in Japan.[18][19] Therefore, Iwase decided to make it for the whole world, thinking that there was still a demand for it overseas.[19]
In the production process, Iso first decided whether to adopt the idea that had flashed in his mind, after listening to the opinions of the experts in charge of scientific research.[24] Since this was an entertainment work, the minimum basic rules were followed, but priority was given to fun rather than realism in the adoption of the idea.[24] Finally, Iso took the opposite of the usual approach of linking ideas together before building the story in order to make the most of all the ideas that were adopted.[24] The script took about five years of meetings alone, and Iso wrote about 100 different draft variations.[19] The fundamentals of the story have not changed, but the initial plot was about a comet crashing into the earth and only 50 children on a school trip to a space station survived, and in the end they emigrated to the moon, and the main characters were Tōya and Nasa, who was the same age as him.[18][25] However, this was a 20th-century story, and it is now the 21st century, and since dystopian science fiction has already been produced so many times, Iso decided it was time to create a bright future.
Iso engaged in almost all jobs except sound, including scriptwriting, storyboarding, key frame checking, CG, VFX, and cinematography.[16][19]
Open source 3DCG software "blender" was used for CG drawing, but it was used more as a support for hand-drawing, both digital and analog.[27]
Since this work has only six episodes for various reasons, it is overwhelmingly short on time, and many scenes in the scenario were cut.[20] Iso attempted to reduce the original six-hour running time to a 2-hour regular film size, but was unable to do so, resulting in a 3-hour film. Nevertheless, the events before the incident of Episode 1 and daily life in space, etc. were omitted, and a number of important scenes, especially at the end of the story, both narratively and thematically, were cut.[23][28] Although the story is complete, Iso said that if given a chance, he would love to release the original "director's cut" version.[25][29]
