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"Otomo gave us little in the way of suggestions on the design of the characters. Kawasaki and I created them together, based on the original characters. Kawasaki is a big fan of the original comic, and he wanted keep Yu as close to the original as possible. That was very difficult to do. We had to work a lot on his face, because a slight difference in the positioning of his eyes or nose made a big difference. Jan has slant eyes in the original comic, but we made them more foreign-looking. Little Boy and Tanaka are also different from the original. I think we did good job adapting them. The most difficult suggestion from Kawasaki was to make the characters realistic but not plain. He wanted us to combine the lightness of an action film and the heaviness of a serious film. At first, I couldn't understand what he wanted, and I had to go through a long process of trail and error. Kawasaki's camera work is very fast and requires a lot of movement. We had to draw 85 thousand cell pictures, even though we had only planned to have 50 thousand at first. The size of the pictures was a problem too. Most of the pictures were too large to work with on the drawing desk. We also went to Turkey to help us get a better idea of how to make some of the character's faces look more realistic and to help us create more realistic background scenes. While I was there, I always stared at local people's faces."