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"This film is a near future SF story. It has two different worlds. One is the real world, and the other one is an unreal world; the one that appears after the Ark had been revealed. I tried to make it sound as if both of these worlds actually existed. Even in the real world, it was very difficult to express some scenes through sound. For example, Mt. Ararat doesn't have anything like the sounds of a forest or a creek. To express such a wilderness, I couldn't think of anything beside the sound of wind. We had a lot of fighting scenes, but those were not easy to do either. The action scene where they fight each other in the snowfield was especially challenging. We couldn't express that scene with usual sound, so we went outside and recorded a variety of sounds. Otomo, Kawasaki and I agreed to try out something very distinctive for this film. Because they told me not to be afraid of failure, I could try bold things. One of our challenges was to make the dialog sound unique. We wanted express realistic dialog not only through the guidance of the director, but also through the manipulation of sound. The dialog might sound a little bit strange if you compared it with the dialog of an average animated film, but we tried out radically new techniques. I hope people will enjoy our work."
