[3] Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser using a bluescreen set up in his living room and a Macintosh IIci.

Almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live-action footage, while the entire film was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then recreated as CGI animatics.

Ten months prior to shooting the live-action scenes, Conran first shot them with stand-ins in Los Angeles, then converted that footage to animatics so the actors could accurately envision the film.

It was one of the first major films, along with Casshern, Immortal (both 2004) and Sin City (2005), to be shot entirely on a "digital backlot", blending actors with CG surroundings.

A cryptic message leads her to Radio City Music Hall, against the warnings of her editor, Mr. Paley, where she meets Dr. Jennings during a showing of The Wizard of Oz.

The authorities call for "Sky Captain" Joe Sullivan, the city's hero, Perkins' former lover, and the commander of the private air force the Flying Legion.

They find a secret subterranean facility in a mountain, where robots are loading animals, as well as the mysterious vials, onto a large "Noah's Ark" rocket.

Dex disables the lair's defenses and the group discovers Totenkopf's mummified corpse inside with a scrap of paper clutched in his hand: "forgive me".

Before the rocket reaches 100 km, when its second stage is scheduled to fire and thereby incinerate the Earth, Polly pushes an emergency button that ejects all the animals in escape pods.

In 1922, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett[12] commissioned Ferriss Archived March 18, 2006, at the Wayback Machine to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Sky Captain's message is largely about the film genre, but Laputa has strong anti-war and anti-technology themes, found in most of Miyazaki's work.

"[15] Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashioned movie serial on his Macintosh IIci personal computer.

The producer realized that "the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, which would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio.

Avnet set up a custom digital effects studio with a blue screen soundstage in an abandoned building in Van Nuys, California.

The entire movie was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as computer-generated 3D animatics with all of the 2D background photographs digitally painted to resemble the 1939 setting.

The grids were made into actual maps on the blue screen stage floor to help the actors move around invisible scenery.

To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, such as Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) for Paltrow's performance and The Thin Man (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly.

[7] Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage.

Conran wrote a scene that was added later in which Polly talks to her editor in his office that was shot on a physical set because there was no time to shoot it on a blue screen soundstage.

The distinctive look of the film was achieved by running footage through a diffusion filter and then tinting it in black and white before color was blended, balanced and added back in.

He courted the Internet press and finally made an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advance buzz.

[19] The composer Edward Shearmur wrote the film's orchestral score in the style of Hollywood's golden-age composers, and the film's end-title sequence featured a new recording of the song "Over the Rainbow" sung by the American jazz singer Jane Monheit, which were all featured on Sony Classical's original motion picture soundtrack recording.

The site's critical consensus states: "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is slim on plot and characterization, but the visuals more than make up for it".

[27] Roger Ebert was among those who strongly supported the film, giving it a 4 out of a possible 4 stars and praising it for "its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[29] In his review for the Chicago Reader, J.R. Jones wrote, "This debut feature by Kerry Conran is a triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste".

First-time director Conran incorporated many references to classic genre films into his own movie: The work of those artists and writers from the pulps and Golden Age of Comic Books like Airboy was really the template for us.

[35]The army of giant robots seen in the film – both flying over the city and later various models in Sky Captain's massive warehouse, particularly one designated as number "5" – are a homage to the Paramount Pictures Superman cartoon The Mechanical Monsters (1941), produced by Fleischer Studios.

Similarly, during the New York sequence when Sky Captain deploys a bomb to stop a giant robot, the shape of King Kong can be seen on the Empire State Building in the background.

[36] During the underwater dogfight sequence, a light momentarily displays the wreckage of a ship with the name Venture – the tramp steamer that sailed to Skull Island in the 1933 version of King Kong.

[38][39] The Flying Legion is a homage to pulp magazine and comic book heroes such as G-8 and his Battle Aces, Captain Midnight, and the Blackhawk squadron.