Uru in Blue

Aoki Uru was originally planned to be directed by Hideaki Anno and scripted by Hiroyuki Yamaga, with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto serving as its chief animation director and character designer.

Takeda related an occurrence where Hiroyuki Yamaga had stormed out of a planning session on the studio's future after Okada arrived at the meeting to announce he would not resign, saying, "I can't even talk with him in the same room.

[19] Aoki Uru was to be set 50 years after Royal Space Force, on the reasoning that avoiding recurring characters or storylines from the original film would make the pitch easier for investors to understand.

Once the lover of a princess of Honnêamise's royal family, her abduction leads him to join a rescue team of four other elite pilots, each equipped with VTOL fighter jets and with their own individual reasons for taking on the mission.

[24] Following Patlabor 2, Kon had been sketching out a manga project, but to help meet his living expenses decided to join Gainax, who paid him a special retainer to reserve his services part-time to work on Aoki Uru.

[27] "Full-scale production work" on Aoki Uru was described as having begun in January 1993; by the end of the next six months Gainax had created over a thousand pieces of design art.

In addition to the 338 images made for the film's storyboard, 50 pages of drawings were produced for the film's characters, 120 on its mecha, 30 on its "props" (small devices), 90 on its "art settings" (line drawings of an anime's "set designs" from which the actual background paintings are made), 21 "image boards" of concept art, and 370 "color boards," paintings representing concepts for how scenes should be colored.

The CD-ROM introduction noted that the 370 color board total included two choices for each scene, one from each of Aoki Uru's two art directors, Kikuchi and Sasaki, who approached the task as a competition between themselves.

The financial crisis associated with the halt on Aoki Uru led to what Takeda described as a "mass exodus" of staff from Gainax after Sawamura announced to employees that in the near-term future he could not guarantee meeting their payroll; during this period Takeda's own salary was cut to the point where he could no longer afford an apartment, sending his wife, SF author Hiroe Suga, back to live with her parents while he slept in a small company bunkroom.

"[35][e] During this time, Anno agreed to a sudden offer from Toshimichi Otsuki of King Records to produce a TV anime together, a proposal that would eventually be developed into the series Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Visiting the United States for Anime Expo 1996 shortly after Evangelion first aired on Japanese television, Hideaki Anno remarked, "Hiroyuki Yamaga is pretty serious as a matter of character, certainly—so he doesn't really think of compromising with the audiences.

"[45] Affirming Sadamoto's 1993 description of a film with an emphasis on speed, Yamaga contrasted Aoki Uru with his earlier movie project: When I created [Royal Space Force], my goal was to make a world: You're there.

Yamaga maintained his goal was not to make an anime that looked 3-D, but rather to use the approach for "emphasizing a sense of depth in a two-dimensional format," mentioning that he was researching the programs PowerAnimator and LightWave 3D to develop Blue Uru.

[50]In July 1998, Gainax released a CD-ROM entitled Aoki Uru Frozen Designs Collection containing the visual and script content created during the 1992–93 project, with a new commentary added as a QuickTime file.

[52][j] However, Yamaga also viewed Takeda's "cool hero" approach as not a good fit with the Ultraman ethic, so to make Aoki Uru compatible for Anno, Yamaga turned instead to the physical mode of the film's events, deciding to make Aoki Uru an aeronautic action story so that Anno could express his particular sensibility as an animator of objects at high speed and in mid-air.

Yamaga, a fan of Tsuyoshi's Goa trance music style, felt that it had the ideal "sense of speed and rapturousness" for the planned Aoki Uru PlayStation game,[k] and traveled to London to recruit the artist, who was then DJing at the club Return to the Source.

[56] In February and September 2000, Gainax released a first and second Aoki Uru Combat Flight Simulator Plane And Mission Module add-on for Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator utilizing plane designs from the staff of the 1992–93 anime project, as well as new ones contributed by artists including Neon Genesis Evangelion mecha designer Ikuto Yamashita, as well as Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo and Maschinen Krieger creator Kow Yokoyama.

[61] On March 20, 2013, the opening day of that year's Tokyo International Anime Fair, Gainax displayed a teaser poster for the Aoki Uru film listing Hiroyuki Yamaga as director and screenwriter and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto as character designer.

[62] Joined by artist Range Murata, Yamaga and Sadamoto discussed the project during a talk that evening hosted by Osamu Kobayashi at the event space Asagaya Loft A.

[63][64] The following September, Gainax announced on their Facebook page that a pilot film for Aoki Uru would be released in 2014;[65] during his guest appearance in San Mateo, California at the 2013 Japan Expo USA, Sadamoto commented in an interview with Anime News Network, "I'd like it to become as great a movie as Honnêamise.

Yamaga further related that Uru in Blue would not use the production committee system common to anime, but would instead pursue investors through a limited liability partnership based in Singapore; a budget of US$40 million was projected for the film, on which Yasuhiro Takeda would return to his original role as producer.

Yamaga described a "core concept" of Uru in Blue being that its main characters "are not noble knights, they're ruffians and thugs that come from pretty poor backgrounds" who conduct duels on behalf of gambling syndicates using fighter jets acquired as military surplus.

"[71] At the 2015 Fanime panel, Yamaga had characterized traditional methods of anime funding as unprofessional and lacking in standards, and that the inability of Uru in Blue to find financing in Japan had prompted him to seek it in Singapore, as announced there in 2014.

[74] In July and August 2018, Gainax's Fukushima branch was acquired by the Kinoshita Group, a conglomerate known largely for its housing and real estate business,[75] but which currently manages the festival Tokyo Filmex, and whose distribution arm, Kino Films, releases around 15 movies yearly.