How did Katsuhiro Otomo draw Neo-Tokyo?
Start with the workload, because the city’s density is a labor fact before it is a style. In a Kodansha-published interview, Otomo recalled that by the time the film production began, the manga was running on a weekly rhythm: twenty pages a week. He had brought on a second assistant, occasionally enlisting a third just to handle the screentone, and near deadlines the studio pulled all-nighters, after which he would walk straight into the anime studio the next day. He also noted the unusual shape of his career: he did helper work young, but never served as an assistant in another artist’s studio. The hand that drew Neo-Tokyo was self-trained.
The city itself was built the way its author builds everything: from a real skeleton outwards. Neo-Tokyo grows around the actual geography of its predecessor, the 1964 Olympic stadium site becoming the new city’s Olympic ground, craters, expressways and military architecture laid over a Tokyo Otomo knew street by street.
