We were originally shooting for 48 epsiodes, but for various reasons, we cut back to 24. The staff aren't thrilled, let me tell you. If you want to see a continuation made, then show your support for Ebichu, his owner, and her boyfriend.

I laid a hell of a lot of grief on the animators. I wanted very much to bring out the roughness of the original art, but that's not something you can get away with in digital photography. So we (actually, I) tried making the animation drawings fuzzy, without worrying about thickness, both of which are the exact opposite of regular animation drawings. It took a lot of time for the animators to get the knack I wanted, and we had plenty of remakes along the way. I take this space to thank them all.

All of the meetings I had--with the animation directors, the art director, the cel painters, you name it--ended up as cause for lots of laughs, as did the studio recording sessions. The episode directors would be reading along, and get tripped up by some naughty pun in Ebichu's dialogue, and the still-young(?) men and women put their heads together to decide the color of Ebichu's owner's boyfriend's balls (he gets an awful lot of erections, you see), they'd say things like, "That'd make him look like a grade-schooler," or "This looks like a real-enough color (male speaker)," "Like this? Really? (female speaker)" "No, mine's more like this, (different male speaker)" "I'm getting an education here (female speaker)". And on and on. The studio recording sessions were also a barrel of laughs, which I'll leave to Jin, our audio director, to describe.

We made the backgrounds as clear and white as possible. You're normally supposed to paint lots of backgrounds in anime, and I'd never tried anything like this in any case. I was nervous when it came time to see the first rushes, but I was surprised at how normal it looked. I think we did a good job of capturing the feel of the manga.

Meetings with the scripters, Yoshimura and Hojo, involved laying out the structure of the stories, but as we went on, Hojo got increasingly shocked by all of the forbidden words in the scripts, even crying out in terror (he's a well-bred person, you see). His main concern seems to have been, what if he ended up using such words in other scripts by mistake.

It's been a long time since I last worked on anything I enjoyed so much. My thanks to Itoo Risa for creating it. When the last retakes were shot, the director of photography asked if there was a continuation in the works, because everyone said they enjoyed it so much that they never wanted it to end. That really made me feel good. As I wrote earlier on, when we went from 48 to 24 stories, Oohashi, the character designer, really took it hard, as we went through and picked out what to leave in and what to leave out. Oohashi really did good work with the hot babe outfits (from the manga), as well as a really cute Ebichu. See for yourself.