During Kon's battle with
pancreatic cancer, the director expressed concern about the film being finished to Madhouse head
Masao Maruyama. Maruyama assured Kon the film would be completed, no matter what. When Kon died, production was suspended indefinitely until further plans could be worked out over the film. On November 12, 2010 Madhouse Studios announced production resumed with character designer and chief
animation director Yoshimi Itazu taking over as director of the film. At
Otakon 2011, Maruyama revealed that production had been put on hold for financial reasons, but that he was dedicated to eventually be able to finish the film. According to Maruyama, about 600 shots out of 1500 had been animated at that point.
Susumu Hirasawa, whose song "Dreaming Machine" (from
The Ghost in Science) is the source of the film's title, said: "I never received an official order from Kon. It's an unspoken agreement of sorts. There are scenes where he specifically requested a certain track to be used, but there are also many parts where there are no such directions, so it falls to me to choose the songs. This is a difficult task. But we must carry out his dying request, to complete this work, even without a director to question". On November 10, 2010, the album
Hen-Gen-Ji-Zai, which features a rerecording of "Dreaming Machine" made two months before Kon's death, was released by Hirasawa's labels. In 2011, Maruyama left Madhouse to found
MAPPA in order to "make new shows that we wouldn't have been able to make at Madhouse." At Otakon 2012, he stated regarding Satoshi Kon's unfinished film, "Unfortunately, we still don't have enough money. My personal goal is to get it within five years after his passing. I'm still working hard towards that goal." There was little new information about the film for several years afterward, but one of the project leads,
Kenji Itoso, crowdfunded a separate film,
Santa Company, on
Kickstarter. In an interview in December 2014, Itoso said he felt comfortable taking a break from
Dreaming Machine only because Satoshi Kon himself had urged him not to obsess too much about completing the project. During a Q&A session at an Otakon 2015 panel, Maruyama commented that the biggest challenge behind production is finding someone comparable to Kon to direct it. In August 2016, Maruyama said in an interview with Japanese anime/manga news site Akiba Souken: In August 2018, Maruyama revealed that the movie will not be completed and released in the foreseeable future, In the book "Animation! Real vs Dream" (アニメ！リアルvs．ドリーム), three cuts of a
storyboard were made public. One cut consists of a background containing a group of buildings in a city that has been submerged and devastated in the distance, and two cuts depict the three main characters—Lirico, Robin, and King—walking towards the clouds crawling on the ground. ==References==