Pre-production Co-creator and director
Yasuomi Umetsu directed the opening for
And Yet the Town Moves produced by
Shaft and headed by his friend and colleague since the 1990s
Akiyuki Shinbo in 2010. Umetsu liked the studio's work, especially their digital animation teams, and decided he wanted to work with the company one day. However, after
Galilei Donna (2013) and
Wizard Barristers (2014), he was unsure of what kind of direction to take. He presented three ideas to Shaft president
Mitsutoshi Kubota for an original series who was also interested in making a work with Umetsu. Umetsu was then given responsibility of directing another opening for the company, Shinbo's
Gourmet Girl Graffiti. The production assistant in charge of the opening was Ryuusuke Suzuki, and Umetsu liked his work, so he asked Suzuki to be the animation producer for the then-unannounced project. That year, writer Yūya Takahashi joined following the cancellation of a separate work, and the screenplay was finished in 2016. The series' title,
Virgin Punk, and the first film's subtitle,
Clockwork Girl, were both chosen in a discussion regarding what to officially call them. Screenwriter Takahashi came up with both, and it is the first title in Umetsu's directorial catalogue in which he did not come up with the title. The setting is based on the city of
Lisbon in
Portugal. In 2016, some of the staff members, like art directors Honjou and Funagakure, visited Portugal for research and location shooting; and Umetsu intended to go as well, but was unable to due to a conflicting schedule with the production of the opening for
Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru. At the time, Shaft was still largely headed by Shinbo's ideas and style, who was essentially the company's chief director of sorts, and Kubota insisted that Umetsu didn't have to be bound by the studio's other works or its usual "directing manual." Both Kubota and Iwakami encouraged to direct
Virgin Punk however he saw fit. Between 2016 and 2018, Umetsu appeared several times and various other studios mainly contributing animation or directing openings and endings. It wasn't until 2018 that the animation production process itself started.
Production Clockwork Girl Umetsu brought on several collaborators from his previous works mainly from Arms,
Pierrot+ (Arms' sister company),
A-1 Pictures, and
Production I.G (where he directed an opening in 2011): Shinichi Yokota worked with Umetsu on
Wizard Barristers, and Umetsu called him to the project because he believed that Yokota had a talent for design work; he sub-character designer Keita Matsumoto while at Production I.G; prop designer Naoko Kouda worked with Umetsu on
Galilei Donna at A-1 Pictures; main animator Shinya Takahashi was a veteran collaborator of Umetsu's since the early 2000s; and main animator Maho Kandou met Umetsu when she still worked for Pierrot+. Suzuki called art directors Yuuki Funagakure and Yuuji Honjou onto the project. Genichirou Abe was the only one of the three main animators on the project via Shaft and whom Umetsu humored to be . Shaft also provided color designer Yasuko Watanabe and directors of photography Rei Egami and Takayuki Aizu. Umetsu made few appearances on any anime for several years once the production process started and mainly showed up for key animation work on some of Shaft's other titles. In 2021, he directed the opening to Shinbo and
Hajime Ootani's
Pretty Boy Detective Club as the first indication of his project at the company. Although both pre-production and production took a considerable amount of time, Umetsu was focused on quality and Kubota was focused on allowing Umetsu to display the full span of his sensibilities and style. For Kubota, this meant being able to satiate people on a cut-by-cut basis. In a first for Umetsu's career, Shaft and Aniplex set no particular deadline and ensured that Umetsu had as much time as was necessary. Even up until the end of the production process, some cuts were given complete retakes by request of Umetsu. He was also, at first, only focusing on the direction of the project, but later ended up working as its sole animation director as well. Suzuki was particular about the effects animation and pushed the limits of the film to get a more-or-less 24 frames-per-second for all of the effects animation. In total, the first film had around 740 cuts in 31-32 minutes (not including the length of the ED credits) and a total of 35,000 drawings. Umetsu continued to add elements to the work that were not originally in the screenplay and expanded upon them through the storyboards. This put a burden on the animators, and combined with the number of cuts, which in a standard 30-minute production would have had somewhere around 400 cuts (rather than 740), put a strain on the production side. For the sequel part, Umetsu said that he is looking to keep the content the same but decrease the number of cuts. with the first part released in a limited theatrical setting on June 27, 2025. ==Reception==