The movie consists of 2,212 shots and 160,000 single pictures, 2-3 times more than usual, using 327 different colors (another record in animation film), 50 of which were exclusively created for the film. The reason for this statistic is that most of the movie takes place at night, a setting that is traditionally avoided by animators because of the increased color requirements.
This was one of the first Japanese anime films to have the characters' voices recorded before they were animated. While this is the typical practice in U.S. animation, in Japan the animation is generally produced first.
The film is widely credited with breaking anime into mainstream Western audiences.
Computer-generated imagery was used in the film, primarily to animate the pattern indicator used by Doctor Onishi, but it was additionally used to plot the paths of falling objects, model parallax effects on backgrounds, and tweak lighting and lens flares.
The computer sounds, which can be heard during Tetsuo's body scan, were taken from the MU-TH-UR computer in Alien (1979).