Oshii decided that the third episode would be an anime instead. The project was originally pitched as a six-episode OVA as he knew Bandai Visual was interested in having him do a series for them and his original Kerberos Panzer Cop manga was formed by six chapters. As he proposed the project to Bandai Visual at a meeting they instead asked him to direct Ghost in the Shell but green-lit the series for pre-production. The production eventually evolved into a feature film following the international success of Ghost in the Shell as Manga Entertainment wanted a similar hit and saw potential in Kerberos Panzer Cops as the manga had been published in the United States. After reluctantly giving up the directorial role, Oshii originally thought on Patlabor 2: The Movie animation director Kazuchika Kise, but he had no interest in chief direction at the time. He then committed Jin-Roh as a debut film to a trusted young collaborator, Hiroyuki Okiura, who had worked on animation movies such as Ghost in the Shell (character designer) and Patlabor 2: The Movie. Oshii considered him the most able candidate among the younger staff of the studio and both Production IG and Bandai Visual, knowing about his directing ambitions and his interest in creating a serious drama, wanted him to do his debut for them. Oshii "begged" to at least be entrusted with the screenplay, the prospect of working with Okiura changing his previous reluctance about merely writing films. This wasn't originally in Bandai's plans for the film, but Oshii expected Kazunori Itō, his usual screenwriter, to reject their offer as he had previously told him that he didn't want to write a story involving dogs following his work for Jin-Roh live-action prequel The Red Spectacles, and after he did so he was offered the role. He ultimately still found the experience frustrating both through the tiping ("The moment you write, you want to direct") and after realizing the result would unavoidably be much different from what he pictured in his head. Lacking any creative control on the process, he chose to distance himself from the animation production while looking forward to the final product. Okiura favored traditional animation, and thus the film was almost completely drawn by hand, requiring 80,000 cels. Oshii, who characterized him as "allergic to computers", admitted that had he directed the film he would have relied in computer animation