"She and Her Cat" was written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, who also provided the voice of the cat. He had the idea in 1997, but started it in 1998 while he was working as a graphic designer at Falcom, a video game company. Because he experimented with computer graphic animation during his work, he wanted to minimize complex procedures. So he opted to do a black-and-white film since a colored-one would use three times as much space in the computer and it would also make the process three times slower. He was working on a role-playing game, whose genre is known to have "very rich and detailed" surroundings, and this influenced the film's background details. He also took pictures of cityscapes and the streets, and used them as a basis for his hand-drawn animations. The composition of 3D scenes was done with Adobe After Effects and for other effects Shade, Illustrator and LightWave were used.