The home video was removed from circulation for several years because of problems with music licensing - with so many bands and artists on the soundtrack, securing rights to the music proved difficult.
This segment utilized rotoscoping for Taarna and her long flight over the land. An actress was filmed acting out scenes such as when she puts on her costume and when she attacks the thugs in the bar. She wore a black and white approximation of Taarna's outfit. For the traveling landscape scene a model was built and painted in black and white and filmed. The movie frames were transferred to cels and painted. The lycra reel on the DVD/Blu-ray releases shows most of these filmed segments.
As in the magazine, the evil emanation Den battles is called Uhluhtc. That is Cthulhu spelled backwards, a reference to the God of Chaos in the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft.
The scene where Den decides to improvise a loincloth upon arrival in Neverwhere is a playful reference to the original story in Heavy Metal magazine while being a concession to North American movie classification systems to keep the movie rated "R" and thus able to be distributed in mainstream cinema chains. In that story, one of the original defining ones featured in the magazine, Den and Katherine remain completely naked, are entirely comfortable being so, and are fully visible as such in Neverwhere, a primitive fantasy world that has no nudity taboos. However, the animators also playfully omitted the loincloths of the female leads in certain long shots and fleeting closer ones when they are not depicted frontally, leaving them completely naked.
This movie was inspired by a long-running science fiction magazine of the same title, which began in Europe as Metal Hurlant. Most of the story segments are based on stories or characters featured in the magazine.