The Castle of Cagliostro
The original finale was to take place on the hands of Big Ben with Ratigan eventually falling to his demise. However, layout artist Mike Peraza approached Musker with the idea of restaging the final confrontation so the characters would break through the face of the Big Ben with the grinding clockwork gears providing added menace, in which Musker agreed. Peraza's inspiration for the scene was a Japanese anime film, "The Castle of Cagliostro" (1979), the feature film debut of animator Hayao Miyazaki which is part of the "Lupin III" franchise; "The Castle of Cagliostro", which Peraza was a fan of, featured a climatic scene involving characters amidst giant turning gears in a clock tower. Pereza and his team was sent to London for video reference and were granted unprecedented access to the clockworks inside Big Ben. Because the bells would chime at every quarter-hour, the team completed their research in one hour.