To achieve the specific period look they intended for the film, director Kon Ichikawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa were inspired by the use of color in Moby Dick (which was dye-transfer Technicolor added with a B/W layer) and experimented on a process that is now called "skip-bleaching". It was the first time in film history that this process, now a rather commonly-used one, was applied for a motion picture film.