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 (1956) (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.