Being set before World War II (1939 to 1945), I have decided to do a little more researching in what people had worn back then in the late 30s and early 40s, aside from the yukatas (Or kimonos depending on what season) and uniforms worn, I am noting some fashion similarities between the east and west, especially when it comes to the men (What with their fedoras, suits and coats).
I have played these video numerous times while sketching out concepts for the background characters and even Totto-Chan's mother, I am still however looking into pre-war videos:
There was a notable scene in the beginning of Totto-Chan's ex teacher telling her mother about an interesting incident where she had invited garish, tacky looking street musicians into the class to perform for them all (Much to the helpless teacher's dismay), and so I find this to be a great little scene to have animated in the titles sequence.
Descriptions for the musicians were vague, and so I had to make a wild guess and what sort of music they actually played, at first I had considered them to be Enka singers, but researching further into the topic, it would seem that only that genre of music became popular only after the war had ended, it was actually Ryukoka that had been popular from the late 1920s through the early 1960s, some of the roots of Ryukoka were developed from Western classical music, songs from this genre did not use the kobushi (Slow vibrato) method of singing and instead used legato (When successive tones are to be produced in a closely connected, smoothly gliding manner).
Visual references are surprisingly hard to come by for both Enka and Ryukoka (Or even for street performers for that matter) performers, I will mostly have to scrap together what I can find from various videos (I really wouldn't want to scrap this idea).
This link might be of some help to me in the future though.
History on rail transports in Japan are scarce, so I had to get whatever I could find from both non-fictional and fiction sources (There isn't really much of a need to research too much into background designs, but I decided to just in case).
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| While it's not the atmosphere I am going for, the setting in which "Grave of the Fireflies" takes place will be of huge help to me in other ways, such as setting designs. |
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| Nope, this just looks too solemn and grim, even though it still looks beautiful in a poignant way… (Ugh I'm going to end up crying again when I watch this for my research) |
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| This is more like it! The more cheerful and vibrant color scheme especially (Minus awesome supernatural characters, unfortunately). |
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| More Hayao Miyazaki inspiration and references coming up in the next reference and research post! |
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