Hakuouki Movie 1: Kyoto Ranbu Special
Hakuouki Movie 1 : Kyoto Ranbu special version, with English sub and Chinese sub.
It’s a digest of the movie: the first 10 minutes, and Ikedaya Incident. The backbone is the same, with everything else different. Very interesting. Not to mention the beautiful animation and sleek battle scenes.
Hakuouki costume setting, in movie pamphlet.
In an interview before, the director said they've designed the battle attires closer to history. Plastron and tekko (covering for the back of the hand and wrist) were added. Saitou & Heisuke changed to hakama, while the others tied the loose ends of their hakama.
In most TV dramas and manga, Shinsengumi's men wear plastron in Ikedaya. The child of Yagi family witnessed:
When I came home from school that day, I saw soldiers gathered in the yard, swinging swords and talking. I saw Matsume wearing bamboo plastron (protector in fencing) under his clothes, and thought it looked funny. So I asked, "why are you wearing this?" Matsume replied, "we're gonna kick some butts in a dojo."
Shinsengumi was dirt poor back then, so most of them wore their everyday practice gear to battlefield, rather than luxurious chainmails.
Tekko is important. Near the end of the battle in Ikedaya, Nagakura Shinpachi was about to finish off someone. His sword was pretty run down, so he reached out his left hand for a random sword on the ground. But he couldn't grip. Then he noticed there's a cut so deep that he thought he'd kiss his thumb goodbye. Nagakura wrote about this in his notes about his 7 scars. He recovered from it perfectly, of course. But if without protection... *shivers*
It's difficult to make big movements in Saitou's kinagashi (kimono without hakama). If he's quickly slitting a throat with iai, that's fine. But not for melee in Ikedaya. Look at his battle with Amagiri. No way can he stride sideways that wide in a kinagashi. It'll pull the whole kinagashi loose now that's fan service! Kazama too. When he kicked Okita, if the camera cut in earlier or a little lower, we'll have a pantyshot. XD Wearing hakama in battle is more reasonable.
It's great to see Hakuouki put more effort into making the background closer to reality. :)
BTW here's raw source and srt file to watch it with sub offline. If anyone wants to use this to translate this into another language, please let me know.