![]() #Yojimbo anime free#Mifune’s Sanjuro, being free from any master and the final pittance of a dying tenet (the samurai), exacts a story of ultimate inconsequence and irrationality. Only such a samurai of the imagination much more powerful than a real samurai could mess up these gangsters.” He was himself an outsider, a kind of outlaw, which enabled him to act flexibly, if sometimes recklessly. So in order to attack their evil and irrationality, and thoroughly mess them up, I brought in the super-samurai played by Mifune. Stating in an interview with Joan Mellen in 1975, Kurosawa openly admits that “ was so fed up with the world of Yakuza. Kurosawa strongly infers his detest for criminal enterprises and the incessant struggle for power between contemporary gangsters, such as the Yakuza, presenting Yojimbo’s villainous lot as dense, brainless and gullible allowing Sanjuro to play them for fools in a bid for his own benefit. Climaxing is a pseudo-superhero finale in which Sanjuro, after witnessing the unending cycle of violence, decides to take on the remaining gangsters to enact a closing act of brutal justice – unsheathing his samurai swords and cutting them down one by one in masterful fashion. Played cunningly by the great Toshiro Mifune, Sanjuro intends to play both of the criminal gangs against each other, pitting violence against violence as a lesson concerning the meaninglessness of power and domination. Kurosawa reinforces this thematic with Yojimbo’s swindling central character to the volatile mix the ambiguously named, Kuwabatake Sanjuro, whose title is merely taken from a nearby Kuwabatake (“mulberry field”) and his ambivalent age (“Sanjuro” meaning “thirty-years-old”). Essentially a jidaigeki film about the ill consequences of the two conflicting criminal enterprises, Kurosawa establishes a tale about the seemingly unceasing nature of gangsterdom, as each faction fights to maintain corrupt control over a certain area only to permit more and more irrevocable violence and injustice. Set in 1860, at the tail end of the Edo period ( 1603 – 1868), and thus, the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate, in which the samurai were largely exhausted and their importance diminished, Yojimbo tells the tale of a lowly ronin (a samurai without a lord or master) who stumbles upon a town in crisis as two warring factions engage in criminal activities to denounce the other’s control over the townsfolk. And arguably, none of Kurosawa’s films has been as influential and unjustly copied as that of his 1961 samurai swan song, Yojimbo. Thereby, informing the lasting influence of Kurosawa’s films: that they speak globally and resonate with universal truths of heroism, villainy, selflessness, and selfishness allowing filmmakers to recapture and pay homage to his seminal masterpieces thanks to the ease of their accessibility. Oftentimes branded as Japan’s most “Western” auteur, it’s unsurprising that Kurosawa’s films have been routinely echoed and mimicked throughout the western film canon, employing humanitarian themes of peace and virtue amidst exciting plots of courage and violence, formative elements of storytelling that are as universal as the distinction between good and evil itself. A film cycle of influence and reinterpretation. ![]() Just as Kurosawa utilised his deep understanding and affinity for John Ford’s classic westerns of the early-to-mid 20th century – recapturing their narrative essences for his innovative chambara (“samurai cinema”) selection – the director’s films have also been subject to numerous adaptations and thematic homages in the west establishing a reciprocal chain of cause and effect. #Yojimbo anime movie#Over the course of each review, it’s become overtly apparent the monumental impact that Kurosawa’s films have had on the increasingly copycat nature of the movie industry. ![]() Starting with an intrinsic look at his first widely acclaimed piece, Rashomon – focalising on the inherent self-absolution of human nature when one’s fidelity is brought into question – and following up with a brief commemoration of Kurosawa’s most famous film, the pioneering action extravaganza, Seven Samurai. Celebrating the masterful storytelling of the seminal director and the lingering influence that many of his works weigh on the overall spectrum of film history. Coinciding with the BFI’s major season on Japanese cinema, we here at Japan Nakama have aspired to create a trilogy of reviews pertaining to some of the films from the late, great Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. ![]()
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