I'll start this by saying I rather enjoyed the Kurosawa unit. I had been meaning to watch some of Kurosawa's movies other than Seven Samurai, which I had seen in 10th grade and enjoyed, for awhile now. I highly enjoyed all of the movies that I was exposed to in this unit and I feel that they represent a wide range of the director, from his beginnings to his peak of fame and then to his later years.
A thing I noticed between all of his films was a use of an abnormal hero character in all of them and, in Ran's case, no protagonist. In Stray Dog, the main protagonist is a rookie cop who just came back from the war who's pistol is stolen and, in trying to find the person that stole it, realizes that he and who he pursues are very similar people, only having gone down different paths after the war. This sense of connection in ones adversary is something that we do not see very often in movies, bar maybe STAR WARS, and it really helps create another layer to the story.
In Yojimbo on the other hand the protagonist has seemingly no ties to the people around him, but is but an exterior force that comes in, mops up the towns mess, and leaves. He has no real motive or anything at stake to help the villagers, but does anyway and about as quickly as he enters, leaves. This is very uncommon to see in most films nowadays (Besides its 2 remakes) and really adds another interesting element to the story.
Finally in Ran Kurosawa does not make a main hero character as he was past that stage in his movie making Career. Because of this, there is no one really to empathize with in the movie because the audience is left feeling that everyone got what they deserved. The movie is based off of King Lear so this was not a new concept to story telling but after having made so many movies surrounding a hero or heroes this was an interesting move for Kurosawa and overall was my favorite film of the unit
1 comment:
I agree on how you said these abnormal heroes give the movie a new layer because as i was watching them i thought the same thing if the movies by Akira were to have a generic heroe repeating in each one his films would have easily lost their appeal, but since he never gives us the same heroe twice it makes it very interesting to compare his movies against eachother even if they have a simular theme it still feels totaly different because of this.
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