Tag: akira kurosawa

The Asian Cinematic Journey

TiberiusLeave a comment

About time I addressed a noticeable pattern of mine

Between Hong Kong cinematic action pieces of yesteryear and Japan’s golden age of cinema, I’ve been quite busy exploring the directors of East Asia. So far, I’ve addressed four powerful names in the cinematic world (John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi), but this is only the tip of the iceberg, as I’ve definitely seen more than just those for in both the live-action and animated worlds. And before I expand on that, I thought I’d address that for a few seconds:

I love this era of literal memes, it beats brainrot 100% of the time.

The archives of this very blog show that the things I write the most about animanga and almost always on the series itself as opposed to the production side of things. It’s been this way since the blog first launched in 2023 and when it comes to writing about the production side, it’s heavily skewed toward games, movies and TV series. The reasons for this have to do with what creators are willing to share to news agencies. From my experience, game devs are happy to document the process from storyboard to controller to thrown off a cliff by Margit the Fell Omen.

Animanga is a lot of the same but it highly depends on the publisher. So while the 3D Mortal Kombat games have videos where Ed Boon et al talk candidly on the creation and re-introduction of legacy MK characters, Francis Ford Coppola feels cathartic talking about the troubles facing Apocalypse Now, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul would walk you through the making of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, only a few manga publishers I’ve found are to be this open about their processes. Individual mangaka certainly, but editors for companies like Shueisha, Kadokawa, etc. are more than a little lockjawed. Even when they do show journalists the tour or sit down to conduct an interview, the details are either light or the sources are in Japanese, which I’ve explained during my review of The Elusive Samurai anime adaptation is nowhere near at a level where I can confidently review the contents. This part is understandable when the studio is busy bringing manga to life in real time, but if nothing is currently being worked on or not set to be for another half-year or so, then there’s really nothing worth keeping secret about the general production part at least, and I say this as a guy who revels in surprises.

Sometimes information is behind a paywall or a region code and no amount of sloppy-toppy offers will get me access to that succulent content short of a VPN subscription and moving my IP address somewhere else.

Maybe this will help when it comes to viewing the BBC’s documentary on The Troubles

A not insignificant portion of my animanga reviews have my parsing what I can from what I’m able to find in English, the most notable examples on this blog being that of Nazo no Kanojo X and Haibane Renmei, where the mangaka doesn’t have easily accessible photos of themselves or evidence that they’ve done interviews in the past and the other where the eccentric writer pulled an anime adaptation off the cutting room floor of his studio. Who says Haibane Renmei was a final draft at the time?

With that said, my recent trip to the cinematic side of things in East Asia is something of a pipeline, I consider. The precise origin point isn’t so much lost as its under tough debate within myself. I would say that it began when I was in community college in 2018 and my Asian Art History professor introduced the class to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran which is a medieval Japanese interpretation Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Japanese romanticization of medieval Europe is a time-honored tradition outside of Isekai, it seems.

But as I recall, I was on a streaming site whose name I forget where I was made aware of a Chinese-animated and directed film by the name of Have a Nice Day.

Without spoiling too much of the plot, it’s inciting incident is when a cab driver, Xiao Zhang, takes a million yuan ($150,000 USD) at knife point. Not for completely selfish reasons; his girlfriend was the victim of a botched cosmetic surgery and he wants to use the money to get it fixed in South Korea. The rest of the film is something of a No Country For Old Men type of movie, in the sense that even more unscrupulous folks are after the cash, with each pursuer quirkier than the last. Are they dangerous? Yes and no. They are dangerous, but often to themselves than anyone else. And Zhang is still in some kind of danger as some of these types gun for him too, but have to fight the rest of the mob off as they chase him down. One prize, clashing goals, and a story made up of losers and those who lost less. Make of that what you will. It’s currently free to watch on Tubi as of this writing, so I might as well remind myself what I liked about it.

At the time, I was simply looking for movies and content to watch in the dark of night on my ancient Samsung touchscreen laptop. I was 18 turning 19 at the time and the 2AM binge was a fierce mentality. After a few years of that, binging doesn’t do it for me anymore, as I’ve explained in the past. I was scrounging for films I’d heard of but haven’t seen, and without a specific order in mind. Just wait for the lightbulb to flash on, scour the web for a pirate site that’ll allow to me watch or torrent without issue, and I’m on my way. In some cases, I took these with me to the movies during the holidays and because the copyright expired on some of these, I was able to watch them all in the Almighty Internet Archive.

To keep track of all of these, I had a Wordpad document organizing the movies listed by decade, starting with the 1930s black and white films where just about every production member is long dead, the production studio defunct or eaten by another one over the years, and no one left alive to make a fuss over it. Pirating movies is my time-honored tradition, Jake.

Of the films listed, some of these do happen to be Kurosawa films, but looking back at that old document, interspersing Eastern films with the plethora of Western films harkens back to a time when I couldn’t tell the difference between animation and anime, but didn’t care because the drawings moved. You think I gave a damn whether Zatch Bell! or Yu-Gi-Oh! were animated in Vancouver or Yokohama? Seven-year-old me could tell it was art, and it was f[horse]king art!!

Where did this series go, by the way?

Speaking of art, I can talk at length about the production and cost side of even foreign cinema, but aside from country of origin, there really isn’t anything foreign film studios do differently in terms of filming. And yet as far as accessing these films go, it’s historically been a challenge for the simple reason of Hollywood being Hollywood. Harboring the lion’s share of the world’s movies, a foreign film would need an international film festival to get more eyes on it. These days, there’s not much trouble achieving that and more, but in an industry where the mantra is to “know your audience,” dropping a foreign film on an unfamiliar audience can further alienate the audience and hurt the film’s efforts, provided the audience is looking at that sort of thing. It can feel like homework if there isn’t prior exposure to the subject matter.

What does this mean for Asian cinema in the past? Well, long before the interconnected-ness of the modern age, the best you could do was release films of age-old stories, hence why the western film genre dominated from the late 1890s to the 1970s. So powerful and inspirational were these stories of cowboys and Indians that non-American directors took a stab at it by way of the European (mainly Italian) subgenre, the spaghetti western. East Asia, in particular, had to make do with old tropes and stereotypes for specific genres to gain traction over the decades with pioneers like Bruce Lee, John Woo and even Akira Kurosawa gradually introducing these concepts to the western market. The benefit being that their names are known, the drawback being that kung fu, samurai, shinobi, and other medieval concepts were assumed by many to be all that the region had to offer at least until minds like John Woo and Park Chan-wook showed us that even East Asia can cinematic set piece and gun-fu to the top.

Another thing to highlight about Asian cinema would be the local politics. Like it or not, history and politics touches everyone and in the grand scheme of things, East Asia and Southeast Asia have a disturbing tradition of strong men dictators who couldn’t help but meddle in the affairs of private citizens, historically and contemporarily. Mainland China has loosened its grip in recent years, but in some areas the CCP can still put a thumb over film production. Japan is a democracy these days, but pre-war films were heavily scrutinized for dissent from the Meiji era to the mid-Showa era. Post-independence South Korea had a hardline anticommunist stance that kept creatives walking on eggshells in the film industry and (as I’ve discussed before) in their manhwa/comics industry, leaving their manhwa to be discovered decades after publishing online. Needless to say, if the government didn’t like it, it wasn’t gonna get a wide release outside the country, never mind have a guaranteed impact at home. Why bother making uncultured foreigners care about our movies?! We have mouthpieces to produce!!

But we live in a freer world, so that’s not an issue anymore… supposedly… It’s only a recent discovery (or re-discovery if I’m being honest) that I’m adding these films to my watchlist and the showing thus far has been nothing short of:

Insert Invincible title card effect here

I will not stop writing about these films. I’ll use my remaining appendages if my fingers fall off.

The World of Japanese Live-Action Cinema

Tiberius1 Comment

Same continent, Different History

Full disclosure, the first topic lined up was meant to be about the Senran Kagura series, but I haven’t been playing it as much as of late. Work-related stuff among other things took my time, and for the style of gameplay, I’ve seen better. At least it has an anime adaptation. Next to that, was about a series that was subject to limited release outside of Japan — Idolmaster, only I’ve mentioned it before and without access to the whole of the franchise, I’m not able to review it in the manner I’d like. Typically, I start at the beginning, but the circumstances that created this series in particular are only available in Japanese arcades with the Xbox 360 port dying with the console, making the first installment in this franchise semi-lost media. So instead, we’re sticking with Nihon and talking about their movies.

As far as old movies go, whatever I could get my hands on I’d always given it a watch. In community college, I watched 1932’s Scarface and 1933’s King Kong. I managed to find the 1982 film The Wall based on the Pink Floyd album of the same name. I recommend all three by the way. And all of these plus similar films have been my go to for years, from my piracy era to my movie theater era. I’ve heard from the Extra History channel on YouTube in their series on Japanese Militarism that when it comes to studying societal changes in the Axis Countries during WWII, Germany and Italy get over-studied while Japan frustratingly has been under-studied or brushed aside, presumably because they don’t have an equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini, or rather no civilian equivalent with the Japanese military dragging the society down into Hell with them one assassinated politician at a time. I bring up the historical blind spot in an admittedly faulty comparison to my own approach to the Japanese film industry. I’m American, after all, my first movies are going to be American. Sometimes, British cinema will spillover.

Guess I was always a sci-fi fan, I was just denying it because the genre was so broad.

Only recently have I been watching Japanese films and a lot of them are damn old, coming from legendary names in Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and one other one I discovered whilst researching this topic, Kenji Mizoguchi. These three directors formed the foundation of post-WWII Japanese cinema in the 1950s during the Golden Age. By the time they were making film after film, Japan already had a storied cinematic history, though looking at the world the country left behind in and entered in favor of, one can see what kinds of films were being made especially during the late Taisho and early Showa periods. The short version of the history of the motion picture largely boils down to an amalgamation of centuries’ long efforts to get pictures to move by themselves, a means to record a moving flipbook and similarly, movements of this type popped up in East Asia.

Early films, as you can expect, are unimpressive considering what populates our screens, streaming services, and theaters today, but to Frederick Harrison Burgh in 1898, regular photos of the every man to his left and right were given life before his eyes. I didn’t exactly take any history of cinema courses, but I can also imagine a playwright of some kind looking at the first film directors in human history and incorporating the ideas into his plays or straight up becoming a film director himself in part or whole–to varying degrees of success. Maybe a combination of these, who knows?

Even when Japan had more or less completed industrialization or neared its zenith, they weren’t done learning from western innovators, such as Thomas Edison.

Far from the progenitor of filmmaking, his inventions and contributions to cinema in particular formed the foundation of this industry worldwide. When the industry erupted in Japan, elements of kabuki and rakugo have made their way in over time. Narration, depictions of bygone eras, romanticism; different country, similar tropes about legendary figures. Just watch any western and compare it to the reality of the cowboy.

In this case, Japan had the shogunates and numerous tales of courageous warriors to adapt to film. Miyamoto Musashi, Tomoe Gozen, the main belligerents of the Genpei War; even the monarch has been depicted in film. Meiji was a fixture of post-WWII cinema for a time and looking at the Meiji era it’s easy to see why. A teenage emperor spearheads reforms that put an island nation on equal footing with the west over the course of about 45 years. Meiji was the emperor during the establishment of the Empire of Japan, his reforms reshaped the military into a powerhouse capable of knocking China and Russia around, empires many times the size of Japan itself and they were weak to Japanese might. Nationalist or no, you can’t help but laud an era of rapid industrialization and the man who helped with that.

These days, we can look at the era objectively, but the World Wars era emboldened and inspired filmmakers world wide. Wartime propaganda to motivate the populace to accept rations for the troops, instructional movies on the safety and operation of equipment and maneuvers, pre-mission briefs with the commanders in the war room before the march to battle: if done right, it can get the public firing on all cylinders and bolster the war effort significantly. If done wrong, the populace will be made complicit or forced to go along with the military’s worst actions. A tool of Japanese militarism, factions of junior officers in the Imperial Army and Navy formed individual groups all along the nationalist side of things. On the tame end, films released in this era in authoritarian nations helped lead to the cult of personality around certain authoritarians. Hitler had one, Mussolini had one, and I doubt he was aware of it, but Hirohito had a cult of personality as well, fostered by a radical faction working under the worst evolution of the national slogan, the latest one being “Revere the Emperor, Destroy the Traitors.”

The wild end of the propaganda spectrum can lead to the fabrication of enemies and dubious reasons to subjugate them. Most tools at their disposal were used for this purpose and led to ultimately dire consequences. Militarism could only last so long though and the dismantling of the Japanese colonial empire and subsequent occupation meant starting over again, with a new constitution and a self-defense industry with limited expeditionary capabilities.

So where does filmmaking factor into all of this? Adaptable stories for one thing. Think of all the western films featuring Ancient Greece and Rome, even in a stylized/fictionalized manner.

Obviously, the Spartans had armor, these masters of warfare weren’t stupid.

As mentioned before, any knowledgeable filmmaker can make Japanese historical films, circling us back to the likes of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. So far, I’ve only watched Kurosawa films, but I do want to talk about the others anyway. Kurosawa was an inspiration to many. He was to film what Osamu Tezuka was to animanga. The first time I watched him was in college during a course on Asian Art during the Japanese section. The film in question was called Ran and it was Kurosawa’s version of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a manner of speaking, which itself, when I saw it, drew parallels to the power struggle that emerged from the division of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century. All three stories involve a ruler of some kind who chooses to divide power among his heirs in near-equal status; all three fail to realize that the water of the womb doesn’t always bind and that siblings may bicker, but rich siblings don’t pull any punches; all three heirs immediately raise armies to rob the others of their territory; and all three explain in a gruesome showing why much of the known monarchic world defaulted to primogeniture. This model is criticized heavily by historians but without a better alternative, what were medieval kingdoms gonna do? Let a woman rule? Well, sometimes…

Queen Eleanor by Frederick Sandys, 1858

Remember when I mentioned western influence in Japan? Expanding beyond technology, this opens up a wider question on Japanese appeal to medieval Europe, of which the short answer to that is exoticism, same as how many westerners and weebs exoticize Japan and at times the rest of East Asia, hence why a lot of East Asian celebrities and such adopt western names.

Samurai tales were Kurosawa’s bread and butter and a great influence on samurai stories thereafter. One such film I had the pleasure to watch while on CQ was Yojimbo: the tale of an anti-hero ronin with a bullish demeanor who fights off gangs after getting to know an innkeeper family.

Moving onto Yasujiro Ozu’s output, he didn’t make samurai tales, instead favoring contemporary, slice of life films about everyday life. Exclusively Japanese life? Yes and no. Obviously, the setting is going to be in Japan, but the lifestyle of the people in his films being relatively modern make it relatable to many people globally. These aren’t disillusioned ex-samurai with a lot to gain in a changing Japan; these were regular people with commonfolk stories, easy to tell and far away from the realm of fantasy. I only recently discovered a few of Ozu’s films on the Internet Archive site, and I do plan on giving them all a proper viewing.

The last of the Golden Age Japanese directors is Kenji Mizoguchi, who I mentioned I discovered while drafting this post. Google and his Wikipedia page both tell me that his films historical dramas with a focus on women’s lives. How feministic! He was the oldest of the trio and being born when Meiji was still emperor and thus would have been exposed to the lives of not just female entertainers (geisha) but also of women going into a rapidly advancing Japan. This leads me to believe that, like much of the western world, Japan in particular was about to approach the subject of a woman’s place in life but not with the right approaches or interests at heart in mind. Or when the society did so, it was a mixed bag of controversial successes and failures. Like their male counterparts, women enjoy many of the same privileges enshrined in western societies, but some age-old challenges still linger, many of which became a central theme of Mizoguchi’s movies. Like most of the other media I have listed, I also plan to watch a few Mizoguchi films. I hadn’t made any concrete plans to write about them in any capacity, but I do wanna get back into it at some point–things have been looking a bit too anime otaku-centric as of late.

Not a shift, but an addition to my typical lineup.