#YOJIMBO MOVIE MOVIE#
#YOJIMBO MOVIE SERIES#

#YOJIMBO MOVIE SERIES#

Stan Sakai, the sole creator, author, and artist who is best known for his series Usagi Yojimbo, the epic saga of Miyamoto Usagi, a samurai rabbit living in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Japan.

#YOJIMBO MOVIE MOVIE#

I'd like to start a sort of discussion/analysis here what did you like/dislike about Yojimbo. Yojimbo is a 1961 Japanese samurai movie starring Toshirô Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai, directed by Akira Kurosawa.It notably features only one gun, which plays an important role in the hands of Nakadai. Usagi Yojimbo is one of the longest independent serialized comic book series in existence. The ronin sits up on the watchtower in absolute delight as he watches over the two cowardly gangs pathetic excuse to intimidate one another.Īnyways, Yojimbo was spectacular. My absolute favorite shot in the film is when Sanjuro brilliantly sets up the two gangs into fighting one another. I've heard many praise the cinematography and camera work of the film and I can certainly see why. Kurosawa displayed the character's attitude in one short little sequence, giving us the sense that he was a 'happy-go-lucky'. To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro turns a range war between two evil clans to his own advantage. The opening scene in which Sanjuro leaves his fate to a stick thrown in the air, really signifies the state Samurai were in at this period in history. Japanese The incomparable Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa's visually stunning and darkly comic Yojimbo. At this period in Japanese history, many samurai were unemployed, roaming around the Japanese countryside in search of employment. The film starts off wonderfully, putting into perspective what it meant to be a samurai in the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. I've heard many people say, it is the most accessible Kurosawa film. Yojimbo may be seen as the perfect blend of action, comedy and drama. (The first two being The Seven Samurai and Rashomon) To amuse himself, he plays the gangs off against each other, nearly getting killed in the process. Toshiro Mifune is Sanjuro, a ronin caught in a yakuza gang war. Akira Kurosawa incorporates gallows humor in a pitch-perfect samurai film, one of his best.

YOJIMBO, 1961, Janus Films, 110 min.

This supercut compares and contrasts key scenes from the two movies giving “a side-by-side look at the respective births of the ‘super-samurai’ action movie genre and the spaghetti western genre.Yojimbo happens to be my third Kurosawa film. Yojimbo / Sanjuro (1961) NR, 1 hr 50 min. These can be seen in a supercut created and edited by Alejandro City. Leone directly lifted certain scenes visually from Kurosawa’s movie. The similarities between Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars are not just confined to plot.

This leads to a key scene at the film’s denouement. In A Fistful of Dollars he has a Winchester rifle-used to kill any enemies with a bullet to the heart. In Yojimbo the lead villain has a pistol. Leone turned everything up to eleven making the film operatic in its style yet at the same time incredibly austere. This is not present in A Fistful of Dollars. Kurosawa offered a comedy on social manners and the hierarchy of class in Yojimbo. Apart form these two groups, the town appears to be almost deserted with few people other than an undertaker and a barman. In A Fistful of Dollars the gangs are identified as two families-the Baxters who deal in guns and the Rojos who smuggle liquor. Kurosawa also has other characters and background stories with the gangs hiring loutish mercenaries to do their bidding. In Kurosawa’s film the town is split between two corrupt families vying for control-three brothers versus a husband and wife. Leone used many of Kurosawa’s plot devices in A Fistful of Dollars, with an unnamed anti hero (Clint Eastwood) arriving in a small desert town where two rival gangs fight for its control. working in a town controlled by one kingpin who is battling many other smaller gangs. More recently, some film writers have pointed out Yojimbo bears an even greater similarity to another of Hammett’s books The Red Harvest-the story of his anonymous Continental Op. Kurosawa later admitted his movie had been loosely based on the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novel The Glass Key from 1942. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sumīut Yojimbo was not a truly original story, either. This delayed the American release of A Fistful of Dollars for three years. Unfortunately, Leone failed to secure the movie’s remake rights which led to his company being sued by Toho Productions. When the Italian director first saw Kurosawa’s tale of a rōnin (Toshiro Mifune) arriving in a small Japanese town where two rival gangs fight for supremacy sometime back in 1963, he was so impressed he thought it would translate into a good cowboy film. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo from 1961.

Yojimbo movie