It’d be almost redundant to describe Akira Kurosawa’s works as influential. His career, spanning six decades, has resulted in numerous films that have tried to emulate his works (but never with an equal result). This week, The Magnificent Seven was released, reminding us yet again that Kurosawa’s films—regardless of their age—will continue to exist in Hollywood, not as bygone antiquities, but staples of film that are as powerful now as they were more than half a century ago.
1. The Usual Suspects
Its Influence: Rashomon (1950)
The Usual Suspects is basically a surface level retelling of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Similarities include an eyewitness (who may or may not be trustworthy) recounting a crime, separate realities illuminating the story and an underlying murder(s) mystery shrouding the narrative with the natural intrigue of classic genre-filmmaking. I’m not the biggest fan of Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects—I found his characters shallow and uninteresting and his story beats grandiose and overly self-serious—but it’s hard to deny that the mixture of Rashomon’s text and The Usual Suspect’s shadowy neo-noir provides us with nothing less than new avenues for telling familiar stories and doorways to revisit an old master.
2. A Bug’s Life
Its Influence: Seven Samurai (1954)
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Initially, the substratum for A Bug’s Life premise came from an ancient fable titled The Ant and the Grasshopper. The movie, however, becomes something else entirely. At the heart of A Bug’s Life is a western, and at the heart of the western is Akira Kurosawa, a longtime practitioner and innovator of the samurai film, Japan’s answer to cowboy films. A Bug’s Life shares strikingly similar beats to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954): the ants are the villagers, Flik is the recruiter, the “warriors” (actually circus performers) are the samurai and the grasshoppers are the bandits. In the tradition of Kurosawa, A Bug’s Life is a western comedy of errors.
3. Biutiful
Its Influence: Ikiru (1952)
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A complete revision of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). Both films essentially study a character diagnosed with terminal cancer and their subsequent events to change the world around them. Biutiful is definitely interesting, but it represents the weaker tendencies of director Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s a bleak and reflective brand of social realism imagined in an almost dystopian Barcelona. It possesses little, if any, of Kurosawa’s intimacy. Both men explore existentialism and family drama, but where Kurosawa recounts his character’s final days with a passive sincerity to emotion and family, Iñárritu explores with grand gestures and histrionic tragedy.
4. Sym-Biotic Titan
Its Influence: The Hidden Fortress (1958)
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I’m making an exception here. Sym-Biotic Titan is an animated television series created by Genddy Tartakovsky (the same guy responsible for creating Samurai Jack). Star Wars (1977) is most famous for adapting its premise from The Hidden Fortress (1958), but Sym-Biotic Titan—a television series cancelled way before its time—follows Kurosawa’s premise even closer. The princess of a distant planet goes on the run after her father, the king, is deposed. Accompanying her is a warrior, loyal to her cause, and a servant, an artificially intelligent human. Sym-Biotic Titan later dabbles into more traditional “television” genres—high school and mecha—but its Kurosawa influence is crucial to the show’s foundation and framework.
5. Money Monster
Its Influence: High and Low (1963)
The clash between the rich and the poor is a conflict that predates most forms of storytelling and even today continues to define how modern society operates. No film better explored either world as viscerally or delicately as Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1968), a film whose very title marks a puerile distinction between the two social classes. High and Low (1963) and Money Monster (2016) exist on fundamentally different economic and social planes, but their stories are virtually the same: when faced with poverty, a frustrated young man resorts to kidnapping and ransoming money from an affluent man only to discover a deeply sinister, systemic motive behind his economic crisis. Money Monster, unfortunately, possesses only a tenth of High and Low‘s depth.
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