YOJIMBO ANIME MOVIE
YOJIMBO ANIME FREE

I'm informed that such a weapon was indeed real, but it's hilarious just the same. In one outrageous sequence with the warriors lined up for combat, one giant fighter carries an oversized Yosemite Sam-style mallet. The character has been described as the film's proto-Yakuza.Įven as we marvel at the lightning-fast swordplay, we never take Yojimbo all that seriously. Somewhat of an anachronism, Unosuke carries an American pistol in the folds of his clothing and adorns himself with a plaid scarf. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Unosuke, Sanjûrô's only real opponent. Like James Bond, we know Yojimbo won't get killed. But he isn't totally bad: Along the way Sanjûrô makes friends with a neutral barman, and helps an innocent couple escape the clutches of one of the evil families. Pretty soon he has both sides annihilating one another while he sits in the middle getting rich. The story is structured as a farcical fairy tale: the cagey Sanjûrô (Yojimbo = bodyguard) hires himself out to one warring faction, causes some mayhem, and then switches sides. But most of his shenanigans win our approval and make us laugh as well. Just as in Leone's Spaghetti Western remake, the character isn't a clown. Aloof, calculating, Sanjûrô always has one more trick up his sleeve. Toshirô Mifune plays the character lampooned by John Belushi on Saturday Night Live's skits - forever scratching himself and pulling his arms inside his tunic. The entire enterprise celebrates mercenary cynicism, as Sanjuro encourages bloody battles between two warring super-powers, cleverly taking money from each.

YOJIMBO ANIME FREE

Paced more like a comedy than a period picture, and peopled with characters refreshingly free of historical meaning, this swordplay free-for-all invented a new style of super-hero samurai warrior. The Japanese critics thought Kurosawa's ordinary films were too Western, and with Yojimbo he totally broke the mold. Sizing up the situation, the stranger makes deals with first one side and then the other, cutting the private armies down to size and quickly amassing a pile of mercenary loot. Mysterious ronin Sanjûrô Kuwabatake (Toshirô Mifune) drifts into a hamlet split down the middle by two warring clans, each of which has taken on a retinue of hired swords to harass the other.

It's immediately obvious that this is something new when our ragged samurai hero walks down the road to music that sounds like swing jazz. Ironic humor and bloody conflict are everything, while historical context and moral examination are mostly absent. Most previous samurai tales were serious costume epics but Kurosawa envisioned his film as a samurai-western hybrid even more American in tone than his earlier Seven Samurai. Not to denigrate Sergio Leone's talent, but I don't know of another filmmaker whose breakthrough picture is such a blatant exercise in plagiarism.Ī monster hit in Japan, Yojimbo originally attracted its share of put-downs from homegrown critics. Leone remade Yojimbo scene by scene, joke by joke and practically shot by shot. But the two movies are much more than just similar. Produced by Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, Tomoyuki Tanakaīefore we saw Yojimbo we already knew that it had provided the template for Sergio Leone's first Spaghetti Western Fistful of Dollars, just as John Sturges had 'adapted' another Kurosawa samurai epic, Seven Samurai. Starring Toshirô Mifune, Eijiro Tono, Kamatari Fujiwara, Takashi Shimura, Seizaburo Kawazu, Isuzu Yamada, Hiroshi Tachikawa, Kyu Sazanka, Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Kato I wonder what they'll do when it comes time to introduce Hi-def Super-Criterion discs?ġ961 / 110 min. If the transfer quality stays high, Savant will have no complaints. The first planned release is a string of early Ingmar Bergman films. And we're also excited to see what their new stripped-down Eclipse line will be like. Hopefully they'll get around to re-do's on High and Low and Diabolique.

Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, Fritz Lang's 'M' and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

YOJIMBO ANIME MOVIE

I wouldn't call this double dipping, as seven years have elapsed since the first no-extras edition of Yojimbo, and the movie is certainly worth the special attention.Ĭriterion has retooled a number of its initial disc offerings, such as Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, H. Criterion doubles back into its library to bring a pair of earlier releases 'up to code': Back in the first years of DVD they were re-purposing older transfers just like everyone else, and along with Fox and Paramount were late to commit to enhanced (squeezed) transfers.

Yojimbo anime