#i rewatched mugen train and was tempted to color him ^^

[zxnin]

Kyojurou Rengoku | Flame Hashira ☆

[canvaswolfdoll]

CanvasWatches: Seven Samurai

About time I start looking into the highbrow stuff much lauded by film historians and critics and the like. Become cultured and so forth.

Though the subject is a Japanese Film, so I’m still clinging to some of my innate nature.

I didn’t watch it dubbed though! Not that the Criterion Collection BluRay had the option. To be fair, I don’t watch live action material with English Dubs. I have my lines.

This probably won’t be the last time I venture into this general area. Akira Kurosawa[1] has a few other notable films I’m intrigued by (Rashomon and Throne of Blood are particularly tempting)[2]. As with all things, no promise of when or if I’ll get around to them.

Anyways, Seven Samurai. Let’s get into it.

Seven may have been too many samurai. Sure, I could (visually) keep track of Kambei and Katsushiro as the Veteran and Newcomer archetypes, and Kyuzo and Kikuchiyo[3] as the clear inspiration for Jin and Mugen of Samurai Champloo, but I was unable to track their names, not helped by the language barrier of the actual dialogue.[4]

Not that I feel it matters, since the movie’s not a character-driven piece by any means.

We open with a farm village soon to be attacked by bandits, which isn’t good. After some discussion, the farmers decide the best course of action is to recruit some samurai. So four farmers travel off to do just that, feeling their chances are slim due to having only food to offer.

Kambei is moved by their plight, and agrees to assist the farmers, becoming the commander of the operation and taking over the recruitment of additional samurai.

Kambei decides on forming a team of seven.

The section where the team is being assembled is my favorite part of the film, probably since it’s where most of the cast get the entirety of their development. Kambei recruits an old war buddy and some other random samurai, who then recruits a man who is obviously meant to be the comedic relief (Heihachi doesn’t get enough dialogue to make good on this). Kambei offers a spot on the team to Kyuzo, a man who wishes to test his skills, and Kikuchiyo (the proto-Mugen) stumbles in drunk and walks along with the group until they agree to let him in.

Then they walk to the village, then start planning for combat, then engage in combat, then come to a costly victory, and the end card goes up.

It’s combat heavy, and not particularly good combat either.

To summarize the deaths: ‘Tag, now play dead.’ The hits don’t even look like an attempt was made to look realistic. It’s both a little funny and very disappointing.

I mean, the fighting takes up most of the second half, you’d think a little more effort and choreography could’ve been put in.

Because of the focus on the combat, the movie can drag on a bit, especially since there’s relatively little character development, and it can be hard to track deaths and the samurai since the language barrier and lack of color strips away much of the distinguishing features. You can mostly distinguish the farmers from samurai since the farmers all have bald caps of vary quality, a trait shared only by the two least distinctive samurai.

Kambei makes a good leader figure, looking the oldest and carrying the most wisdom. He’s introduced using guile to save a young boy from a thief, which foreshadows the tactical forethought he puts into defending the village, though he uses relatively conventional methods in that case. He survives the film with a wistful comment about how, ultimately, the villagers won since the bandits are gone, more than half the samurai fell in the conflict, and all the survivors got out of it was food. Intentionally or not, the farmers got the samurai to work for no personal gain.

Were this a more modern film, Kambei would’ve been under one of the burial mounds after successfully mentoring Katsushiro to be some noble warrior guy.

Katsushiro[5] plays our Zeppo Marx: the young innocent looking to find his place in the world and woos the only young female (Shino). He apprentices himself to Kambei because he has to learn the trade from someone. He and Kikuchiyo provide most of the actual comedy in the film, despite previous attempts to pretend Heihachi would be the funny one. He’s mocked for his youth, used as a tool for slapstick when recruiting samurai, and is only added as one of the titualar samurai because they ran out of time and needed to bolster their ranks.

Katsushiro’s romance with Shino has some ambiguity: either it was an actual case of young love, or Shino was chasing a youthful indulgence before settling into a life of toil. Either way, it clearly ended when Shino’s father got upset when became… er… “damaged goods” by the film’s words. But hey, the kid lives, and that’s not nothing.

Which brings us to Kikuchiyo, who (in a modern film) would’ve fought with Katsushiro to be the de facto protagonist. I just called him Mugen when commenting on the film since I couldn’t remember names, and the creative genealogy between the two is very clear. Kikuchiyo is a low born with an overly fancy sword fighting tooth and nail to prove he’s the toughest. Heck, a rivalry with the film’s proto-Jin even causes some trouble!

He’s also a consistent scene stealer, and has the best defined personality, being brash and blunt, finding success not through talent or training but by sheer force of will. The other six didn’t even want him as part of the team, but he persisted in following behind and then succeeded in getting the village to actually meet with the samurai.

Kikuchiyo engages in slapstick, jokes about and teases his squad of militia farmers, and generally is the most consistently funny cast member, but when it comes time for him to be dramatic, Toshiro Mifune commands the scene that drives home the true tragedy of the farmers: these are men regularly preyed on by bandits forced to rely on samurai, who have casually destroyed their lives and homes in the name of their wars. Yes, the farmers have killed and stolen from Samurai in the past, but they had to.

Kikuchiyo wears his emotions on his sleeves, can’t stand still, and constantly has to be doing something, even if it’s hypocritically yelling at others for crying. He may be Proto-Mugen, but he also shows traits common with many Shonen Protagonists and lancers.

He is the quinticessal Red Oni, but has no Blue Oni to balance him.

A tragic take on the Monkey King.

You start the film for the prestige, but you stay for Kikuchiyo, a man who dies wearing a stolen name.

It’s a war movie that, while bloodless, still doesn’t hide the horror of war, even those of a romanticized age.

So, as it happens, I can actually recommend this high brow film, though I can’t promise it would be easy to love. It’s long, dry in parts, and could stand a few less quiet moments. But there’s a lot of recognizable beats and tropes and characters that continue to echo to this day, and the good scenes are really good.

So try and watch it. At least get to the part where they reach the village. If you get thrown out by how remarkably dull the battles are, I won’t blame you, but it’s worth the attempt.

Thanks for reading. I welcome any comments or questions you may have. I’ve written other reviews and sometimes even original content, and I have a patreon which I’d like to use towards making my own masterpieces. I look forward to what inspirations I can take from Seven Samurai.

Kataal kataal.

[1]Kurosawa Akira? Still don’t know how I should format these names. [2] Hidden Fortress might be a good companion to the Star Wars rewatch I keep meaning to do. [3] Ya know, the K names! [4] Really need to put effort into actually learning Japanese… [5] A name I presume means ‘fried castle’.