Dang, I wish I could read through these. I took Japanese in high school, but that was a decade ago and I never kept up with it. Can anyone tell me if they have his original RUNAWAY TRAIN script?

Yep, it’s there: 暴走機関車. 133 pages. It was something that also I wanted to look up immediately after I saw this thing.

Hm. I just realised that if I link directly to an image, the system doesn’t seem to give you the possibility to move backwards and forwards within the folder. So, maybe it’s better if I give the folder group: the main group for scripts filmed by other directors is 23, the Runaway Train subgroup is 19, and the script itself is the subgroup 01 in that (02 has some newspaper clippings). In other words, look for this:

23. 脚本による他の監督映画化
–19. 暴走機関車
—-01. 台本

That’s fantastic. Thanks, Vili.

[goes hunting for old stack of Japanese/English dictionaries]

Noel, I decided to translate all the category titles into English.

It’s almost two in the morning now — I only started after midnight — so I will have to give up for the day, especially since the server seems to be having some problems (I get a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable message every now and then).

In any case, you can see the work here. I hope it will be of some help to someone!

A suggestion perhaps to the greatness of it all, is I spent 3 hours exploring. And in many regards it’s like a magician’s trick book opened up. From the bits I manage to read, the drawings, storyboards, to the amazing photographs, I already see elements of Kurosawa never known. While unfortunately limited, the photos of AK and crew at the camera are amazing. The little bits of how the camera was setup, where the lights are at, where AK is at, etc, are deeply interesting. Small set notes, scribbling, and bizarre photos, the investigating to which, solves some mysteries, creates more, but best of all spawns a refreshing affect, and deeper appreciation to AK’s work.

The website too is brilliantly simplistic and easy to operate. The great effort and care is obvious, and huge raw scans, a work of art in themselves.

Indeed the most significant and honoring piece of work for anything Kurosawa.
akirakurosawa.info must now step aside to 2nd place.

So true Jeremy, so true.

The actual number of items currently in there is now reported to be 27,431. If you looked at a hundred pictures a day, it would still take you more than nine months to go through the entire archive.

Bliss.

Dang, I wish I could read through these. I took Japanese in high school, but that was a decade ago and I never kept up with it. Can anyone tell me if they have his original RUNAWAY TRAIN script?

PB, if you check the second comment posted here, you’ll find the link. Funny how Runaway Train is the first reaction for so many of us!

Incredible! It is enough to make any AK fan’s head explode.
The photos are fascinating. Is it possible to download them at all? Would love to use as wallpaper or the like.

^^ If you have a high screen resolution that enables you to see the whole image at a size large enough for scaling to wallpaper, you can use Windows Vista’s Snipping Tool or some of the better screen capture software. Otherwise there is no way, as they purposely arrange the image to be embedded as part of the flash and acrobat, rather them an image.

I notice they do list the file’s name and the location of the archive used to display the image, but I haven’t bother to see what happens when I attempt to access the image directly, as I don’t want to abuse their work. I do not however think it will work.