10 Ways Akira Kurosawa Has Influenced Modern Blockbusters

Screen Rant has a list article that counts ten different ways Kurosawa influenced modern blockbuster films.

And the author doesn’t even mention the Rashomon effect: the use of multiple conflicting points of view of the same events. If truly adhering to his practice in Rashomon, this is done in a way that is not later reduced to a “true, correct” narrative.

The interpretation of Kurosawa as pandering to Western audiences is so tired. Of the major Japanese directors, he is the one who had the most “international” or Western influences (query how Western Dostoevsky was as an influence though, given that he comes from a Russian Orthodox tradition), so his movies naturally have the most appeal to Westerners and overlap more with Western interests, but they’re nevertheless made by a Japanese man from and in a Japanese context. That makes them different from the oeuvre of other Japamese directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi who weren’t similarly influenced by non-Japanese culture, but it doesn’t mean he pandered to Westerners.

*mutters something about people saying the same thing about other East Asian cultural exports popular in the West like Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS)*

Did you notice that the very first picture in the article (and number 5 on the list) is not in fact from a Kurosawa movie? It is Nakadai, in (I think) Hara Kiri, which was directed by Masaki Kobayashi.