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Akira Kurosawa’s Ran Akira Kurosawa used the different elements of film, mostly the image/camera or the visual elements, in order to convey an intensely felt humanist message, the tragedy of the destruction of a family. It is very obvious that Kurosawa must have used Shakespeare’s King Lear as a source for this film but it must be noted how creative he was in combining Shakespearean tragedy with the Japanese style of drama and the artistic condition of modern man (during that time, which was probably before the Tokugawa period (personal research)). The plausible difference between the two could be that in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Kurosawa’s three brothers were really three sisters. In addition to that, it is most obvious that it is not Shakespeare’s style to be gory, grotesque, bloody or detailed in battle scenes but with Kurosawa, he expounded on the battle scenes (blood and all…) probably to emphasize more the whole preoccupation of the film. The word Ran in Japanese means “chaos”, “fury”, “revolt”. Ichimon in Japanese means “family” or “clan”, Ichi meaning “one” (taken from a Japanese dictionary). This may advocate a sense of unity particularly in the family. The “chaos” part may intend to show what happens when the unity of a family is destroyed or in this film, how the family was destroyed. What happens in the film is that the heritage of past sins of the father, Hidetora Ichimonji, corrupts the relationships between family members leading the sons to be against each other and their father. Other themes that may follow the main one may be loyalty and betrayal, appearance and reality (deceit), vengeance and forgiveness, and man’s nature itself. It seems that the artistic medium Kurosawa mostly used is the camera and image. It is the metaphorical quality of the image, scene, and the visual choreography of the entire work that the artistic achievement and meaning emerge (much like the movie In the Mood for Love, which has much symbolical scenes… also considering that it has less dialogue). An Example is when Hidetora illustrates the strength of solidarity by handing each son an arrow, which individually, can easily broken in two. However, when banded together, the arrows will not bend so easily. The images are of life; the characters, their emotions, their blood, all vivid, all real. At least that’s how it seems to me because the Japanese way of acting is so much different from that of the Hollywood or American style. Since Kurosawa based this on a pre-Tokugawa period (which denotes time of chaos---research), it may seem that for him, history works as a metaphor and symbol, with images and scenes reflecting the social and moral condition of man which may still be applicable at present. It is very apparent that Kurosawa spared no expense in producing the full emotional and dramatic effect of the film (although it was said that at first he couldn’t find any sponsor for funds in producing it). The colors of the army standards, the mob of the running troops, the advance of the rushing cavalry, the luster of the armor, the bright red color of the blood, and the architectural beauty of the castle or the setting itself all combined to produce an all-encompassing hallucinatory effect.
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