Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) is one of the most influential films ever made, spawning numerous official and unofficial remakes around the world. One of the most ambitious of these is Samurai 7, a 26-episode anime television series produced in 2004 by Gonzo studio and aired in high definition in Japan on the satellite network Animax. Because anime commands a huge international audience, the series traveled far beyond Japan, via cable television and DVD. It aired, for example, throughout Southeast Asia and Latin American and aired in the U.S. in 2006 on the Independent Film Channel. The series melds Kurosawa's samurai period film with a science fiction setting and the free flights of fancy that animation enables and that the historical fidelity of Kurosawa's original inhibited. The series was neither the first sci-fi nor the first animated rendition of Kurosawa's tale. Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) transposed Kurosawa's story to interstellar warfare, and Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998) was an animated feature remake.
But Samurai 7 is more ambitious than these efforts, partly by dint of its length but mostly because of the intimidation that the anime filmmakers experienced in tackling the remake of such an imposing work. Their awareness of the long shadow cast by Kurosawa's classic drove them to work especially hard at their craft. The series demonstrates the powerful appeal of Kurosawa's narrative--the epic story of 16th century samurai warfare proved eminently adaptable into anime, one of the most popular genres of contemporary culture. Indeed, anime exists at what Susan J. Napier calls "a nexus point in global culture." (1) As she points out, anime is not only a major part of Japan's cultural export market but is also "a small but growing part of the non-Japanese commercial world, in terms of the increasing number of non-Japanese enterprises that deal with anime. These range from small video rental operations in big cities throughout the world to mail order houses up to and including such behemoths as Amazon.com." (2) And, one might add, such Western cable television enterprises as the Independent Film Channel. Furthermore, this nexus of popular culture includes such participant activities as cosplay at anime conventions, i.e., fans of the series attending costumed as their favorite characters. Photographs of fans dressed as the anime Kikuchiyo or Heihachi can be found on the Internet, and web-boards track fan discussion on the merits and appeal of the respective Samurai 7 characters. (See, for instance, http: / / manga, about.com / od / imagegalleries / ig / 2007-NY-Anime-Festival-Gallery / NYAF-07--Samurai-7.htm)
By entering this nexus of global entertainment as the inspiration for a successful series, Kurosawa's film lives on by acquiring a new and different identity. The title of the series identifies it as Akira Kurosawa's Samurai 7, surely an improbable possessory credit. Not only had Kurosawa long been gone when the series was planned and created, but the historical purist in him--that filmmaker for whom the samurai past was a living reality and for whom film was a means for exercising the historical imagination-would have been unlikely to embrace this transposition of the film. He initially planned Seven Samurai as a kind of quasi-documentary portrait of the rituals and routines of a day in the life of a Sengoku-era warrior. With its robots and flying spaceships, the anime series is a long way from the detailed texturing of a historical era that so distinguishes Kurosawa's film.
But Kurosawa's approval is now beside the point, especially since he has a possessory credit whether he would have wanted it or not. What counts is that the anime filmmakers felt cowed by the stature of Kurosawa's film and resolved to account for their temerity in remaking it by striving for excellence in the storyline, the casting, the art direction and the visual effects. Sound designer Yota Tsuruoka remarked on the "definite feeling of the magnitude of the title, of the magnitude of the image that people around the world have for the movie." (3)
The series' executive producer, Shoji Murahama, pointed out that a live action remake would probably turn out quite badly. "It would take a lot of courage and grace to do a live action remake. If someone decided to, it would require lots of money and talent. And even then, there's little chance of really capturing what made the original a masterpiece. I figured it might be possible to pull it off in animation." (4)
Animation would privilege a free adaptation that might honor the spirit of the work while taking it in a direction that would attract a young audience less likely to be enamored of an old black-and-white movie. With animation teenagers are "more likely to take an interest in the original work it's based on, more likely to come in contact with Seven Samurai. If we can make something that can play such a role, and can carry some of Kurosawa's original will and spirit, I think it'll be incredible." (5) Anime might furnish young viewers with a gateway to the classic, original film.
But in order to make the adaptation work as a television series, new narrative material had to be invented. Kurosawa's film ran just under 3-1/2 hours, while the 26 episode television series would be almost three times as long, with each episode holding around twenty-two minutes of story material. All of the familiar characters from the movie, of course, would appear in the series, including several of the prominent farmers, such as Manzo, Rikichi, and the old village elder who .lives in the millhouse. (Throughout the following discussion of Seven Samurai, I assume that the reader is familiar with film. Consequently, I will not spend a lot of time explaining who the major characters are and summarizing the major plot points.) Important new characters in the series include Kirara, a water priestess who accompanies Rikichi in the search for samurai and whose amulet has special powers that divine the moral fiber of prospective candidates. She also furnishes a love interest for both Kambei and Katsushiro a completely new plot element. In Kurosawa's original, Katsushiro, the youngest and most inexperienced of the samurai, fell in love with Shino, a farmer's daughter. Kirara is more self-possessed in a resonantly modern way than was the relatively passive Shino. But Kurosawa's Kambei was an aging warrior well beyond the appeals of young love, and it would have made no sense in the plot terms of his film for Kambei to have dallied with one of the village maidens. But in the anime series, considerable screen time is occupied by the love triangle among Katushiro, Kirara and Kambei, with Kirara's preference remaining ambiguous and her choice delayed for many episodes.
Accompanying Kirara and Rikichi on the quest for samurai is Komachi, Kirara's sister, a chirpy little girl whose inclusion in the storyline presumably is intended to pull in even very young viewers. She is the shojo character--the pre-adolescent girl--that is a recurrent and popular character type in the world of anime. She squeals, laughs, shrieks, and chatters in a running commentary on the action. Ukyo is another new character, the chief villain of the television series who has the audacity in the final climax of murdering Kikuchiyo, the most beloved of the samurai warriors. In Kurosawa's film, there really were no villains, at least none personified as individual characters. The marauding bandits were a generalized pestilence. A few were visually memorable, such as the chieftain who sported a helmet with enormous horns. But none were individualized as characters in the manner of Ukyo, who is a spoiled, self-indulgent son of the magistrate governing the city of Kogakyo, where most of the action in the initial third of the series takes place. Ukyo is decadent and cruel, and he eventually succeeds in becoming emperor, whereupon he puts into motion a Machiavellian plot to provoke war between the Nobuseri (a cyborg army), the ronin, and the farmers.
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Kogakyo is a new addition to the series, a fully imagined city with towering buildings, a high tech quarter, a business district and market, and low tech slums. The farming village was the primary location in Kurosawa's film, and the early scenes in town, when the farmers are searching for samurai, are unspecified as to place. By contrast, Kogakyo is not merely the principal setting of the first portion of the series; the climax takes place there, too, as the surviving samurai battle Ukyo for control of the city. A lengthy subplot involves Ukyo's desire for Kirara. He kidnaps Kirara and intends to exploit her in his harem. This depraved plan furnishes the material for numerous action scenes as Kambei, Katushiro and Kikuchiyo fight to free her. The necessity to invent new story material, sufficient to sustain a multi-part television series, with numerous narrative arcs, compelled these revisions and extensions of Kurosawa's storyline.
But the most substantive changes are those that have re-inflected the characters of the seven warriors. In Kurosawa's original, all of the samurai except for Kikuchiyo and Katsushiro were elder men, seasoned warriors most of whom were past the prime of their life. The portrait of aging adventurers helped to give the film its considerable melancholy. In the anime, by contrast, they are very young men, an obvious ploy to connect with the young audience demographic to whom the series was pitched and that is anime's most devoted audience. Kambei was mostly bald throughout Kurosawa's film, having shaved his head in an early scene to disguise himself as a Buddhist monk in order to save a kidnapped child. The cartoon Kambei, by contrast, has long, flowing locks of hair and a small goatee. And, like many characters in anime, he does not look Japanese. His facial features are Western. His hirsute appearance makes him both younger and more sensual than was Kurosawa's character, appropriate given his new status as a potential love interest for Kirara. On the other hand, the anime Kambei is more mono-dimensional than in the Kurosawa film in that he is consistently morose and often quite absorbed by the purity of his own unique melancholy. He is sad because he has lost so many battles and because the samurai world is in eclipse. The film Kambei, so memorably performed by Takashi Shimura, was a god among samurai, a supremely capable warrior, but he was also quite human in the variety of his moods and demeanors. He could speak soulfully about losing all of the battles in which he had fought but could also joke at the guilelessness of Katsushiro or the blustering of Kikuchiyo. The anime Kambei projects a far more limited emotional range, mainly a weltschmerz that at times verges on neurasthenia. Shimura's Kambei is more variegated and finely textured, but the simplicity of a limited emotional palette and broad character strokes is a part of the audience appeal that the anime artists were striving for.
All of the anime samurai, save for Kikuchiyo and GorMbei, have abundant locks of hair. Kyuzo has a big mop of bright blonde hair, giving him a decidedly un-Japanese appearance. Shichiroji, Kambei's buddy, looks like he is in his twenties, and Heihachi appears even younger, a veritable kid sporting a bomber jacket and goggles. Although we meet him chopping wood, as in Kurosawa's film, he looks like he would be more comfortable playing a video game than wielding a sword.
Gorobei's hair is closely cropped in a butch cut, and he appears at least a decade older than Schichiroji and Heihachi. He is also darkly completed, which serves to set him off racially from the other members of the band of warriors. Whereas Kurosawa's Gorobei was not well individuated as a character, the anime version not only has a vivid personality but he becomes one of the most well-defined and memorable of the samurai. When we meet him he is working as a sideshow entertainer, using his great martial skills to snatch arrows out of the air before they can strike his body. When Katsushiro, on a dare, fires an arrow at his head, Gorobei traps the flying missile between his hand microseconds before it can penetrate his forehead. With these skills, Gorobei emerges as one of the greatest of the warriors, alongside Kambei and Kyuzo. This martial prowess is a distinct difference from Kurosawa's film, where Gorobei's fighting skill is never vividly dramatized.
In some ways, Katsushiro closely resembles his counterpart in Kurosawa's film. The closer mapping in this case is certainly due to the overlap of Kurosawa's character with the ideal demographic for the anime series. Both iterations of the character are green young men, with a fighting spirit but no real experience in battle. And both are ready for love and find it quickly, although with different characters (Kirara and Shino). Later in the series, however, a rift develops between Katsushiro and Kambei because of Kirara, something that would have been unthinkable in the film because the young samurai was totally devoted to honoring his mentor.
Kyuzo and Kikuchiyo see the most striking and extreme transformations in their characters from film to anime. To audiences of Kurosawa's film, both men are the most popular of the samurai heroes, and the anime series has worked the deepest changes in their characters. Kurosawa's Kyuzo was a great man of mystery, a silent loner and a peerless swordsman, the one among the samurai who had the clearest claim to mythic stature. When he goes off alone to kill a few bandits and take their guns, no-one dares criticize him for ignoring Kambei's order that everyone must work as part of a group. When he is killed in the final battle, everyone on the field freezes, unable to believe that such a magisterial figure has been cut down by a fire-arm. With Kambei, he personifies the greatest virtues of bushido and cuts the most imposing of heroic figures. The anime version, however, is a professional assassin! He works for Ukyo and is dispatched to execute Kambei. When Kambei fights him to a draw, however, he promises Kyuzo a rematch but only after the mission to defend the village is complete, and Kyuzo agrees because he is eager to kill Kambei but must honor his wishes first in order to claim an honorable opportunity for a rematch. Thus, Kyuzo joins the adventure because he wants to slay Kambei! When he is killed near the end of the series, his last promise is to match swords with Kambei in the afterlife. Like the film's version, the anime Kyuzo is a master swordsman, but, in the new conception peculiar to the series, he is a mercenary and is allied with the film's chief villain. Although the travails of their adventure serve to bind Kambei and Kyuzo closely together as allies, and although Kyuzo will die in Kambei's arms, the television series makes him a renegade and an outlaw instead of the calm, reflective Zen master of Kurosawa's film.
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As startling as is Kyuzo's transformation from the disciplined and reflective swordsman of Kurosawa's film to a murderous henchman, Kikuchiyo's re-design is even more remarkable. In the series, he has become a robot, a mechanical creature that can lose an arm or even a head in battle and then have it reattached by a skilled mechanic. He is one of the mecha characters, a fusion of human and machine, that are ubiquitous in futuristic anime. As Antonia Levi writes, "Anime robots come in two basic forms: cyborgs and giant robots. The cyborgs are humanoid and have some human responses and emotions; they also operate more or less independently. The giant robots are large exoskeletal structures, usually fighting machines, which require one or more human pilots." (6) The Nobuseri use giant robots to prey on the farming villages, and as a cyborg hero, Kikuchiyo confronts and battles them.
As the series presents his backstory, Kikuchiyo has elected to exchange his human self for the superior fighting skills that the robotic body armoring pro vides. In the series' alternative iteration of samurai history, many warriors rise to a higher level of martial power by becoming robots. In this way, they become more fearsome fighters and deadlier adversaries. Indeed, the series' version of Kurosawa's bandits, who in the film were ronin just like the seven heroes, presents them as Nobuseri, samurai who have forged their bodies into a mechanical exoskeleton and who are now preying on the defenseless, just as Kurosawa's bandits had done. Thus, in the series, Kikuchiyo becomes a replicant of the bandits, a plot twist that is unique to the anime production.
This robotic Kikuchiyo does make a kind of sense in that Toshiro Mifune's performance in Kurosawa's film is so broadly pitched, so far over-the-top that it reasonably inspires an equally stylized rendition in the terms of anime. Mifune, of course, wasn't playing a robot, but the sheer physicality of his performance, the nonstop grimacing, scratching, jibbering and somersaulting underpins the bio-mechanical transformation that the cartoon series works upon the character. Thus, there is more of Mifune's performance lingering in the anime series than of any other actor from Kurosawa's film. And this is plainly evident in way that the cartoon Kiku--as he is affectionately known in the series--blusters his way into the adventure and fights as much with verbal bombast as with actual sword. Like Mifune, he carries a giant sword, except that it also works, when necessary, as a gigantic chain saw capable of cutting through metal, which he does at every opportunity. If Mifune was excessive in the film, the animated Kikuchiyo is equally excessive within the stylized realm of the series. And at every turn, the anime narrative insists on the human elements of Kikuchiyo's personality. Indeed, despite his mechanical body, he has the most forceful personality of all the samurai heroes. This emphasis bears out Susan Napier's observation that mecha narratives often focus on the human within the machine: "It is this contrast between the vulnerable, emotionally complex and often youthful human being inside the ominously faceless body armor or power suit and the awesome power he / she wields vicariously that makes for the most important tension in many mecha dramas." (7) Indeed, numerous story events feature Kikuchiyo interceding into a conflict with his buzz-saw sword and body armor in ways that provoke new and unintended catastrophes for which he profusely apologizes.
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In many respects, the plot of the anime series conforms very closely to the story of Kurosawa's original. All of the major events in the film appear in the anime series and even many of the motifs and images that helped to make Kurosawa's story so memorable. Heihachi's flag, for example, with its striking juxtaposition of characters for samurai and village and with the triangle representing Kikuchiyo's uncertain status mid-way between both worlds, appears in the series and is hoisted in a similar fashion above the farming village as an emblem of the alliance of samurai and farmers. The early scene in the mill, in which the village elder tells the farmers to hire samurai is ported over to the series as a nearly exact copy. The cartoon character even tells the same story about having once seen a village spared from bandit raids because that village had done the unthinkable in hiring samurai. The cartoon versions of ManzM and Rikichi quarrel over the elder's recommendation, just as they do in the film.
At times, the anime even replicates some of Kurosawa's memorable compositions. When Kambei accepts the farmer's pleas for help, he holds their rice bowl in the extreme foreground of the shot. In Kurosawa's film, this composition emphasized the ethical basis of Kambei's heroism, that is, his recognition of the reciprocity of obligation. The farmers had shown him their best effort by allocating their rice for the samurai while subsisting themselves on a diet of millet. By formally accepting the bowl of rice, Kambei is acknowledging his indebtedness to the farmers and their village. These relationships are less clear in the anime because the cartoon Kambei is a more monodimensional character and because he plays much harder to get than his filmic counterpart. He turns the farmers down several times and seems motivated by little of the humanitarian impulse that guides Kurosawa's character.
But while the series often hews closely to the narrative template of Kurosawa's film, the plot is also notably transformed. The anime is a science fiction story in which the villains fight with mechanized weapons and fly spaceships from which they launch huge and devastating war machines. So the anime samurai confront mechanized warfare and automatic weapons and do so with their swords. They deftly deflect bullets with their blades, and Kambei and Shichiroji are both skilled pilots. In fact, we meet them in the series prologue as they fly a spaceship into battle. While the series' emphasis on futuristic technology is a common feature of anime, it does tend to dilute the symbolic force of the opposition between gun and sword as it appears in Kurosawa's film. There, only the bandits have guns, and the guns bring the specter of modernity into the movie, that which ultimately defeats the samurai class. All of the samurai heroes who perish are killed by gunfire. It is this--the inevitability of historical change, the dawning of a modern world--that Kambei acknowledges in his memorable remark at the end of the film about the samurai having lost the battle and which Kurosawa acknowledges in the concluding camera tilt up to the samurai graves on the hill.
In the anime series, these perspectives about the nobility of failure are far more dilute and diffuse because they have little to attach to. By intermixing the historical frames--a medieval one consisting of a farming village subsisting on rice production and samurai fighting with swords and adhering to the tenets of bushido, and a futurist one in which samurai can become robots and fight with advanced weaponry--the anime series loses the organic connections in the historical framework that made Kurosawa's symbolic drama so powerful and persuasive. When guns and swords co-exist as extensively as they do in the series, there is no longer any meaningful opposition between them and therefore no historical vision of changing eras that the opposition can articulate. In Kurosawa's film, the climactic battle in the rain embodied the supreme heroic effort of the alliance between samurai and farmer, a unity in the face of the chaos represented by the bandits. In the series this is no longer enough. The battle in the rain occurs in episode 16 of the 26-episode series, and the true climax of the series involves a large scale assault by the samurai, flying in spaceships, on the city where Ukyo and his Nobuseri army are headquartered. This battle is rife with automatic machine-gun fire, explosions, dueling spaceships, and robotic warfare. Because so much is mechanized in this futuristic landscape, the anime Kambei's lament about the end of the samurai era becomes pure form, a plot convention without content.
Thus, when the anime characters do give voice to the historical themes of Kurosawa's film, the remarks have less force. In the prologue, as Kambei and Shichiroji fly their ship toward an overwhelming number of enemies, Shichiroji tells Kambei that this looks like a losing battle, and Kambei replies that it's all they have. Kurosawa took three and half hours of screen time to build toward this ironic perspective, whereas the series tosses it out, in an almost casual fashion, right at the beginning. The series telegraphs other components of the historical world that Kurosawa embedded in his drama in terms of image and action rather than explicit dialogue. When the farmers spill their rice, the anime Katsushiro gets on his knees to pick it up. When Rikichi protests that he ought not to do this, Katsushiro says that it's part of bushido to help others. This explanation about the tenets of bushido is evidently offered to help orient the young viewers of the series, who wouldn't be expected to know much about it. The comparable scene in Kurosawa's film has no explanation, and, in fact, Katsushiro doesn't help pick up the rice but, instead, tosses a few coins to the farmers and is visibly uncomfortable about even this level of fraternization with a lower class. The scene in the film that most develops the theme of samurai obligation to help others is the one that introduces Kambei, saving a child from a demented thief. Kambei shaves his head so that he will pass as a Buddhist monk and be able to get close enough to the thief that he can snatch the child. He does so successfully, but there is no dialogue in the scene about the meaning of bushido. The idea, instead, is implicit in the action. While the anime series ramps up the action--the thief there is hotwired with dynamite which he threatens to explode--it doesn't contain the moral force of Kurosawa's sequence.
The historical drama of the film, then, is translated in a fitful way to the cartoon series. Whereas Kurosawa's 16th century world seemed fully dimensional, the anime feels notably flatter. Partly this is a matter of the themes from the film translating poorly to a science fiction realm that incorporates vestiges of a medieval world. But it is also a function of the difference between Kurosawa's dynamic film style and the two-dimensional graphic conventions of anime. Kurosawa continuously dollies and tracks his camera into the depths of the action, taking viewers physically into the heart of things. He also uses editing in a manner that propels the story forward, quickly and with a narrative rhythm that is both economical and viscerally appealing. The anime series, by contrast, features mostly traditional cell drawings and the more restricted kind of movement that goes along with them. The camera cannot travel into the heart of a scene or convey the kind of exciting motion perspective supplied by Kurosawa's moving cameras. Computer animation is used sparingly in the series, so the kind of 3D effects that it makes possible are not often found. As a result, while the physical environments are rendered with great imagination, the sensuous and dynamic visual energy of Kurosawa's film is not.
The series' creators felt strongly that a modern audience would be unlikely to watch an old, long, black-and-white movie, however famous it may have been. Some of the production crew even confessed that they had trouble staying with Kurosawa's film. They saw their task in making an anime version to be a means of updating the film in ways that would make it attractive for today's viewers, some of whom, hopefully, might seek out Kurosawa's work after having seen the anime series. Samurai 7 proved to be a big hit for Gonzo, and it found a wide international audience as it went overseas to cable television outlets and to DVD and inspired anime conventions, fan behavior and Internet communications. Like Kaze no Yojimbo (2001), an earlier anime series based on another of Kurosawa's films, the Gonzo series is a very free adaptation, even a kind of riff on Kurosawa's work, but its success in Japan and overseas demonstrates the excellence of Kurosawa's narrative, which furnished the template for the adaptation. Seven Samurai perhaps has been remade more than any other film. Whether the animators are correct in their belief that an old, black-and-white movie will fail to connect with a modern audience cannot really be tested on the basis of Samurai 7 since the adaptation is nearly a horse of a different color. But their robust adaptation of Kurosawa's film helps to keep the original work alive and points to its enduring significance as one of the pinnacles of narrative art in the cinema. It also establishes Kurosawa as a presence within anime, one of the most pervasive forms of international popular culture. And that's not a bad place to find this old master residing.
Notes
(1) Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 22.
(2) Napier 8.
(3) "Samurai Resurrected: Interview with Sound Director, Yota Tsuruoka," insert notes accompanying disk four of the series DVD set.
(4) "Samurai Resurrected: Interview with Executive Producer ShMji Murahama," insert notes accompanying disk one of the series DVD set.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Antonia Levi, "New Myths for the Millennium: Japanese Animation" in Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. John A. Lent (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001): 44.
(7) Napier 87.
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