Kagemusha (1980) - The Criterion Collection

Synopsis

When a warlord dies, a peasant thief is called upon to impersonate him, and then finds himself haunted by the warlord’s spirit as well as his own ambitions. In his late, color masterpiece Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returns to the samurai film and to a primary theme of his career—the play between illusion and reality. Sumptuously reconstructing the splendor of feudal Japan and the pageantry of war, Kurosawa creates a historical epic that is also a meditation on the nature of power.

Cast

Shingen Takeda	Tatsuya Nakadai
Nobukado Takeda	Tsutomu Yamazaki
Katsuyori Takeda	Kenichi Hagiwara
Takemaru Takeda	Kota Yui
Masakage Yamagata	Shuji Otaki
Nobuharu Baba	Hideo Murata
Masatoyo Naito	Takayuji Shiho
Danjo Kosaka	Shuhei Sugimori
Masatane Hara	Noboru Shimizu
Kasusuke Atobe	Koji Shimizu
Nobushige Oyamada	Sen Yamamoto
Sohachiro Tsuchiya	Jinpachi Nezu
Zenjiro Amemiya	Kai Ato

Credits

Director	Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay	Masato Ide and Akira Kurosawa
Executive producers	Akira Kurosawa and Tomoyuki Tanaka
Executive producers–international version	Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas
Associate producer	Teruyo Nogami
Production coordinator	Ishiro Honda
Directors of photography	Takao Saitô and Masaharu Ueda
Cinematography	Kazuo Miyagawa and Asakazu Nakai
Art director	Yoshiro Muraki
Music	Shinichiro Ikebe
Sound	Fumio Yanoguchi
Lighting	Takeshi Sano
Costumes	Seiichiro Momosawa
Assistant editor	Keisuke Iwatani
Wigs and hairdressing	Shigeo Tamura
Makeup	Junjiro Yamada

Disc Features

AVAILABLE IN DOUBLE-DVD AND BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITIONS:

Restored high-definition digital transfer (with DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 soundtrack on Blu-ray edition)
Audio commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince
Lucas, Coppola, and Kurosawa, a 19-minute interview piece in which directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola discuss Kurosawa and Kagemusha
A 41-minute documentary on the making of the film
Image: Kurosawa’s Continuity, a 44-minute video piece reconstructing Kagemusha through Kurosawa’s paintings and sketches
Suntory Whiskey commercials made on the set of Kagemusha
Gallery of storyboards painted by Kurosawa and images of their realization on-screen
Theatrical trailers and teasers
PLUS: A 48-page booklet featuring an essay by scholar Peter Grilli, an interview with Kurosawa by renowned critic Tony Rayns, and biographical sketches by Japanese film historian Donald Richie (NOTE: Richie’s piece not included in Blu-ray edition)

From the Current

LAZY SUNDAY

Mar 14, 2009

Many of us have fond memories of sunny weekend jaunts to the country. But how many can boast spending those outings with Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa? Only Wim Wenders, whose hiccup-fraught trip to Coppola’s Napa Valley home in the summer of 1978 with the legendary Japanese filmmaker . . .

Kagemusha: From Painting to Film Pageantry

by Peter Grilli Mar 18, 2005

In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth—he painted . . .