Kagemusha: From Painting to Film Pageantry
By March 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 Read more »
- Japan
- 1980
- 180 minutes
- Color
- 1.85:1
- Japanese
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 & CreditsOpen
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)
