KAGEMUSHA: Akira Kurosawa's re-evaluation of the Samurai genre and its influence on Star Wars

KAGEMUSHA - 20TH CENTURY FOX

It’s well-known that Akira Kurosawa films such as The Hidden Fortress influenced George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy, but Kurosawa’s impact reverberates to this day. In his 1980 film, Kagemusha, the directoroffers a re-evaluation of the samurai genre, the genre that made him famous. Similarly, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is a re-evaluation of the previous Star Wars films.

Thematically, The Last Jedi is a film that urges its audience to let go of the past, meaning the previous instalments of the franchise. From the famously pessimistic Luke Skywalker to the end of the film, which features the resistance cutting their losses and escaping to fight another day, it is one of the bleaker entries in the Star Wars universe. 

Kagemusha, while not as full of failure for most of the runtime, provides a much more downbeat ending than other Kurosawa films. The central ruse is discovered, the warlord’s armies are destroyed, and Kagemusha himself is killed. Where many of Kurosawa’s previous films had the “good guys” winning, this one casts judgment on the “good” side for being deceptive and hot-headed. The film also delivers the message that, like the continued existence of Shingen, samurai films are a fraud. 

This is another crucial similarity to The Last Jedi. In the first scene of the film Luke when handed his lightsaber, tosses it behind him in a gesture that declares the film does not care about the past. Luke tells Rey that the Jedi are a sham, and the film goes on to prove this when Benicio del Toro’s DJ character shows Rose and Finn that the arms dealer they thought was evil made his money selling weapons to both the First Order (bad) and the Resistance (good). In DJ’s words, “Good guys, bad guys, made-up words.”

Kurosawa’s film carries that same philosophy. The audience only thinks that the side they are watching is the “good” one because they get most of the screen time. In fact, Kurosawa provides little reason for the other warlords to be called “bad” or Shingen’s clan to be “good”. Its rather ambiguous which side is right, and it may be that none are. As far as a viewer can tell, the only things the warlords are fighting over are money and power. The first scene in the film also makes it clear that it does not make sense for the thief to be hanged for stealing a few coins while Shingen himself has “killed hundreds and robbed whole domains.” The film’s morality is murky, to say the least.

Stylistically, The Last Jedi borrows many of its hues from Kurosawa’s film. The bright red plates of the samurai-inspired Praetorian Guard are clearly Kagemusha-esque, and the film is, in fact, full of that bright shade of red, which is almost the same shade of the blood and many of the banners in Kurosawa’s film. Red, the colour often associated with anger, an emotion that leads to impulsiveness, weighs heavily over both films. In Kagemusha, Katsuyori’s impulsive decision to attack at the end of the film ultimately dooms his army. While in The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren’s perpetual anger is one of the traits that firmly positions him as the story’s villain. 

Kagemusha’s influence on Star Wars canon does not stop at live-action films. The film directly inspired an episode of the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The film’s title translates to “the shadow warrior”, which is also the title of a Clone Wars episode about a character, Jar Jar Binks, who poses as another character in a much higher position in order to stave off conflict. 

It’s no secret that Kurosawa influenced Star Wars, but it is telling that he managed to continue doing so even after the release of the first two Star Wars films. Almost forty years after the release of Kagemusha, an entirely new generation of filmmakers used it as their inspiration for a brand-new Star Wars film. Kurosawa’s influence on Star Wars did not stop at George Lucas, and it likely will not stop at Rian Johnson either, as long as his films continue to inspire. 

What makes the story of Kagemusha’s influence on Star Wars even more complex is the fact that Star Wars influenced Kagemusha. Not through any of the franchise’s films, but through their creator. Kurosawafamously could not procure the rest of the budget needed to complete his epic. Upon learning of this fact, Kurosawa admirers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola lobbied Twentieth Century Fox into giving Kurosawa the money he needed.

The relationship between Star Wars and Kurosawa is cyclic in nature. Kurosawa influenced Star Wars, Star Wars helped Kurosawa, and Kurosawa even influenced an animated show. Kurosawa and Kagemusha are nearly as ingrained in the DNA of Star Wars as George Lucas’ original Star Wars.