Cinema Around the World: Japan

4 months ago 16th Jul 13:39

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 picture Rashomon, which explains the rape of a woman and the murder of her husband from the accounts of four witnesses, won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and marked the arrival of Japanese cinema on the global stage.

In 1954 one of cinema's most famous monsters made it onto the big screen for the first time: Gojira, better known in the west as Godzilla, which became a landmark picture in Japanese science fiction and special effects.

1961's Yojimbo, about a masterless samurai who arrives in a town where competing crime lords gamble to make money, heavily influenced the west as Sergio Leone remade the film as spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars.

However Leone and his production company failed to secure the remake rights to Kurosawa's film, resulting in a lawsuit that delayed Fistful's release in North America for three years.

By the eighties Studio Ghibli movies dominated the box office as the likes of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind were released, director Hayao Miyazaki would have this success in Japan for twenty years.

In 1997 Japanese filmmaking cemented itself further on a global stage when director Shohei Imamura won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the film The Eel, becoming only the fourth two-time recipient of the award.

As Japanese cinema has moved into the twenty first century Studio Ghibli reached the pinnacle of it's success in the west as 2001 picture Spirited Away not only broke Japanese box office records but it won the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, the first anime film to win an Academy Award.

In 2004 their next project, Howl's Moving Castle was also recognised by the Academy as it nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost out to Brit flick Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

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