Akira

[Kenny]

Hah, touché.

[OL]

There are Japanese versions of Star Wars

No no, other way around. Star Wars is the western version of a Japanese movie.


So sayeth Lucas.

[Kenny]

Yeah I totally forgot about that.

Fo shame. I need to flog myself to teach me a lesson:

phpBB [video]

[Raithos]

It was a heavy influence on him as far as there being a princess saved whose home is gone and the companions, but he's even said he exaggerated it in the past. I love the Hidden Fortress, one of Kurosawa's most enjoyable movies. But Star Wars isn't a western version of it by any means. I tried finding a video of one of the special features interviews but could only find this.

“I remember the one thing that really struck me about The Hidden Fortress,” he said, “the one thing I was really intrigued by, was the fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters. I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story. Take the two lowliest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view. Which, in the Star Wars case is the two droids, and that was the strongest influence. The fact that there was a princess trying to get through enemy lines was more of a coincidence than anything else. In my film, the princess is more of a stand-and-fight kind of princess. In the beginning, in one of the first drafts, I did have a little bit more of her and a Jedi, an older Jedi, trying to escape, but then it evolved into the story of Luke.”

The actual filming of it is where the two seem more akin, from the angles of each shot to the way he transitions between them. I think he captured the feel of the movie more so than anything. Its really awesome to watch The Hidden Fortress then episode IV back to back, you can notice a ton of it that way. There was one shootout scene my grandpa used to tell me "They took that straight out of (some old western)" but I can't remember what it was. He showed it to me once and it was almost identical.

[Axm]