User reviews

Another demonstration of Kurosawa's genius, his first colour film is a darkly surreal look into the tragic lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, essentially a series of interweaving vignettes depicting several groups of people eking out a perilous existence in a harsh and uncaring post-war shanty town. Swinging from comedy to tragedy and back, this film shows how people deal with the worst kind of life each in their own way, mostly retreating into themselves and living in the fantasy worlds of their own heads, withdrawing emotionally from those around them or drowning themselves in alcohol. Mixing kitchen-sink realism with Kabuki-esque theatrics, Kurosawa toys expertly with the emotions of his audience, drawing tears and laughter with equal deftness. A wonderful, draining experience.

The daily lives of those who live in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo, forgotten by time and society.

The film is a mix of several stories, from neighbors who share the same house (and wives), to others isolated from the world and life itself.

The narrative is interesting, it's like a case study of a community that even living in the worst conditions is able to dream and be happy, and even with almost nothing they cling to it with all their strength. It was Kurosawa's first color film, where the director clearly sees himself adapting to that format.

Some scenes are a bit too long, where almost nothing goes on and evolves, which can lead to a bit of distraction by the viewers, if they are easy to get bored.

This film needs to be talked about more when someone discusses Kurosawa's filmography.

This is similar to another one of Kurosawa's films 'the Lower Depths' but instead of using theatrical comedy, this film tends towards a more realistic drama to carry out its multi-character case study. Each of the slum residents, who again like in LD are from diverse backgrounds and each of them have a story to tell, and those stories range from heartbreaking to inspirational, though mostly their pasts are not revealed so the viewers had to take a wild guess on how each of them ended up living in the slums.

The plus point of this film against LD is that each character has their own arc so we can solely focus on the person matter without interruption from other characters; in LD everyone tells their stories in the same room which can be quite confusing at times. The minus point is that there seem to be a less clearer picture of the daily, mundane activities by the slum residents to carry on with their lives, aside from the scenes where the little boy begs for leftover foods. Overall, this is a very well-made movie that still put many modern movies of similar theme to shame.

If there was anything Akira Kurosawa did wrong in making Dodes'ka-den, it was making it with the partnership he formed with the "four knights" (the other three being Kobayaski, Ichikawa, and Konishita). They wanted a big blockbuster hit to kick off their partnership, and instead Kurosawa, arguably the head cheese of the group, delivered an abstract, humanist art film with characters living in a decimated slum that had many of its characters face dark tragedies. Had he made it on a more independent basis or went to another studio who knows, but it was because of this, among some other financial and creative woes, that also contributed to his suicide attempt in 1971. And yet, at the end of the day, as an artist Kurosawa didn't stop delivering what he's infamous for with his dramas: the strengths of the human spirit in the face of adversity. That its backdrop is a little more unusual than most shouldn't be ignored, but it's not at all a fault of Kurosawa's.

The material in Dodes'ka-den is absorbing, but not in ways that one usually finds from the director, and mostly because it is driven by character instead of plot. There's things that happen to these people, and Kurosawa's challenge here is to interweave them into a cohesive whole. The character who starts off in the picture, oddly enough (though thankfully as there's not much room for him to grow), is Rokkuchan, a brain damaged man-child who goes around all day making train sounds (the 'clickety-clack' of the title), only sometimes stopping to pray for his mother. But then we branch off: there's the father and son, the latter who scrounges restaurants for food and the former who goes on and on with site-specific descriptions of his dream house; an older man has the look of death to him, and we learn later on he's lost a lot more than he'll tell most people, including a woman who has a past with him; a shy, quiet woman who works in servitude to her adoptive father (or uncle, I'm not sure), who rapes her; and a meek guy in a suit who has a constant facial tick and a big mean wife- to those who are social around.

There are also little markers of people around these characters, like two drunks who keep stumbling around every night, like clockwork, putting big demands on their spouses, sometimes (unintentionally) swapping them! And there's the kind sake salesman on the bike who has a sweet but strange connection with the shy quiet woman. And of course there's a group of gossiping ladies who squat around a watering hole in the middle of the slum, not having anything too nice to say about anyone unless it's about something erotic with a guy. First to note with all of this is how Kurosawa sets the picture; it's a little post-apocalyptic, looking not of any particular time or place (that is until in a couple of shots we see modern cars and streets). It's a marginalized society, but the concerns of these people are, however in tragic scope, meant to be deconstructed through dramatic force. Like Bergman, Kurosawa is out to dissect the shattered emotions of people, with one scene in particular when the deathly-looking man who has hollow, sorrowful eyes, sits ripping cloth in silence as a woman goes along with it.

Sometimes there's charm, and even some laughs, to be had with these people. I even enjoyed, maybe ironically, the little moments with Rokkuchan (specifically with Kurosawa's cameo as a painter in the street), or the awkward silences with the man with the facial tics. But while Kurosawa allows his actors some room to improvise, his camera movements still remain as they've always been- patient but alert, with wide compositions and claustrophobic shots, painterly visions and faces sometimes with the stylization of a silent drama meant as a weeper. Amid these sometimes bizarre and touching stories, with some of them (i.e. the father and son in the car) especially sad, Kurosawa lights his film and designs the color scheme as his first one in Eastmancolor like it's one of his paintings. Lush, sprawling, spilling at times over the seams but always with some control, this place is not necessarily "lighter"; it's like the abstract has come full-throttle into the scene, where things look vibrant but are much darker underneath. It's a brilliant, tricky double-edged sword that allows for the dream-like intonations with such heavy duty drama.

With a sweet 'movie' score Toru Takemitsu (also responsible for Ran), and some excellent performances from the actors, and a few indelible scenes in a whole fantastic career, Dodes'ka-den is in its own way a minor work from the director, but nonetheless near perfect on its own terms, which as with many Kurosawa dramas like Ikiru and Red Beard holds hard truths on the human condition without too much sentimentality.

Various tales in the lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, including a mentally deficient young man obsessed with driving his own commuter trolley.

"Dodesukaden" was Kurosawa's first color film, and is notable for how well he transitioned. After the success of "Red Beard", it took Kurosawa five years before this film appeared. Very few of the actors from Kurosawa's stock company of the 1950s and 1960s were in it, and most of the cast were relatively unknown. "Dodesukaden" was unlike anything Kurosawa had made before. It gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film in the 44th Academy Awards.

Apparently it did not do well, though, and only added to Kurosawa's depression. The next film didn't come out for another five years, and his output in general greatly slowed down. This film is a prime example of an artist not recognized in his own time. Today Kurosawa is widely considered the greatest Japanese director (with the only real competition coming from Ozu), but apparently this acclaim came later, as he had trouble filling theater seats...

This one tends to get slighted by a lot of critics and Kurosawa fans, but I thought it was wonderful. It's an episodic multi-character study of Tokyo's poorest, who live in a city literally made from garbage. Though it looks like an A-Bomb just hit, the film has a sort of serene beauty thanks to the glorious use of Technicolor. The title comes from the sound made by the insane young man who drives an imaginary trolley through the slum. All the characters were wonderful and all the stories engrossing, but perhaps the most tragic concerns the man and his young son who live in an abandoned car. When not searching for food, they spend their spare time using their imagination to build their dream house. An emotionally moving and beautiful film.

Kurosawa, fresh into color, losses sight of his usual themes of truth and perception of reality and opts for a depressing take on Tokyo's slums. Kurosawa stretches for a style that was, in my opinion, his antithesis- that is to say, I feel as if Kurosawa wanted to make an Ozu picture. Poorly paced, poorly conceived, this movie is a rare dud in this auteur body of excellent work. While Ikiru, while being mundane and depressing, was still interesting and well paced, and while Stray Dog depicted the slums and social poverty of Japan without being too heavy handed or boring, do desu ka den has all the somberness that one could expect with its content, with none of the redeeming qualities of earlier Kurosawa pictures.

Be warned, this is not a movie that Kurosawa should be judged by.

In 1970, after a five year absence, Kurosawa made what would be his first film in color. Dodes' Ka-Den is a film that centers around many intertwining stories that go on in a small Tokyo slum.

The title comes from the sound a mentally retarded boy makes as he imagines he is operating a train. We slowly get to know more of the people in the small community, the two drunks who trade wives because they are not happy with the ones they have. The old man who is the center of the town who helps out a burglar that tries to rob him. The very poor father and son that cannot ever afford a house, so they imagine one up of their own. By the end of the film, the stories all come full circle, some turn out happy, others sad.

Since this was Kurosawa's first color film you can see that he uses it to his advantage and it shows. Maybe too much. This movie goes in many different directions and it's hard to settle down and get into it. But don't get me wrong, Dodes' Ka-Den may not be Kurosawa's best, but coming from the greatest director of all time, it's much better than 99% of today's films.

The title is onomatopoeic, the sound of a streetcar clacking on the rails. It is metaphoric for all that the people who live in the dump cannot have. The misery of those people is illustrated by the passing streetcar which represents the relatively unobtainable rich life of the middle class. The pathos of the little boy and his beloved yet sadly insane father is most touching. This was Kurosawa's first film in colour and he uses beautifully shocking hues, colours seen only in dreams. The movie is surreal and surpassing in beauty. The compassion for humanity is the underling force, but as always, Kurosawa is focused on capturing the beauty of the film. It is a masterwork by a genius of cinema.

This film is likely to divide people into those who love it and those who hate it. On the one hand, you have to admire Kurosawa's unflinching portraits of Tokyo's poor, and his gentle humanity. He presents those at the bottom in a simple way that reflects how all of mankind is in this set of overlapping vignettes, from the alcoholics and rapists to the steadfast and wise. We find ourselves disgusted with revulsion in one scene, and in the next moment empathetic to the pathos of dreams that will never come true. I enjoyed most the story with the young girl exploited by her uncle (and step-father), which had real tension. 'Dodes 'Ka-Den' reminded me of another Kurosawa film, 'The Lower Depths' from 1957, and just as in that film, amidst those living in squalor ('les miserables' if you will), there is a sage who exudes calm and wisdom. In this film, among other things, he helps a man he finds robbing him at night, and teaches another that he really doesn't want to commit suicide. There are Buddhist overtones here; the acceptance of people's weakness, the wisdom of seeing their positive sides (such as when the husband defends his rude wife in front of his colleagues), and the wisdom of compassion, and helping others.

On the other hand, the film is bleak, and at 140 minutes, becomes a little tough to sit through. You hate to think of others destroying an artist's vision, but it's hard to fathom the original 244 minutes. One of the more ponderous stories has a man and his son seriously ill from food poisoning, with both of them in garish makeup, and dreaming of a mansion on a hill. Kurosawa overplays it by going back to visions of the mansion several times, and I think it would have been much more powerful had this concept been limited to a single scene. Another story I wasn't fond of had a couple of drunken laborers swapping wives on a whim; while the intent may have been to shock, the entire story falls flat and is dated. Lastly, while there is symbolism in the mentally challenged boy believing he's a tram conductor (from which the title derives), this story is never developed and is also predictable.

I see both sides and end up in the middle in my review score. I would not want to watch the film again, and would only recommend it to a Kurosawa fan, which is not a good sign. The film is just a little too understated in its lessons for its length, and too uneven in its story-telling. The use of primary colors and simple sets may have been meant to heighten the feeling of desolation, but it also means a film with few moments of beautiful cinematography. It's sad to me that its poor reception, building on top of the 'Tora! Tora! Tora!' fiasco, was one of the factors that drove Kurosawa to attempt suicide the following year. If anything, it's interesting as a snapshot into the director's life, and his subtle philosophical message.

Let me start by saying I am a big fan of Japanese cinema generally and of Kurosawa specifically. I've seen many of Kurosawa's movies but for quite some time I resisted Dodes'ka-den. Based on the first half of the movie, my hesitancy about seeing it was well founded. I cannot comment on the whole movie because I became intensely frustrated and walked out around the midpoint.

Dodes'ka-den shows people living in a junkyard somewhere in Japan. The characters are all very broadly drawn with no nuance in their portrayal. In other words, they are almost pure types: There are the two laborers who get drunk every night to the dismay of their slatternly wives; the urchin living in a car with his architecture-obsessed lunatic guardian; the nasty drunk and his semi-catatonic daughter who makes artificial flowers 20 hours a day; the aggressive nut job who picks fights; the catatonic nut job who likes ripping fabric into strips; the obsessive brush-maker and his slutty wife; the teenager who thinks he's a trolley driver and his highly religious mother....All of these people are hopeless misfits and outcasts; they display their various pathologies and vices ad nauseum during the film, and it wears thin pretty damned quickly...

There is no plot; rather, the film consists of a series of vignettes of the characters being weird and/or nasty either on their own or in various combinations. The scenes alternate regularly from one person to the next and so the time passes slowly onwards. Realism isn't the point here, and there isn't a hint of narrative -- it is a fantasy, but to what purpose? The antics of the characters seem forced, mannered, repetitive and flat. There is no discernible social critique or message. I felt the movie was nearly a complete waste, much like the lives of the people it portrays.

Again, these impressions are just from the first half of Dodes'ka-den. Perhaps something happens later that rewards the endurance (or passivity) of the hapless viewer who sticks around to see how it all ends up. I felt only the vaguest stirrings of curiosity about the ending as I raced out of the theater.

If you are really patient or undemanding, or someone who wants to see absolutely every Kurosawa film, you might consider seeing Dodes'ka-den. But for those of you who have feasted on Kurosawa's earlier, better-known movies this title is likely to be a severe disappointment.

This is a movie about the small scale. What could be more fitting for contemporary Japan?

It's too easy to give Kurosawa his laurels on the strength of the Toshiro Mifune films, his great panoramas of mist and rain, and Fuji, always, shrouded, revealed. Dodesukaden (Dodeska-Den in the US release from Janus) brings you right up into the characters, right into their faces, their homes, their hovels, their dreams. It's billed as Kurosawa's first color film. The composition is phenomenal, really. Each shot, no matter how it moves or how it doesn't, is as wonderfully framed as a painting, as balanced as a beautiful face. The color saturation is complete, and yet they seem to float above the screen rather than clobber you or intrude.

I am astounded by this film. I've never thought of Kurosawa as someone who would know how to handle squalor and the rude life of the bottom of the underclass. I was wrong. There isn't a false step in this picture, from the use of color to the editing to the choice of music and the times it's used. It's as moving a portrait of a community as I'll ever see. Dodesukaden belongs at the top of the canon of Kurosawaa's work, with Ran and The Hidden Fortress next to it.

This movie, also known as Dodes'ka-den, was strange but interesting. Everyone had their own routine during the day and lived in such slums. I am not sure what to make of this movie in the end, what it's message was, or if it was worth watching it at all.

You may ask: why would you rate this film as a 7 out of 10? This film was Kurosawa's first film which was in cover and it being a commercial failure upon its initial release, with its reception in Japan sending Kurosawa into a depression and an attempt of suicide in 1971! Still, it continued to draw mixed responses and is considered by some to be one of the world's greatest films, even winning the Belgian Film Critics Association's Grand Prix award. I found the interplay of the characters enjoyable, although the question remains: what will happen to all these characters in the urban shantytown...and will anyone care for them?

Kurosawa is an interesting director whose style is bold and dynamic, strongly influenced by those in Western cinema but also being quite distinct. While this film was a strong drama, I liked his other films such as Rashomon (1950) which showed the same story from various viewpoints, Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortess (1958), and The Bad Sleep Well (1960), along with parts from Dreams (1990). Perhaps I will rewatch those films and review them on her in the future. With that, my review of this film comes to an end.

Dodes'ka-den is the monotonous sound of the trolley clickety-clacking down the rails; the mindless drone of a brain damaged or retarded "trolley freak" acting out his repetitive fantasy in the Tokyo city dump where he lives with his long-suffering mother; and, a cinematic masterpiece from Kurosawa.

The film doesn't have a traditional plot, it's a snapshot of the lives of a strange ensemble of characters who live in the dump. (In much of the third world today, municipal dumps are inhabited by poor people who scavenge trash to make their living. It wasn't that long ago that the same was true in the US, by the way. In the late 1800's the NYC dump was home to a population of desperate scavengers too.) Kurosawa does his usual brilliant job of creating a full spectrum of characters, except that here most of them are damaged and dysfunctional. Kurosawa is loved for his portrayals of honor, courage, and heroism. Some find it more difficult to appreciate his unblinking examination of loss, failure, wickedness and despair. This film lays bare some of the dark corners of the human heart, and presents the full spectrum of human reality, warts and all - but with an emphasis on the warts.

It's not a dark film nonetheless. These tragic blighted lives are shown with zen clarity and humor. We see a cross-section of human psychology, both good and bad, and the genius of Kurosawa makes it clear that each of us share the feelings and foibles of these Tokyo dregs.

There's an older Akira Kurosawa movie that Dodes'ka-den feels a little similar to. The Lower Depths also feels like a slice-of-life movie about working-class people and the challenges of getting by, but Dodes'ka-den did the premise in a way that I found more engaging. There are multiple characters whose plots are generally self-contained, though in Dodes'ka-den, they're all shown to live in the same area. Naturally, some characters are more interesting than others, but there weren't any sub-plots I could call terrible.

I also can't say it begins as a fun or light-hearted movie, but the emotional stuff did still sneak up on me. It's not a depressing or hopeless movie, but it's pretty real at points, and therefore feels very sad at times. Even sadder is the behind-the-scenes story about how the reception to this movie affected Kurosawa. I'm surprised it was ever widely disliked or seen as inferior to his other movies in the first place. It's not one of his very best, but it's nowhere near his worst, and I think overall, it's probably one of his most underrated.

Kurasawa said that this film is about the heart. IMHO, most people are unequipped to understand the film because they lack experience in thinking from a Buddhist perspective. This film begins with several minutes of chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo which is the mantra of all Nichiren Buddhists. We chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo because that is the primary method that we use to practice Buddhism. The practice is somewhat like praying and somewhat like meditation, but it is different too, especially because it is very high-charged. Nichiren Buddhists have found that this practice helps our lives in many unexpected ways. The words literally mean "Praise to the great law of the universe" that Shakyamuni Buddha expounded in The Lotus Sutra. Nichiren urged people to chant Nam-Myo-Renge-Kyo to develop their own Buddha nature and, cooperatively, to bring about world peace.

Nichiren Buddhists understand that chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo is a tool which each person can use to awaken their inner Buddha nature and experience energy, purpose and a joyful life. The reference to the children throwing things at "the trolley freak" could easily be taken as a direct reference to "Bodisatva Never Disparaging," an important legendary figure in Nichiren Buddhism.

I saw this film many years ago when I knew about Nichiren Buddhism but was not actively practicing. The movie haunted me for three decades. I wanted to see it again but was unable to find the title. I finally watched it again last night. I watched it with two questions in mind. My first question was about the man who ran the imaginary(?) trolley. It seems to me that he is representative of all Nichiren Buddhists in that he uses his practice of chanting to draw on a continuous supply of energy from his deepest inner resources.

There were other references to Buddhism that could easily be missed. One was the parallel between the man who tricked the would-be suicide into believing he took poison and the parable of the wise potions maker from the Lotus Sutra, who tricked his children into believing that he was dead in order to shock them into their senses. The wise man's statement at the end of that scene, when he said that there is a remedy for every poison, is an obvious statement of the Buddhist principle, "Hendoku Iyaku," which means "turning poison into elixir."

Commentators who should know have suggested that the trolley character represented Kurasawa. This should be no surprise. Kurasawa was demonstrating his own determination to keep going despite the near end of his film-making career after Tora Tora Tora. People who chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo know what it is like to vigorously chant your way through your problems. Daisaku Ikeda, Honorary President of the Soka Gakai, the worldwide lay organization of Nichiren Buddhists, says that the rhythm of chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, (which is a very physical practice), is like galloping on a horse. That is not a far stretch from the clickety clack of a train. In fact, I believe that the name of the film is actually a substitution for the phrase Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.

The other question I had on reviewing the film was whether the characters in the story are based on the psychological states of mind known in Buddhism as "ten thousand worlds in a solitary moment of existence" (Ichinen Sanzen). A simplified version of this is the ten worlds, consisting, in ascending order, of hell, hunger, anger, animality, tranquility, rapture, learning, absorption, Bodisatva (the state of caring more for the good of others than for the good of yourself) and Buddahood or enlightenment. According to Nichiren, most people in this despoiled age, known as the "latter day of the law," spend most of their time bouncing around in the lower four worlds and occasionally experiencing life in the fifth and sixth worlds. In the movie, it is obvious that several characters are living in a psychological state of hell. Many others are dominated by hunger, anger and the animalistic instinct to fear those who are more powerful and to pray on the weak. We all possess these potentialities but some learn how to cultivate states that are known as "the higher worlds." Two characters clearly exhibit this: the wise man who seemed to protect all the people in the shanty town and the Buddha-like character who loved and raised the children that his wife bore from other men. The trolley driver was enigmatic but he was also the most self-assured and perhaps the happiest person in the story.

Why did he pray for his mother to become smarter? Because if she became smarter, she would not be as bothered by little things that have no consequence, such as all the stupid people who made fun of him because, to them, his trolley was invisible.

This film is an allegory. It is about hidden meanings. I cannot say what was in Kurasawa's heart when he made this movie, but to me, it is a very clear affirmation of the optimistic message of Nichiren Buddhism. I would still like to know whether Kurasawa practiced Nichiren Buddhism. With such American cultural luminaries as Herbie Hancock and Tina Turner practicing Nichiren Buddhism, it would not surprise me if Kurasawa used this popular spiritual practice at some point in his life too.

(1970) Dodesukaden (In Japanese with English subtitles) DRAMA

Agreed with a critic somewhere that this is an experimental film for Akira Kurosawa and somewhat unusual which revolves several different characters coping living in a pre-war environment which were at the time labelled as the slums of Japan. The story begins right after the end of WWII focusing on a harmless abnormal teen filling his time by pretending to be riding on a train as a train conductor. As he's choo- choo choo-ing, he passes some other people who also are in some difficult times of their own, two drink to escape their problems, a young teenage girl allows herself to be exploited with deliveries by a young teenage boy who feels for the young girl and a couple of underage scroungers trying to provide for their parents as well as more characters particularly one wise old man. The movie which was supposed to be as long as 140 minutes in length, some of the scenes looked like it went on forever since viewers already knew what was going to happen. It does have it's moments but not enough to sustain memorable interest because by watching this, it looked like Kurosawa had a lot to say but as a result of time and money, this was all he could do, meaning that it looked like that it should've been a long running series instead of being just a two film! Nominated for an Oscar Best Foreign film!

"Dô desu ka den" is the first colored movie of Master Akira Kurosawa, and surprisingly is not about samurais, ronins, warlords or battlefields. It is inside a very poor community in a slum in Tokyo, where the dwellers are homeless drunkards, beggars, tramps, abused women, losers. I do not know the reason why Kurosawa selected this tragic theme and environment to put colors, but indeed they are very sad stories, some of them heart-breaking. I personally like the touching story of the boy and his father that dream with a house of their own and built by them; the story of the retarded boy that believes he pilots a train; the story of the man that raises five children as if they were their own sons and daughters; and the story of the young woman abused by her stepfather. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Dodeskaden – O Caminho da Vida" ("Dodeskaden – The Way of the Life")

The blend One Wonderful Sunday and The Lower Depths is Kurosawa's first trying of such artistic Hyperlink Structure and the dream-like color.

This is a heartfelt cinema, without any fancy charisma polishment.

The degenerate train boy is a sign of vision, the vision of dark, beautiful, twisted human life. Even though he didn't show up for more than 5 scenes, but he rambles across the whole group of lower-class life.

The nagging dreamy wanderer with a kid, the hysterical housewives and drunken husbands, the girl poorly raped by her relatives, the epileptic man with an abominable wife, the thief with a kind old man. All those colors and patinas are separate stories that lead toward the misery, it's linked together. All those people struggling their lives not to be hungry to death.

It could be the most obscure, inexplicable film to Kurosawa, but it is the most ambitious one, we perceive the humanistic rather than heroism, and it works pretty well with Kurosawa's bravura dream-like color handle. The color is close to the child-painted cartoon, which gives us a sign of the future and dream, the miss-en-scene is also unreal, making life here like an isolated island where there are only dreams and nothing.

The ending of wanderer is marvelous.

"Dodes'kaden" was released five years after Kurosawa's last movie "Red Beard" but in his epic body of work scale, if only a pure aesthetic level, the film could have as well been made fifteen years later.

What startles first is the absence of Toshiro Mifune (he wouldn't collaborate with Kurosawa again) and Takashi Shimura and all the stacked actors we were familiar with. All new faces: from the gentle husband with nervous mannerisms and his bullying wife to the elderly wise man who helps a burglar and gives a depressed man faith in life, from the father of five children who rumor says aren't his own to the Greek chorus of women doing laundry and gossiping about the mysteriously catatonic but oddly handsome artist, from the lively prostitutes to the drunkards who swap wives and philosophical comments on life... so many hidden depths revealing no less hidden depths about human nature.

The second shock is the departure from the black-and-white, Kurosawa was a painter deep inside so he doesn't take colors for granted and uses them to paint a rich palette of characters living in Japanese suburban slums, that and a certain personal vision combined with their own visions at times in pure expressionist tradition. It's surprising how we're drawn into these people by inhabiting their own world, starting with the 'local idiot' who spends the whole film mimicking both a trolley and a conductor, using the Japanese clickety-sound of "Dodes'kaden".

Once again, the line between lunatic is genius is thin: we get it that the boy is challenged but there's an interesting shift between the opening sequence showing his drawings of trolleys, all in rich and bright colors so typical of childhood, but relatively motionless. Once the kid starts to embrace his own poetry and gets his "trolley" ready, with a body language that evokes both Chaplin (for the gentleness) and Keaton (for the precision), the camera moves, faster and faster, we're taken to his ride and the film starts to drain the energy that will come at hand to understand the other players.

Yes, it's childish, weird and rudimentary but we're taken within that creative weirdness as if cinema was an art that called for such daringness and maybe Kurosawa is preparing us to something unusual like Bergman did with his "Persona". And like Bergman's film, the film opens with a mother-and-son moment, a prayer so "mechanical" that suggests the birth of cinema as an expresion that couldn't just rely on meditative and contemplative format but on sound and words. By the way, the first time I saw the film, I was immediately caught by that trolley Candide and going to the kitchen to get my dinner, I was repeating "dodes'kaden", that was almost 9 years ago but it was one of the two images that stuck to my mind.

The other image was pretty horrifying, I remembered a man and his kid with horrible greenish faces and a sort of nightmarish psychedelic imagery, the flipside of the uplifting and joyful spirit of our trolley friend. The father spends time dreaming with his kid about the house they'll built, he's a poet, looks like one, his vision of the big house is shown like some sort of imagery with a Hollywood score that kind of sets he distance with the Americanized version of poverty despite his Chaplinian roots, what awaits the kid is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film, that and the father whose traits gets maligned by gross lighting and outrageous make-up of color if he went maybe too far into his own imagery. When he got too close, I covered my eyes.

So the parallel between the poet father and the trolley kid is interesting, both try to drives themselves away from misery, one went too far he alienated himself (looked even like an alien) and one drove in a circular way getting back to the starting point, ironically preventing himself from delusion and giving a meaning to his life even within the realm of meaninglessness. Maybe there's the idea that in places where things don't move and are meaninglessness, only dreams can allow you to move as if in motion lied the meaning. The film starts with the trolley guy being trapped by many corridors and rectangular frames before finding his "freedom" outside. The kid and his father lived outside but that lack of commitment to a local emphasized their dream so much that it destroyed them.

"Dodes'kaden" is an assemblage of little slices of life that seem rather circular and motionless but together they create a whole of themselves where we feel like life is an eternal struggle between reality and the imagination. The kids' drawings are the convergence between both, how a simple trolley can look so colorful and motionless but so existent when we follow it through the kid's mime, that's the merit of the the local idiot who like the titular "Idiot" in 1951, shines a light on "normal" people. It's possibly because of Kurosawa's own sense of exaggeration that he could allow humanism implode from his portrayal of men whose life didn't go anywhere, apart from forging a sense of reality that could be compatible with their dreams.

It's just as if Kurosawa shows both the merit and the limit of escapism as if he was himself aware of the chances he was taking by making this film, whose failure lead to a suicide attempt, so you better believe the filmmaker who had proved the world so much had still to prove to himself. Perfectionist as always and humanistic, that goes without saying, so the film might disorient some new or old fans, cast-wise and style-wise, but if not his best, it's certainly his richest and deepest film.

And here ends my 1600th IMDb review.

For as highly esteemed as Kurosawa Akira was and remains, and very deservedly so, it's sobering to learn of the dire low point he was at in his career and life around the time this was made and released. For all the lauded classics he directed, sights unseen one has to wonder just what happened with 'Dodes'ka-den' that it had such a middling reception; how might it hold up years later? One readily discerns that it marks a significant stylistic departure for the filmmaker, what with there being no specific, single protagonist or linear narrative. Other filmmakers emerging circa 1970 found considerable success in taking the approach this does: offering a portraiture of the varied lives, hopes, dreams, troubles, and toils of a loose collection of people connected in some manner, in this case the fact of all living in a ramshackle shantytown. Titles of a similar nature continue to find success, with Paul Haggis' 'Crash' of 2004 being an approximate example. For Kurosawa, however, this was a bold risk far removed from his most renowned and celebrated works. I'm not saying that this in and of itself is a bad thing, but one has to consider if they're receptive to the approach, and there remains the question of how well it might be tackled by someone who otherwise operated in a more tried and true storytelling method.

There is absolutely value in the broad concept: showing the diversity of people within an area, how every life has a story worth telling, and how people can be interconnected. But strictly speaking, just how strong is the writing? How compelling are the life stories of fictional characters, presented as a cinematic treatment, especially when compared to the life stories of real people that foster a sense of empathy, understanding, and community? How rich are the scene writing and characterizations? How well is the concept executed with regards to sequencing and editing, and the direction that facilitates the fundamental tone and energy of the proceedings? All this, including the individual life stories, sounds pretty fantastic on paper, or at least sounds fantastic as ideas worth exploring. And very generally, I think Kurosawa's film is fine. Unfortunately, for a filmmaker who stunned again and again with many of his features, and who made many features I would unquestionably place on my personal shortlist of the best ever made, "fine" is a substantial, disappointing step down. The understated tone swings wildly, and there is weirdly little vitality to be found in the drama across nearly two and one-half hours. Some characters are so rich that we are easily invested in them, not least wise, humble Tanba; other characters are not so well written, and it's difficult to care about them as figures in a fictional tableau.

Some thoughts herein are downright brilliant, and others are ripe for storytelling; elsewhere the doing is passive and unremarkable, and I just feel sadly indifferent. With all this firmly in mind, I think the biggest selling point for this picture is the acting. At large everyone gives a swell performance to realize their characters, and it is perhaps regrettable that the writing and execution isn't more robust such that their portrayals would shine more brightly. In the very least, the potency of each tale, and of the acting, is diminished as the proceedings bounce back and forth. Akutagawa Hiroshi gives an incredible, haunted performance as Hei, and Naraoka Tomoko's turn as Ocho is flush with difficult emotions. Minami Shinsuke's depiction of upbeat Ryotaro buzzes with good vibes as he wears a happy face for the children he raises, a contrast with the underlying circumstances; Watanabe Atsushi is a steadfast anchor as compassionate Tanba; and so on. For as much as the actors do to carry the movie, though, it comes across that no one is receiving the full benefit of how their characters and narrative threads may have been handled; sometimes, by one means or another, we see acting or direction that just feels bizarrely insufficient. The viewing experience, in turn - however much we may admire Kurosawa, and find lasting worth in 'Dodes'ka-den' - simply isn't as absorbing, impactful, or satisfying as it could have been.

This is definitely well made in other capacities, including truly outstanding, imaginative art direction, detailed costume design, and sharp sound. I appreciate the cinematography of Saito Takao and Fukuzawa Yasumichi, and while Takemitsu Toru's music mostly sticks to the background it is roundly excellent, especially at its most subtle. And in total fairness, as the saga progresses and we head toward the last 45-60 minutes of the runtime, the course of events across each vignette indisputably tends to become more intensely dramatic - and outright dour, truthfully. As they do the piece at last achieves more of the meaningful weight and gravity we wish we had been getting all along; we do, in time, see the Kurosawa we know and love, in every element. It's so deeply lamentable, then, that for too much of the runtime, 'Dodes'ka-den' doesn't make the same impression we're used to. I'm given to understand that the man wasn't really even behaving like himself during filming, further reflecting the terrible funk he was in around this period. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that the filmmaker's poor mental health affected the script he penned with regular collaborators Hashimoto Shinobu and Oguni Hideo, and undoubtedly his direction. Perhaps we should be thankful that the feature still turned out as good as it did, imperfect and uneven as it may be.

I don't think this is bad. It remains worthwhile on its own merits, and if most anyone else had made it, we would likely be heralding 'Dodes'ka-den' as a splendid accomplishment. I think the end result suffered from a concatenation of bad circumstances, however, and having been made by one of the greatest directors in the world, it just altogether falls short of the immense level of quality we rightly anticipate. For what the film does well at its best I want to like it much more than I do, yet the problems with which it struggles plainly limit my favor, and at that maybe I'm being a tad too kind. I'm glad for those who find the sum total to be a more rewarding viewing experience than I do; I'm inclined to believe that unless one is specifically a fan of Kurosawa or someone else involved, this isn't something that demands viewership. Check it out, by all means, for it is is deserving in some measure. But save 'Dodes'ka-den' for a lazy day - and in an unlikely move for Kurosawa, maybe temper your expectations.

Various characters live in a rubbish slum village. Dim-witted Roku-chan lives with his mother and pretends to drive a streetcar. There is the elderly Mr. Tamba. Shima has his ticks and a combative wife. Katsuko lives with her mean-spirited drunken uncle while her aunt is in the hospital. There is always a gaggle of women at the communal water spigot. Some in the settlement struggle to make ends meet while others drink their lives away.

This is Akira Kurosawa's first colored film and he's using a kaleidoscope of colors. It's a rambling piece going from one character to the next without much connective flow. These are little vignettes of life. They are mostly unreal. Some are compelling and some are funny. Far too many ramble on and on. Without a plot or much drama, watching this becomes mostly an exercise in Kurosawa fandom.