Categories
Feature Four Frames

Realism and miracles: Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers

The anime film Tokyo Godfathers (Tokyo Goddofazazu, Japan, 2003) starts with children performing the nativity scene on Christmas eve and singing “Silent Night”. It is only after these comforting and delightful first shots that the whole setting is revealed – the interior of a church crowded with shabbily dressed men and women. The dark colours […]

Categories
Feature Four Frames

Heat as a psychological and aesthetic motif: Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog

Right from his directorial debut Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro, 1943), climate phenomena played an essential role in the films of Akira Kurosawa. In Sanshiro Sugata, for example, it is the wind blowing through the pampas grass, reinforcing the tension in the climactic fight scene between Sanshiro and his rival Higaki. In Kurosawa’s films, human drama […]

Categories
Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, 1948) paints a gloomy portrait of post-war Tokyo, a city in ruins where crime, corruption and barbaric behaviour abound and where people struggle against poverty, violence and tuberculosis, which was a death sentence at the time. The protagonists try to survive in a chaotic society marked by confusion and emptiness, but […]