“A cinematic sensei to generations of directors”: Wes Anderson’s favourite Akira Kurosawa movies
The search to find any high-profile director who isn’t influenced or inspired by Akira Kurosawa in one way or another would be as exhaustive as it would be fruitless, with the legendary Japanese auteur casting a shadow over cinema that spans generations.
Virtually every nameworthy auteur of the last half-century has credited Kurosawa as a touchstone, a cavalcade of greats that includes Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick.
They may operate at completely different ends of the stylistic spectrum, but Wes Anderson is no different, and the feature from his back catalogue that channelled Kurosawa most directly was typically offbeat. Stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs doesn’t bear any obvious similarities with the maestro’s work, but that was to be expected from a filmmaker as distinctive and singular as Anderson.
In fact, Anderson admitted that his 2018 genre-bender was “less influenced by stop-motion than it is by Akira Kurosawa”, a director he also described as “a cinematic sensei to generations of directors”. However, everyone has their favourites, so which ones make the cut for the Academy Award winner?
Anderson curated a programme of Kurosawa movies being screened at the Metrograph cinema in New York City, and it should have been obvious, given that he was the mastermind behind Isle of Dogs, that 1949’s crime drama Stray Dog made the cut. Not that they’ve got much in common beyond the canine nomenclature, but it is at least in sync with the idiosyncratic favourite naming the icon as the biggest influence on Isle of Dogs.
The previous year’s Drunken Angel was also included, although it would be safe to say Anderson has never made anything comparable to Kurosawa’s chaotic crime story of an alcoholic doctor who despises the Yakuza embedding himself ever deeper into the organisation after diagnosing Toshiro Mifune’s gangster with tuberculosis.
Anderson’s Isle of Dogs didn’t take its cues from any Kurosawa film in particular, however, but his career-long recurring themes and motifs. Loyalty, honour, discipline, the relationship between mentor and protégé, and the emergence of a hero to take a stand against oppressive forces are intrinsic to the latter’s work, and the former does a stellar job incorporating them into an animated canine adventure.
As can be inferred from the title, Stray Dog isn’t literal, but it does find Mifune’s detective encountering the strays of the world as he digs into Tokyo’s criminal underbelly to find his stolen gun. Isle of Dogs, meanwhile, is much more literal in dealing with that same theme by unfolding in a world where exile and abandonment have become an accepted part of everyday life.
Anderson and Kurosawa may not be cut from the same cloth, then, but his fingerprints have rarely been clearer on any film than they were on Isle of Dogs.
Wes Anderson’s favourite Akira Kurosawa movies:
- Stary Dog
- Drunken Angel
