- The Hidden Fortress (allthetropes.org)
Kakushi Toride No San Akunin (which translates approximately to “Three Bad Men of the Hidden Fortress”) is Akira Kurosawa’s first widescreen film. The film is a Jidai Geki with an interesting twist: rather than concentrating on The Hero, the film instead focuses on a pair of bickering peasants, with none of the other major characters putting in an appearance until twenty minutes or so in. Once the audience’s sympathies have been firmly attached to the peasants, the Hero, the Rebellious Princess, and the rest of the film’s major characters begin to show up. From then on, it’s a series of hairbreadth escapes as the protagonists have to travel through enemy territory to reach safety.
- Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement (YouTube)
Can movement tell a story? Sure, if you’re as gifted as Akira Kurosawa. More than any other filmmaker, he had an innate understanding of movement and how to capture it onscreen. Join me today in studying the master, possibly the greatest composer of motion in film history.
I have enjoyed the journey. The happiness of these days, I would have never known living in the castle. I’ve seen people as they are, without pretense. I’ve seen their beauty and their ugliness with my own eyes.
Princess Yuki, The Hidden Fortress
- Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales (ianridpath.com)
Star Tales grew out of my skywatching guides for amateur astronomers. As I came to describe each constellation, I found myself wondering about its origin and the way in which ancient people had personified it in mythology. Astronomy books did not contain satisfactory answers. They either gave no mythology at all, or they recounted stories that, I later discovered, were not true to the Greek and Roman originals. I decided to write my own book on the mythology of the constellations. The result was published in 1988. A revised and expanded edition appeared in 2018 by when it had grown into a comprehensive biography of the constellations from Ptolemaic times to the present: not just the 88 officially recognized figures which are described in Chapter Three, but also two dozen others that fell by the wayside, featured in Chapter Four. This web version contains additional information not found in the books, most notably details on how Chinese astronomers visualized the stars, a subject still poorly understood in the west. Further updates and improvements to these pages are made from time to time.
- The Hidden Fortress: Three Good Men and a Princess (criterion.com)
The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa’s first hit after 1954’s Seven Samurai, four years and four films earlier. It won even bigger at the box office and scooped up a handful of Japanese and international awards, proving that its director was not merely an art-house auteur but could fill theaters as well. The film’s popularity in Japan was instrumental in securing financial guarantees for Kurosawa’s own production company, which supported all his subsequent films up to 1970. The pacing and characters of The Hidden Fortress, its landscapes and epic feel, make it a great action film, and as Kurosawa’s first use of widescreen, it is one of his most stylish movies. With this film, the director’s artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies.
- The Hidden Fortress (Wikipedia)
The Hidden Fortress (Japanese: 隠し砦の三悪人, Hepburn: Kakushi Toride no San Akunin, lit. ‘The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress’) is a 1958 Japanese jidaigeki adventure film directed by Akira Kurosawa, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. It tells the story of two peasants who agree to escort a man and a woman across enemy lines in return for gold without knowing that he is a general and the woman is a princess. The film stars Toshiro Mifune as General Makabe Rokurōta and Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki while the peasants, Tahei and Matashichi, are portrayed by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara respectively.