Reference
FILM REVIEW
Film: Yojimbo. 4 stars for students 16+
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Veronica Kennedy, Middle School teacher, Winchester Thurston School.
Yojimbo was a film screened for my World Mythology class of 7th and 8th graders.
The film is part of the Samurai Trilogy of Director Kurosawa that is a wonderful example of cross cultural cross pollination. The film is heavily influenced by John Ford’s westerns, and was in turn the inspiration for the Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.
The movie was not a success with most of my students. While it has stood the test of time as a movie depicting the fate of the samurai who no longer has a lord to serve and is holding on to a vanishing way of life. The hero, whose name we actually never know, is the quintessential anti-hero who manages to have the “bad guys” destroy each other. An interesting interlude is the visit of an official who stays and consumes the community’s scarce resources, while contributing nothing.
The movie is suitable for college or high school, but fails to grab the 13 to 14 year old students. I believe that the pacing is slow for kids used to action sequences of great speed and lots of blood and gore. The movie also depicts a business with ladies of the night. There is no sex in the movie, and my students seemed oblivious as to what was being talked about, since the same family has a sake business. The interest in a way of life in a distant time and place is not strong and the movie elicits the “that is weird” comment frequently. We had interesting conversations about the difference in dress, food, social structure and political organization in Tokugawa Japan and how it changed in the Meiji Period.
The film is suitable for older high school and college students, and is a concrete example of samurai values in action. Yojimbo is of course great for adults
