Storyboarding the Worlds of Akira Kurosawa
By C.B. Liddell
Storyboarding the Worlds of Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa is the Sir Walter Scott of Japan. Just as the Scottish writer created a fascinating picture of Scotlandone based on romantic figures of highlanders and windswept cragsthat defined his nation for the rest of the world, so the Japanese director created a colorful vision of his countryemploying feudal samurai and richly painted geishathat has been emblazoned in our minds. Kurosawas visions of our world, extant and imagined, were on display at a recent exhibition of his storyboard illustrations held at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo.
Although he may have been Japans greatest movie director, it seems that Kurosawa was also very much a frustrated painter, as the artistic qualities of these storyboards make clear. He also painted, sketched, and crayoned a great deal, Seiju Toda, the shows curator, tells me. For his 1985-movie Ran, he reportedly created over 800 full-color storyboard images that meticulously worked out details of costume and armor as well explored the visual language of the period.
Wherever he went, he always carried his painting instruments with him, Seiju Toda points out. Even when he was staying in ryokans. I think its clear he intended these pictures to exist as paintings because he signed so many of them.
While normal storyboard illustrations tend to be precise pictures, devoid of extraneous detail, drawn by professional graphic artists to assist camera location and actor positioning, Kurosawas illustrations are vivid, expressive, and rich in color and emotive details. These qualities give viewers a foretaste of the movies atmosphere, such as the lush hues of The Field: A Rainbow Goes Away from Me from his 1990-movie, Dreams, or the dramatic heroism of the soldier pierced by a tangle of arrows in Fall of the Third Castle: A Hedgehog from Ran.
As a young man, Kurosawa greatly admired Vincent van Gogh and dreamt of becoming an artist. He had to push his painterly aspirations firmly to one side as he worked his way up in the Japanese movie industry of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the beginning, it seems he relied little on storyboards, and there are no examples of storyboards earlier than Kagemusha (1980). It was this movie, however, that was to prove the catalyst in combining his continued, if youthful, interest in painting with his professional identity as a director.
He painted many storyboards for this movie because it had a very big budget and, at first, the movie company didnt agree with his ideas, Toda recalls. He used the storyboards to convince them it would work. Also, famous friends and admirers, like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola in America, were so impressed by the storyboards that they helped to get American financing and distribution for the movie.
Although the storyboards at the exhibition were produced when Kurosawa was already an old man, they retain the influences of his youth. I Fly: My Shadow Calls Me an illustration for a sequence that was later dropped from Dreams recalls the lyrical, dreamlike quality of Marc Chagall, while Village of the Watermills: An Old Man of A Watermill from Dreams shows much of the intensity and expressiveness of color for which van Gogh was justly famous.
A special feature of the exhibition was that many of the storyboards were enlarged to a screen size of several square meters. "Although these works became his paintings, they also served as storyboards, Toda explains. In his mind, they must have been screen-sized. Thats why we decided to enlarge them to screen size."
One of the most attractive of these enlargements is The Roof of Ashinoya House: Starry Sky after a Storm from The Sea Watches, in which two kimono-clad figures look up at the sky while the dark flood waters lap at the eaves of their house. That this movie was successfully filmed in 2002, four years after the death of Kurosawa, is testament to the power these images have in communicating the vision of this great artist and director.
Akira Kurosawa Drawings ran from December 10, 2004 to January 10, 2005 at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo.
