See also individual entry for King Lear

Ran is a Japanese version of Shakespeare’s King Lear that is different enough to make it worth treating as a separate film. Directed by Akira Kurosawa (1910–98) and released in 1985, it featured Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora Ichimonji; Akira Terao as Taro Takatora Ichimonji; Jinpachi Nezu as Jiro Masatora Ichimonji; Daisuke Ryû as Saburo Naotora Ichimonji; Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede; and Yoshiko Miyazaki as Lady Sue. It is generally considered a film masterpiece. For Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth, see the entry for Throne of Blood.

Brian Parker, in an essay from 1986 titled “Ran and the Tragedy of History,” reported that Kurosawa’s belief that Shakespeare is “always too wordy”; noted that Kurosawa’s characters “speak only when they cannot communicate in other ways, and then in language that is terse and almost brutally functional”; and observed that Kurosawa thought “that Ran’s relation to King Lear is really secondary” (415). Commenting that Kurosawa’s “view of history is very close to Shakespeare’s, in fact; he sees it as an endless chain-reaction of wars and depositions,” Parker nonetheless quoted Kurosawa as saying that “What has always troubled me about King Lear … is that Shakespeare gives his characters no past. … [Therefore, in] Ran I’ve tried to give Lear a history. I try to make clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of bloodthirsty savagery. Forced to confront the consequences of his misdeeds, he is driven mad. But only by confronting his evil head on can he transcend it and begin to struggle again toward virtue” (416).

In an essay from 1987 titled “‘King Lear’ and Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’: Splitting, Doubling, Distancing,” Christopher Hoile wrote that “the camera in Ran is an impassive and literally distant observer. This physical distance is a correlative of the emotional distance Kurosawa creates on the level of plot by his peculiar splitting and blending of Shakespeare’s characters. This causes a shift of focus whose object becomes clear only at the film’s conclusion. As a result,” Hoile thought, “while Kurosawa’s Lear, like Shakespeare’s, unleashes the discord (ran) of the title by dividing his kingdom, he is not the center but only one side of a balanced equation, and so, unlike Shakespeare’s Lear … he does not experience the full extent of the evil he has unleashed. As the title would indicate, it is the discord in general, not Lear in particular, that is important. Consequently, the vision of the film, as it concerns Lear, is ironic rather than tragic” (29).

In his book from 1989 titled Shakespeare, Cinema and Society, John Collick wrote that in this film Kurosawa “has made Lear into the cruel warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, and both films portray the horror of treachery and bloodshed,” but he thought that “Ran, despite the carnage and suffering, ends with an optimistic critique of the traditional concepts of transcendence, insanity and forgiveness” (181). Collick saw Ran as “an open-ended film that acknowledges the potential for change,” although he thought it “suffers for its optimism,” especially in contrast to Kurosawa’s striking (if pessimistic) version of Macbeth titled Throne of Blood (186–87).

Alexander Leggatt, discussing the film in his 1991 book on performances of Shakespeare’s play (172–99), wrote that “Ran is usually discussed as an adaptation of King Lear, and given the closeness in story line and occasionally in dialogue, the temptation to do so is obvious. Yet it is worth stressing that Kurosawa’s thinking began not with Shakespeare but with a Japanese source, the legend of Monotari Mori (1495–1571), ‘whose three sons are remembered in Japan as the ideal of family loyalty’” (172). Leggatt reported that the film had been considered by some (in Japan) as insufficiently Shakespearean and by others (in the West) as a flawed depiction of Japanese values and history. Leggatt himself called it “a story of war”; noted its focus on “three sons, not three daughters” (175); and offered a long discussion of its specific plot. He quoted one critic as saying he was “‘not moved’” by the film; another as saying that the work was not particularly interested in humanity; another as complaining that “our inability to see faces means that the characters become ‘mere types’”; and another as regretting that Kurosawa had “abandoned ‘social and cultural analysis’ in favour of ‘metaphysics.’” Challenging a Buddhist reading by noting the film’s stark interest in “human suffering,” Leggatt admire Kurosawa’s use of “vivid detail” and bold colors (195).

In a 1991 essay titled “The Use of ‘Mise-en-Scène’ in Three Films of ‘King Lear,’” R. B. Parker suggested that Kurosawa disagreed with Peter Brook and Grigoriy Kozintsev, who also made films of Lear, by choosing to give Ran a very precise historical setting; by choosing to film in color; and by choosing to emphasize visual beauty (76). Parker argued that “Kurosawa’s concern in Ran is with man’s relation to society and society’s to Nature (and, beyond that, possibly to the divine); he is not at all concerned with existential consciousness, the problem of ‘Who can tell me what I am?,’ which is so central to Brook’s interpretation and scenography.” Parker thought that “Kozintsev stands somewhere between them, including part of both his colleagues’ concerns but focusing uniquely on Lear’s link with the common people of his realm, which the other two scenographies ignore completely. In fact when Kurosawa’s co-scenarist, Hideo Oguni, regretted that Ran showed no trace of the life of ordinary people, Kurosawa’s disconcerting reply was, ‘It is not a story that concerns peasants’” (77).

Discussing the film in a 1994 essay titled “The Bow Is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawa’s Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire,” Samuel Crowl reported that “[i]nitial critical reaction to Ran has not been as positive as the response to Throne of Blood, which many, including Peter Brook, consider to be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made” (110). According to Crowl, Ran deals with “three worlds being turned upside down.” The first involves “Hidetora’s personal journey from the height of his society to its depths (from the magnificent mountain vistas of the film’s opening scenes to the death valley he now walks through littered with the bodies of slain warriors).” The second shows how “the empire he created is now consumed by internecine civil war.” Finally, “sandwiched between the collapse of his personal and public worlds we have the potential emergence of a powerful political female. The daughter of Hidetora’s former rival has seduced and psychologically disarmed his son, now the titular head of his father’s fallen world” (114).

Meanwhile, in another essay from 1994 (“Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran”), Robert Hapgood situated Ran in its Japanese contexts (235–36); focused on antecedents to Lady Kaede; and wrote that “Ran is very much of its historical moment” (237). Also, Michael Manheim, in the 1994 essay titled “The Function of Battle Imagery in Kurosawa’s Histories and the Henry V Films,” asserted that “Kurosawa’s approach to war in any age appears pretty clearly that of a confirmed pacifist” and claimed that “in Ran that pacificism is simple and beautiful and is emphasized by juxtapositions of scenes of glory with those of horror” (130).

Julie Kane, in a 1997 essay titled “From the Baroque to ‘Wabi’: Translating Animal Imagery from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ to Kurosawa’s ‘Ran,’” suggested that “[o]ne comes away from viewing [Ran] … with the distinct impression that Shakespeare’s poetry has been jettisoned in favor of visual imagery.” She reported that “[s]creenwriters Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Ide Masato have seemingly pared dialogue to the minimum necessary to advance the plot. Where Shakespeare’s King Lear takes sixty-nine lines of gorgeous blank verse to divide up his kingdom, for example, Kurosawa’s Hidetora spends only a few staccato sentences. The viewer’s impression of linguistic minimalism in Ran,” she continued, “is borne up by former visual artist Kurosawa’s reputation for distrusting the spoken word …. Therefore, it comes as a surprise to discover that Kurosawa’s screenplay does, in fact, retain much of the poetic ‘infrastructure’ of King Lear. The same thematic imagery patterns of birds, beasts, and insects which run like dark rivers of the unconscious through Shakespeare’s blank verse are present in Kurosawa’s choppy dialogue,” but they are “transformed from a western to an eastern cultural context. Helping to obscure this parallel is one overriding cultural difference: Shakespeare layers his similes and metaphors one upon the other with a glorious European Renaissance love of excess detail, while Kurosawa strives for the austere Japanese aesthetic ideal of wabi” (146).

In his 1999 book A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, Kenneth Rothwell wrote that in Ran, “Kurosawa synthesizes the cultural codes of East and West to unify a marvelous grab-bag of bits and pieces from King Lear,” using “bold and vibrant color reflecting sunshine that even at the cataclysmic end tinges the image of the Buddhist Amithab [infinite light] with a golden sheen. The sumptuous costumes of the ancient samurai set against the green hills make for a visual feast at odds with the grim realities of Lear’s fate, though the greenery underscores the ironic gap between the glory of nature and the wretchedness of man.” According to Rothwell, “The multiple alterations in plot and character mainly stem from a desire to blend Japanese with western cultural codes. The characterization of seventy-year-old Hidetora (King Lear) aligns him more with sadistic Cornwall than with doddering Lear, a version of the old king who is plainly not ‘More sinn’d against than sinning’” (197).

Kathy Howlett, in her book from 2000 titled Framing Shakespeare on Film, offered a long discussion of the details of Ran before mentioning that it is a version of Lear. She stressed its emphasis upon spatial struggle and representation; said it charted “geographic as well as ideological space”; and asserted that “Hidetora, like Lear, steps outside the boundaries of the sign-system that has defined and limited him and discovers the vulnerability of his own identity” (126). Also in 2000, Daniel Rosenthal, in Shakespeare on Screen (66–67), praised the film’s “unforgettable images,” its “dazzlingly photographed tragedy,” its “astonishing … mastery of large-scale action,” and its skillful adaptation of Lear so as to “reflect key aspects of Japanese culture” (66).

Zvika Serper, in an essay from 2000 titled “Blood Visibility/Invisibility in Kurosawa’s Ran,” wrote that the film’s emphasis on blood is “justified in that it reveals a unique manifestation of a dialectical depiction of the visibility or invisibility of the main characters’ blood. Kurosawa makes contradistinctions between blood invisibility of characters who obey their giri (‘social obligation’) and the highly visible blood of those who disobey it.” Serper explained that giri, “the most quintessential aspect in Japanese society, is the obligation to act according to reciprocal relations with particular persons with whom the individual has certain social relations. This is a social and moral code that compels the society’s members to respond to this obligation even when their natural inclination (ninjé) is to act differently. The visual contrasts of the blood appearance,” Serper thought, “create together a complementary reinforcement, resulting in balanced harmony” (149).

In an essay from 2006 titled “Brushing Up Shakespeare: Relevance and Televisual Form,” Robert Pearson and William Uricchio discussed such topics as Ran’s opening use of vivid primary colors (160), its emphasis on isolation (162), the ways “buildings and their destruction” are relevant to the theme of home and homelessness (163), and the film’s depiction of “various households” (164).

In his 2008 book Shakespeare and Film (44–47), Samuel Crowl noted that the word “Ran” means “‘chaos’ in Japanese” (45). He described this film’s adaptation of the plot of Shakespeare’s play (45–47) and said the film depicts the triple downfall of the protagonist, his empire, and his culture (47).

Yvonne Griggs, in her 2009 study titled Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s King Lear, wrote that “Kurosawa’s film successfully melds the literature of East and West, the film genres of the jidai-geki epic … and the mainstream western, and the cultural/stylistic motifs of Japanese cinema and theatre with the codes and conventions of Hollywood.” She stressed its status as a work independent of Lear; noted Kurosawa’s own emphasis on its distance from Lear; reported criticism of Kurosawa for being too interested in Western culture; and stressed the film’s visual beauty while reporting that its beauty had been criticized for detracting from its potential “psychological energy” (81). Noting its “archetypal characters” and “classical story design,” Griggs commented that “despite the highly stylised, artistic nature of its images, its deployment of visual, structural and ideological motifs readily associated with the western genre ensures its accessibility to a global mainstream audience” (82). She defended it from charges that it is “merely an exercise in visual excess”; noted its interest in (but also critique of) Japanese heroic values (83–84); and wrote that “Kurosawa creates a world in which questions of honour and loyalty are played out against a backdrop of epic proportions, and in which violence and conflict are the norm” (86). According to Griggs, the film implies the fragility of masculinity (89) and makes Hidetora resemble an “archetypal western hero.” She called him “a powerful war lord rather than a doting father”; compared and contrasted him with Lear (91); and saw both in Shakespeare’s play and Kurosawa’s film an interest in “the demise of patriarchy” (97). She especially emphasized Kurosawa’s focus on “the dilution of the masculinity at the core of samurai values” and said that it is this focus “which sets Ran apart and ensures that it remains a work invested with its own ‘cultural capital,’ existing within its own cultural reference points,” so that “Ran refuses to be consumed by its Western affiliations and asserts instead its affiliations with the western [movie] genre in terms of its ideological premise and its iconic properties” (98).

In his discussion of Ran in the 2013 book Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (78–87), Mark Thornton Burnett noted the similarities of some of its themes to those of King Lear, including its “stress on pride, hubris, folly, abasement and loss.” He thought that “Saburô (Daisuke Ryû), Hidetora/Lear’s third and youngest son, brings both Cordelia and the Fool to mind, not least in Saburô’s recognition of his father’s frailities” and that “Jirô functions as the narrative surrogate for Regan.” According to Burnett, “Distinctive to Kurosawa’s interpretation of sibling estrangement is the issue of birth order,” although he also commented that as “a type of aggrieved Edmund, Jirô is important in Ran as a mediation of a key Renaissance preoccupation—the position of the second son.” He called “Kyoami (Peter) … a satirical ‘conversationalist’ … [who also] stands in for Lear’s Fool” and resembles him in various ways (86).

Peter Cochran, writing in his book Small-Screen Shakespeare from 2013, called Ran “too beautiful,” with “too much control, too much neatness, too much arranged for aesthetic and abstract effect, and not enough for human and dramatic effect.” He considered it too uninvolving, with little emphasis on the Lear-character’s personal sufferings and even with little literal focus on that character (388). Noting contrasts between the plots of the film and Shakespeare’s play and finding some of the film’s effects unintentionally funny (389), he did praise the silent battle; found the later battle unimpressive; and called the film as a whole largely disappointing (390).

In his 2016 book Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation of 100 Years of Adaptations (76–82), Peter E. S. Babiak suggested that Kurosawa’s film qualifies the nihilism of Shakespeare’s play (76); that Tsurumaru may be “one of the few characters in the film who had a realistic orientation to the world around him”; and that Ran “ends on a guardedly optimistic note” (77). Babiak wrote that it is Hidetora who constantly tries to “withdraw from reality” (78); that Ran echoes Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, especially in its “two-part structure” and its consequential battles (79); and that the battle at the third castle is an especially impressive act of filmmaking, particularly in its use of colors, so that it echoes Laurence Olivier’s Battle of Agincourt (in his filmed Henry V) in some ways but is far bloodier (79). Babiak thought that the music and visuals contrast during the battle (79); that the beauty of the imagery is juxtaposed with the brutality depicted (80); and that Kurosawa may be forcing us to confront our own violent and sadistic impulses (80). He commented that the film sometimes echoes western vampire myths (79–80); that Tsurumaru finally can show Hidetora compassion (82); and that Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films often invite us to compare and contrast the film with the relevant play (82).

In an essay from 2019 titled “Is Shakespeare ‘Translatable’? Cinematic Adaptations by Kozintsev, Kurosawa, and Feng Xiaogang,” King-Kok Cheung compared and contrasted the Kozintsev and Kurosawa versions of King Lear, stressing their differences (179–80ff), especially in the storm episode (180ff). Generally this essay argued that “the more a director tries to make the play follow his or her logic—whether moral, religious, or philosophical—the less Shakespearean is the production. King Lear stubbornly resists formulas” (184). Nonetheless, Cheung ultimately praised different directors’ versions of Shakespeare’s plays (188).

Also publishing in 2019, Samuel Crowl, in one of the last essays of his long and distinguished career (“Lear’s Fool on Film: Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa”), observed that because court fools did not exist in Japanese culture (although they did in China and elsewhere in Asia), Kurosawa’s fool is a modern figure—a character named Kyoami (43) who “refuses to be matter-of-fact about cruelty and injustice,” because “if it is human to suffer, then it is also human to cry and complain.” Crowl called Kyoami “a vivid colourful [sic] and gentle force for life” amid “death and destruction” (44).

In another essay from 2019 (“Wicked Humans and Weeping Buddhas: (Post)humanism and Hell in Kurosawa’s Ran”), Melissa Croteau reported that the “Japanese title Ran can be translated several ways: chaos, confusion, rebellion, disintegration and desolation,” both in personal and larger terms (50). She called Ran a “pageant replete with symbols and abstractions ironically designating unity, balance, and Buddhist non-attachment” (50). She concluded that “Ran, in all its beauty and horror, tells us that we have the power not to turn away from suffering” and that we “can choose to face the inevitable hells on earth and look at them straight on, but this courage will not ‘save’ us, nor will it make us heroes. However, it has the potential to inspire us to be more human(e)” (58).