Approaches to Cultural Awareness and Awakenings
✅ 🍿 Fun Facts, Fun Fantasies, and Fun Fantasies: Japanese Anime, Manga, and Cinema ✅ 🍿
Why is understanding other culture important?
Stay at least 33 years and mow my lawn or 33 seconds, clap 58 times or eat 58 donuts, highlight everything, comment 20 times or once: RULE the Word, Thank you
Dedicated to Willow Reed: Support and Follow>
As you read, listen to the music from “Bride with the White Hair” my Favorite film of all time Theme Song-Cang hai yi sheng xiao, influenced my samurai cinema.
✅ 🍿We Are the World ✅ 🍿
I taught world literature for 30 years at a university, but strangely, the first books I used did not have African, Meso-American, or Asian literature, and I couldn’t find any that were not Euro-Centric.
I made my student watch world cinema in class and they loved it, in the process, I became one of the foremost scholars on Asian Horror Cinema!
Sadly, much of academic studies is still colonial and patriarchal, and I am trying to change that before I die, having survived cancer.
My goal is to change that backward thinking: Join me for we must read world literature and watch world cinema. . . .
Within academic studies at the university level, the History of Philosophy and Rhetoric are about very colonialist and Eurocentric.
✅ 🍿We Are the World! ✅ 🍿
✅ 🍿Miyamoto Musashi: Samurai as Animation ✅ 🍿
✅ 🍿“Dream of the Last Samurai” (2009): Anime
Miyamoto Musashi: Soken ni Haseru Yume
Directed by Mizuhi Nishikubo, produced by Mamoru Oshii for Production I.G., this full length animated movie has a big budget and well developed plot.
Powerful Animation Fun and Fun Insightful Teachings!
✅ 🍿Mamaur Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell”
Mamoru Oshii, who was responsible “ Ghost” for wrote the script, not based on Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel of the same name.
Instead, a different Musashi is invented or discovered.
✅ 🍿Docu-drama: “Dream of the Last Samurai”
The film is sort of docu-drama examining the life of a famous samurai. There are even some live action sequences about places that Musashi lived.
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✅ 🍿“Samurai 7” (2004): An Animated Kurosawa Feast
FUN > A Steampunk Kurosawa Influence
Based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), this “steampunk” animated television version is updated with robots and various modern equipment, yet it has old samurai zen feeling.
✅ 🍿Kikuchiyo, Fun Character
Kikuchiyo, played by Toshio Mifune, is a sort of cyborg, or partially mechanized being, for Steampunk is a mixture of old technology and old elements of magic mixed in a futuristic setting.
Cyborg Samurai, Fun Characters
Thus, you still have farmers and a feudalistic society, but there are steam robots too. Something new, something old.
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✅ 🍿Kaze no Yojimbo, “Bodyguard of the Wind,” 2001–2: Another Fun Anime
Based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), in this updated version, the protagonist, George Kodama, is looking for Araki
Genzo, his brother, in a town called Kimujuku, and Like the film Yojimbo, he finds himself in the middle of a yakuza war.
However, he outwits and outsmarts his way around the various battles for control.
In this updated version, the protagonist is not a samurai but is lost drifter in modern day times, and the swords are replaced by guns, and the fun and well produced series is 25 episodes long.
✅ 🍿What would Kurosawa the MASTER have done?
. . if he had made some animations where he could control all creative aspects in a better manner?
Mike Toole states,
“What Kaze no Yojimbo strikes me as is a remake of Last Man Standing, which was a remake of Fistful of Dollars, which was a remake of Yojimbo.”
✅ 🍿Spaghetti Western FUN: YUMMY
Yes, there are intertextual moments of a Spaghetti Western along with moments of a gangster film. This is what makes Kurosawa interesting.
✅ 🍿ANOTHER FUN ANIME:
✅ 🍿Osamu Tezuka’s “Dororo” FUN WOMAN
Created as a comic book tale (1967) by the god of manga, Osamu Tezuka.
This strange tale would become a television series (1969), a video game (Blood Will Tell 2004), and later a live action movie (2007).
Sequels are coming.
Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga
Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) is best known in the West for creating Astro Boy, which is a futuristic version of Pinocchio.
In a sense, Dororo is another version of Astro Boy, this time set in the past during the age of samurai.
This supernatural samurai tale is about a boy, Hyakkimura (100 Demons) boy cursed by demons.
He has no limbs and no face, AND He is raised by a shaman who gives him artificial limbs and creates a face for him.
His father is a desire to rule a kingdom gives his son’s limbs and body parts to 48 demons, So when the son is born they want his entire body or what is left of it.
Instead of killing the mutated boy, the boy grows up strong and is able to defeat each demon.
As he defeats each demon a boy part is returned to him.
Along the way, Dororo, a boy thief (orphan), befriends Hyakkimura.
In the live action version (2007), Dororo, is a girl.
✅ 🍿Disabled Hero ✅ 🍿
Interestingly, samurai films and their Chinese wuxia pian/kung fu counterparts often have disabled heroes like the Zatoichi (blind samurai) series with some 26 films, and even a television series starring Shintaro Katsu.
Wuxia pian had the famous One-Armed Swordsman (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976) series with Jimmy Wang Yu who fights with a broken blade.
Indeed, there was even Zatoichi 22: Meets the One-Armed Swordsman (1971) .
There was also the kung fu film, One-Armed Boxer (1971) also starring Jimmy Wang Yu.
My students love this old Shaw Brothers film: Watch it
There was even a Vietnam War version of Zatoichi called Blind Fury (1989) with Rutger Hauer who also played a cyborg (replicant) in Blade Runner (1982).
Spaghetti Western Blind Man (1971), directed by Ferdinando Baldi, and starring Tony Anthony who also wrote the screenplay, perhaps was modeled on Zatoichi.
Ringo Starr also has a role.
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✅ 🍿Peacemaker Kurogane (1999–2001): Anime Series ✅ 🍿
Rock and Roll Samurai
Created by Nanae Chrono, its Rock and Roll music might not seem right, However, in this revisionist tale of a samurai, it works quite well with the energy and angst of the characters.
FUN: Revenge Theme
Ichimura Tetsunosuke wants revenge for the death of his parents. His peaceful brother, an accountant life figure, joins the Shinsengumi, the police force, a ruthless and violent force.
It was a Shinsengumi who killed their parents.
The anime is not for kids, being graphic and violent.
However, the main character, Ichimura, is a fifteen year old, who seems about ten years old. So kids do like this anime a lot.
Share with me your thoughts: Now CLAP AND DANCE!
✅ 🍿Thank you. . . for being my friend. . .✅ 🍿
I survived cancer twice and am now broke, and I have no friends because they ghosted me and could not take seeing me die day by day, even my wife left me, and most cancer or terminally ill people experienced this . . .
✅ 🍿Please support me if you can, some coffee or books or DVDs? > > ✅ 🍿
SOURCE
“Kaze no Yojimbo.” Anime Jump.
< http://www.animejump.com/index.php?module=prodreviews&func=showcontent&id=676>.
