Immortal Art?
Lately, I’ve been watching an anime series titled Samurai 7, an adaptation of the classic movie The Seven Samurai. Meh. It’s okay. Because the people behind it are not masters of their medium, as Kurosawa or Miyazaki are of theirs, the adaptation is anime first and narrative second. Thus the bandits employ giant battle robots, because anime has to have giant robots. The peasant trio of Rikichi, Manzo, and Yohei are replaced by a teenaged girl in a miniskirt, because anime has to have teenaged girls in miniskirts.
Heavy-handed revision, unsurprisingly, leads to awkward moments. Events are preserved in the adaptation that no longer make sense in the context of changes already made. The tragic demise of classic swordsmanship before the encroachment of firearms, for example, seems grossly out of place in a space-faring culture, which has presumably mastered gunpowder long, long ago, not to mention smokeless powder, automatic fire, and something that looks like plasma projecting rifles. The adaptation is hurt, too, by a simplification of characters and their motivations. Kambei is transformed from a humble failed soldier to a great warrior-philosopher. The awkward romance between peasant Shino and young samurai Katsuhiro is replaced by a trite, and shallow, flirtation between the Katsuhiro and the miniskirt chick mentioned above, without any of the richer undertones of class-consciousness.
Such incongruencies take many forms, and make the animated 7 seem “dumbed down,” either by a production team with only a superficial understanding of the movie, or—more likely—for the benefit of a young audience that won’t pick up the subtle but rewarding plot threads from the original Samurai.
Faults of dumbing down are easily dismissed as just that, but one type, seen a lot here, particularly piques my interest. The original Samurai was deeply enmeshed in questions of class relations: whether the peasant girl Shino and the young samurai Katsuhiro can court one another ethically, difficulties with trust and communication between samurai and villagers, the unchallenged pecking order among the samurai themselves, the impropriety of peasants hiring ronin at all, and especially Kikuchiyo’s awkward status as peasant-turned-soldier by virtue of simply arming himself and taking to battle. Class differences are so important to the movie that the Criterion Collection version’s commentary returns to it again and again. Modern Americans, growing up in a society that makes a virtue of egalitarianism, may not realize the class issues percolating through the movie, and may have a hard time understanding them even once explained.
Samurai 7, by contrast, doesn’t address class differences. The closest it gets is an informal ranking of the samurai themselves by skill; otherwise, everyone speaks to one another as equals. The scandalous romance between Shino and Katsushiro is replaced by a trite, shallow romance between Katsushiro and the miniskirt chick, Kirara. Kikuchiyo is set apart not by his common upbringing, beyond his control, but by his personal failings of impetuosity and abrasiveness.
This makes me wonder: is this change also the product of an egalitarian society? Heaven knows the US is not free of class consciousness, nor is modern Japan a carbon copy of the American dream, but American attitudes toward meritocracy and upward mobility are now firmly entrenched in Japan, and have been for generations. Japanese kids are exposed to far, far more samurai movies than we are, so they’ll easily absorb another show featuring superhuman feats of fencing. But I wonder how easily they would absorb a show depicting, without a lot of exposition, a society in which class informs every decision. I wonder whether a Japanese teen would need the same kind of film commentary I do for the original movie.