Weirdhouse Cinema: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe dive into Akira Kurosawa’s gorgeous and surreal 1990 anthology film, "Dreams."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking
about Akira Kurosawa's nineteen ninety anthology film Dreams, which is
exactly what it says on the box. This is a
collection of eight short vignettes that take the form of
dreams and nightmares. I had never seen this film before

(00:39):
this week when I picked it out for the show,
and I love this movie. But if you watch it,
you should know what you're getting into, especially if you've
liked other Corosawa movies. This is not Seven Samurai that's like,
you know, a gripping, exciting story. This is a movie
that really asks for your patients as an audience member.

(01:01):
The pace is moody and slow. There is no central
or overarching plot. There are some themes and character types
that recur, but each of the eight short stories is
essentially self contained, and they partake of extremely varied tones, settings,

(01:21):
and pacing. Some of the stories are like a weird
kind of improvisational fairy tale. Some are frightening, baffling encounters
with monstrous entities. Some are kind of idyllic meetings between
a curious protagonist and a thoughtful character, and some are
apocalyptic visions of a doomed earth. You really get all

(01:42):
different kinds of dreams in this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, Yeah, this is a great film. I'm so glad
you picked this one, Joe. This is not a Chrosall
film I'd ever seen either. Generally, I'd seen just a
handful of his Samurai epics, Throne of Blood being from
years back.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
But it's of my favorites too.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, but I had not. I had not rewatched or
watched any Krosawa recently, so it was great to dive
into this one. And yeah, I absolutely agree. This movie
is true to the title, just steeped in the texture
of dream in a way that is I think, far
far more sublime than the mere trappings of the cinematic
dream sequence. Curasawa, with signature excellence here generates a strong

(02:26):
ambience of dreams, often, or at least it seems to me,
with a one two punch of first intriguing monotony and
then this emotional upwelling.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Oh yeah, I think I know what you mean that
many of these stories have a kind of earlier middle
section where something is kind of either slow and contemplative
or frustratingly repetitive and monotonous, and then suddenly there is
a breakthrough. There's some kind of catharsis where something of
powerful emotional significance happens.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah. Yeah, And I found this very very interesting and
very true to my experiences with dreams and my recollection
of my own dreams. Intriguing monotony. Here is not a
dig at the picture or a kursawa. I think it's
it's ultimately kind of a revelation that we see dreams
presented in this manner, where like you know, generally our

(03:21):
dream the dreams that we have night to night are
not worthy of cinematic adaptation, but I think people may
recognize this basic form. Like I had this dream and
I was like I was trying to put together some
Ikia furniture and I couldn't put it together. And this
just kept happening for what seemed like hours, and then
my dad showed up and I had a conversation with

(03:41):
my long deceased father, that sort of thing, you know,
with so like a one two punch of monotony, lost
in some sort of an environment or a situation that
may not have anything that's really driving it forward, and
then there's some sort of emotional upwelling. It's almost like
the dream is the garden of the subconscious, populated seemingly

(04:03):
by weeds of various thoughts, memories, and observations, and then
some powerful emotional resonance emerges through and into this dream garden,
taking on its trapping.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
I think that's a great way to put it. Yeah,
a lot of these stories are like that.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, and that that emotional upwelling. It might be love,
it might be fear, it might be regret. So in
any way, what I'm trying to say is yes to
all of that. Dreams is not a fast paced film.
If you're more familiar with Chrosawa's action and drama films,
this is a different beast. I also want to highlight
that I watched this film with a fever. I'm I've

(04:41):
just returned from some extensive travel and something came back
with me, and this is a This is a good
fever film. I have to say. If you find yourself
sort of drifting in and out, this is the perfect
film to do it. There was a time or two
where I caught myself falling asleep a little bit, which
sometimes happens when you become horizontal and you watch films.

(05:03):
But it's extra interesting with this picture because like Kurrasawa
has already put you into the monotony of the dream sequence,
you know, into the dream world, and so you find
yourself slipping into that dream world for real.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
I feel like all of them would be good to
fall asleep and then wake up again, to accept Mount
Fuji and Red. That one's got to be real tough
to kind of suddenly realize what's going on.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, that one was, we'll get to that one. That
one was the rougher one for me. But anyway, this
is our first Karrosawa film on Weird House Cinema. We've
of course mentioned him numerous times in passing on the
show because, of course, a it's impossible to discuss Japanese
cinema without acknowledging a Kira Kurosawa. And you know, it's
certainly the case too with something like a Godzilla film,

(05:46):
even because those several of the Godzilla films we've talked
about in the show were filmed by Ishil Hondakrasawa's friend
and a frequent collaborator under tow Host Studios. And then
on top of all of this, it's ultimately impop well
to discuss cinema at all without eventually referencing Krosawa, as
he's one of the most famed and influential filmmakers of

(06:08):
all time.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah. I would say the majority of his films, at
least the ones I've seen, are not really in the
weird house cinema space, and that I absolutely love them.
But they're a little bit more straightforwardly realism bound, you know,
they're often realistic period stories. They don't really get into
the kind of weird genres we talk about, though there
are some very weird things in Throne of Blood, even

(06:29):
though it is basically a Macbeth adaptation.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, Throwing of Blood is the one that previously I
considered that to be the Corosawa film we might get to.
But this, I think was isn't even better fit for this.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
Oh yeah, because obviously this is dreams, and what's weirder
than dreams? I mean, dreams are dreams are the classic
weird house cinema. Before there was cinema, there was the
weird house cinema of the inner space.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
That's true. Oh, by the way, this is a Cura
Krosawa's Dreams, or sometimes just Dreams. It's often referenced by
that title. Not to be confused with nineteen ninety five's Memories,
an excellent animated anthology from Kutserhiro Otamo. These are two
very different films, but I have caught myself on multiple

(07:11):
occasions confusing the two titles in my mind. So I
suspect I'm not alone here. Memories is anime and it's excellent.
It's also an anthology. This is live action and it's Corsawa,
and it's also an anthology.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
So I thought it might be good at the top
here to go ahead and do a brief rundown of
the eight different dreams in this movie, with like a
one or two sentence summary of each, just so that
we can refer back to them more easily as we
go along, talking about the themes and the connections and stuff,
and then we can talk about the plot in more
detail later on. But okay, so the eight segments are.

(07:49):
The first one is called Sunshine through the Rain. In
this one, a young boy wanders into the forest during
a sunshower when it's raining, but the sun is shining
against his mother's ad vice, and he witnesses the marriage
ceremony of the fox spirits, which is something he should
not have seen. This first segment may be my favorite

(08:09):
segment of all. I'm really excited to talk more about it.
The second segment is the Peach Orchard. This takes place
on a festival day in Japan called the Day of
Hinomatsuri or the Dolls Day festival, sometimes the Girl's Day festival.
On this day, a boy follows a spectral girl dressed
in pink and white out to the terraces where a

(08:30):
peach orchard used to grow, and the spirits of the
now destroyed peach trees appear in the form of dolls
and perform They talk to him, and they perform a
traditional dance. The third segment is called the Blizzard. In
this segment, a group of four mountain climbers are struggling
to reach camp in the middle of a terrible snowstorm,
and the climbers they're overwhelmed by the snow. They begin

(08:52):
to succumb to the cold, and their leader has a
blood curdling vision of a snow witch. In the fourth
meant the tunnel. While walking home after the end of
a war, presumably World War II, a Japanese military officer
has to pass through a tunnel on a mountain road.
There he meets first an angry dog strapped with explosives,

(09:13):
and then a soldier, and then a company of soldiers
who died under his command. The fifth segment crows. This
one is more lighthearted. A painter is looking at the
works of How are we going to say his name
in this episode? I always Vincent the painter, Vincent van
goch or Vincent van Go. I'm just going to say

(09:33):
van Go. I know that's not the correct original pronunciation.
I'm sorry. That's how I always learned it when I
was growing up the paintings of Vincent van Go. He
looks at these paintings, he admires them, and then he
sort of appears within the artistic world of van Go
and then finally meets the artist and learns things about
his vision and kind of interfaces with his view of

(09:56):
art and the world. After that, we get a segment
called Mount fou and Red. This is where the terror
really ramps up. Our Corrosawa surrogate here in many of
these segments are probably in all of them, you can
view the protagonist as some form of Kurusawa himself, either
as a child or a sort of alternate life version
of himself. In this segment, our surrogate finds himself in

(10:20):
a massive crowd of people fleeing a disaster. We see
Mount Fuji in the distance appear glowing hot, framed by explosions,
and then a man in a suit appears to explain
that these explosions are caused by a meltdown at a
nuclear power plant, and the people are being killed by
clouds full of radioactive isotopes, and it just gets worse

(10:41):
from there. Next we have the Weeping Demon. In this segment,
a man is climbing across a craggy, desolate landscape of
rocks and gravel, and he encounters a monstrous man with
a horn on his head. We learn that the man
has been mutated by nuclear fallout, and against a backdrop
of giant dandelions, he explains the cannibalistic hell of the

(11:05):
radioactive desert, and then in the final segment, we get
a rapid sort of down shift back into out of
all the horrors, into a more contemplative mode. This is
a segment called the Village of the Watermills, where our
Kurosawa protagonist kind of ambles into an idyllic rural village
along a river and he meets a wise old man

(11:28):
and observes the local customs.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
I mean, no surprise, but Christawa really nailed it here
with the order. It's just it's the perfect There's no
other order for these sequences that would make sense.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
I think you may have more to say about this
because you were watching the documentary, But I have read
that there were originally intended to be more dreams that
appeared in the film, but the segments got paired back
as production went along, in some cases, I think at
the writing stage. In some cases after some things were shot.
But you know, whatever the original intentions, it does feel

(12:01):
complete and cohesive to me with this set of aid
even though I now know there were originally going to
be more. This just feels right. Somehow it got to
the right place.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, And from what I understand of Krisawa's approach to filmmaking,
this seems to line up with the way he approached
things like you just sort of fine tune it as
you go, and then the eventual final form presents itself
to you, and in that case, these are the segments,
and this is the ore.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
That's interesting, And this might not actually be a contradiction,
but I've always read about Kurrasawa as a very meticulously
planning in advance kind of filmmaker that like he can
sort of see all the shots in his head ahead
of time, and he sort of is editing in his
mind ahead of time. Have you read similar things?

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely it was. I had not really consumed
much about the man or his approach to filmmaking prior
to checking out a couple of the documentaries on the
Criterion collection disc for this film, which I'll reference here
in a bit, But uh, there's a behind the scenes,
some behind the scenes footage where you could see him

(13:08):
in action shooting with the picture, and then there's a uh,
there's a great twenty eleven documentary as well titled Kurrasawa's
Way that you know, gets into this a bit as well.
And Yeah, one of the things that I found very
interesting is that like he's apparently, you know, very much
kind of a loner, a man of few words. There,

(13:30):
you know, he would what he would say about his
process and A and and certainly in his directorial approach
was often succinct and to the point. But uh, but
he wasn't. He was admittedly like not somebody that would
talk about theory a lot like it kind of like
he sees it in his head, he knows exactly how
he wants it to work, and then you know, some

(13:51):
amount of experimentation finding that that form. But he's he's
not spouting a lot of theory. He's not then doing
a lot of a film theory analysis of what worked
and what didn't. And it's kind of left to all
of the people that he influenced to come back and
continually rewatch and describe exactly what he was doing.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
Yeah, I was thinking about how, you know, sometimes people
break down filmmakers into oh, I don't know, I guess
the rough division would be like technical filmmakers versus humanistic filmmakers,
those who are more concerned with the technical expression of
an artistic vision. You know, they're using their techniques and

(14:31):
their skills to sort of put what they see in
their head on the screen, versus the humanistic vision that
is more concerned with themes and characters and film as
narrative and film as kind of I don't know, an
abstract product, something that you could explain and talk about
and interpret the meaning of. And I think you could
easily make the case that Corrusawa is very much both.

(14:55):
Like you could make the argument that he is one
more than the other, but in both directions.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, yeah, like he has he certainly has all those
technical abilities and those exceptional at them, but they're they're
kind of they kind of almost seems like they're internalized
to a degree to where it's like all this is
going on inside. And again he's not discussing the theory
of how it's all coming together, but it certainly comes together.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
You know. I had typed up a list of themes
I saw emerging in multiple segments of the film that
I was maybe going to talk about here, but actually
I think we should save that for later in the episode,
after we talk about the plot in a little more detail,
or the plots all right, So we would usually say
an elevator pitch here, I think we've sort of already
given it. It's Kira Kurosawa takes you on a tour

(15:38):
of his dreams.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, I would also submit, oops, I had another dream.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
They they do like there's a transition that often pops
in to just say I had another dream.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
All right, if you would like to watch Dreams the
cure Crosawa's Dreams. Fortunately, this one's widely available, various streaming
options out there. We can watch it digitally. I watched
it on the Criterion Collection Blu Ray, which I written
from Atlanta's own videodrome. Some excellent extras on this disc,
as you'd expect, and I'll be referencing some of those.

(16:11):
It's must purchase for anyone, or must rent for anyone
who wants to go for a deeper dive into this movie.
As of this recording, the film is not on Criterion Channel,
but as with any streaming service, titles come and go there.
I don't know if that's simply the case, or it
has something to do with the Warner Brothers aspect of

(16:31):
this production. I'm not sure, but yeah, you can definitely
get it on Criterion Collection, Blu ray or DVD, but
it's not on Criterion Channel right now, all right?

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Should we talk about the connections.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, let's get into it starting, I guess with Kira Kurosawa,
the director and writer who lived nineteen ten through nineteen
ninety eight, and I really have to preface here and
say that it feels really challenging to do any sort
of brief summary of such a cinematic icon. But you know,
here it goes. This brief summary year based on some

(17:11):
information that I read at the excellent Akira Kurosawa dot
info page, which is really good, as well as the
extras on the disc that I just referenced. So, Krasawa
was the youngest child and a moderately wealthy Japanese family
descended from the former samurai class. His initial creative interest
was painting, which is interesting given one of our segments

(17:33):
in this film, but he followed his gifted older brother,
Hego in his passion for cinema. Hago worked as an
on site silent film narrator or benshi at this time
and apparently enjoyed some amount of success there, and as
Akira lived with him at the time, he was able
to gain entry into an array of films, plays, and
circus performances, which he would later cite as being very

(17:56):
influential on his craft. Now, Hago's work dried up with
the decline of silent films during the nineteen thirties, Akira
moved back with his parents and two of his sisters,
and Hago sadly died by suicide in nineteen thirty three.
In nineteen thirty five, the Kurra Crosawa answered an advert
in the newspaper from Photo Chemical Laboratories PCL. This is

(18:19):
what would go on to become Toho Studios. They were
seeking new assistant directors to engage in a mentor apprenticeship program,
and so Akira submitted an essay. I've read that it
was kind of a cheeky submission where he's like, the
prompt was something like what would you do to fix
a Japanese cinema And he's like, it can't be fixed

(18:40):
or something. I don't know, but at any rate he
won them over. He received a callback, and he went
on to work with numerous established and up and coming directors.
A special note his mentor, Kajiro Yamamoto. Kurosawa also took
to screenwriting during this time, saw the value of that,

(19:01):
and he served as a second unit or assistant director
on numerous films and wrote screenplays for a handful of
films before co writing and filming his first directorial effort
with nineteen forty three's Sanshiro Sugata, a serious judo drama.
I've not seen this one, but I've seen some clips
from it, and they discussed it in the extras on
the disc. It would spawn a nineteen forty five sequel,

(19:23):
which he also co wrote and directed. In the twenty
eleven documentary Kursawa's Way on the Criterion Collection disc, they
point out this picture's sublime portrayal of action. So it's
a judo film. It's a wrestling picture, but like a
serious one, not like a Santo picture or some of
the latter, you know, Japanese pro wrestling of pictures and

(19:47):
so forth. But the action is really interesting because it
has pointed out in this documentary, there's less of a
focus on the actual grappling, or certainly the most impactful
physical moments of the grappling war on audience responses, audio,
emotional responses to the impact. So we won't actually see
the impact. We'll see how people respond to it, and

(20:09):
then we'll see sort of the results of that impact,
which is very interesting. So Kisawa's wartime work included propaganda films,
which apparently also included, to varying degrees, the Judo Pictures,
especially the sequel. His work during this time sometimes was
seen as too Western by sensors, and his nineteen forty

(20:33):
five film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail,
a period piece, managed to run a foul of both
imperial Japanese sensors and then subsequently American occupation sensors, for
being in one case too democratic and then in the
other case too feudal. I guess this is often the case.
If you're managing to piss everyone off, maybe you're doing
something right.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
Now.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
We can't walk through every kisaw Will picture, but we
might reasonably summarize his post post war work along the
stepping stones of No Regrets for Our Youth in forty six,
the award winning One Wonderful Sunday from forty six as Well,
I Believe, and then nineteen forty eight Drunken Angel, considered
by many to be his first major work and his

(21:14):
first picture to feature Toshiro Mafuni, who Kurosawa would famously
utilize in many of his masterpieces to come, including nineteen
fifties Raschaman, which earned him international acclaim, including recognition at
the Academy Awards in nineteen fifty two, and from there,
Kirasawa went on to write and direct some of the
best regarded films in cinema history, including but not limited to,

(21:37):
fifty four to seven Samurai, fifty seven's Throwne of Blood,
fifty eight's The Hidden Fortress, sixty one's Yojimbo, sixty threes,
High and Low, nineteen eighties Kejimusha, The Shadow Warrior, and
nineteen eighty five's Ron. These decades entailed various ups and
down industry changes, some unsuccessful Hollywood projects, most notably Runaway Train,

(21:57):
which would ultimately be directed by another director nineteen eighty five,
various setbacks and excursion of the Soviet Union to shoot
nineteen seventy five's durso Uzala, and a comeback partially produced
by influential American directors who he had heavily influenced himself.
And this was increasingly important as Japanese studios were in

(22:19):
this time less likely to back him, and so he
was increasingly turning to outside and foreign financers. And certainly
that's the case with Dreams.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Was it the case with his later films that they
were regarded both in Japan and internationally as masterpieces, But
they also didn't make a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, yeah, I've read. I was looking at like some
contemporary Ebert reviews talking about like what happens when you
have like a master who you know, keeps doing their
own thing, but you know, doesn't necessarily it is not
necessarily chasing what the audience wants. Then maybe some of that.
I was looking at some information about how this film

(23:00):
Dreams was received, and I've seen it described as kind
of like a largely muted response both domestically and internationally.
But at the same time, there was like a lot
of excitement for it, especially among directors who admired his
work so much. And another interesting wrinkle is that apparently,
I mean, this comes as a surprise I think for

(23:21):
many because I know when I started watching Krosawa films,
they were airing i think on Turner Classic Movies and
or American Movie Classics. Even it seems weird that they
would be on American movie class American Movie Classic showed
a lot of different films, but at any rate, I
had ready access to them on television on cable, and nowadays,
you know, you have all these excellent criterion collection editions.

(23:42):
But apparently for a while they weren't all necessarily available
on home video, with the exception of Dreams because of
the Warner Brothers connection.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
Oh I see.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
So even if the initial response was kind of muted,
more and more people had the opportunity to Sea Dreams,
and of course it gradually earned it more of a following,
and I think is also seen as this interesting outlier
in Corosawa's filmography. You know, there's nothing else quite like
it among his other titles.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
My general impression is that a lot of critics don't
put it at like his in his top tier list,
you know, it's not in a lot of people's top
five Corosawa movies or whatever, but that it is nowadays
widely respected.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah. I mean, it's one of those filmographers though, right
where it's like, if you're talking about the seventh best
Carrosawa film, you're still talking about a great motion picture.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Yeah. So.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Krissawa was honored at the sixty second Academy Awards in
nineteen ninety and he went on to complete two more films,
nineteen ninety one's Rhapsody in August and nineteen ninety three's Maddeo.
He was working on The Sea Is Watching in nineteen
ninety five, when he apparently suffered a fall, leaving him
unabuilt to direct, and his health rapidly declined in the
following years, and he passed away in nineteen ninety eight.

(24:59):
The Sea Is Watching would ultimately be made in two
thousand and two by a different director, among a couple
of other posthumous screenplay credits. Now, to come back to
something I was talking about here earlier, one of the
things driven home by numerous Japanese and international directors in
Kursaw was way the documentary is that he is really
the epitome of a director's director. I imagine you could

(25:19):
take that a step further now and say that he's
a director's director's director, or to that effect.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Meaning he is appreciated, especially by other practitioners of the
art form, not just by audiences, but especially like people
who make films really admire the way he makes films.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, it seems really difficult to overstress his influence on
modern cinema and directors around the world, Directors who would
often and continue to analyze every minute detail of how
his direction of actors, lighting, framing, use of space and
everything else came together on the screen and it can
almost be invisible, I think to many of us, because
if you're watching a Krosawa film, I mean, its magic

(25:59):
is going to work on you. You are going to
You're not going to necessarily unless you're, you know, making
an effort to You're just it's going to. Its spell
is going to work. You're not going to be maybe
thinking about how he's shooting everything. Because in part of it, too,
I think, is because he was so influential, many of
the things he did simply became more or less standards
of filmmaking.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, I mean, it's true that a lot of times
good technical directing does not really call attention to itself.
It manifests in utter absorption in the narrative and content.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, and so you're.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Watching seven Samurai, you might not be thinking a lot
about the you know, how every shot is being framed
and how he captures movement and light and stuff, But
you know that your attention is held very closely, and
that's sort of like how it comes through to the
average viewer.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Absolutely. All right, let's move on to some other folks
involved in this picture with with less detail we've covered
the big one here, of course, is Shuro Honda. Who
lived nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety three. Famed director of Godzilla,
who we've discussed in the show I think three different times,
most recently in our discussion of nineteen sixty four's matha

(27:08):
Versus Godzilla. He was a creative consultant on this picture.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
I think I read that especially his experience in the
military was used to choreograph the sequence called the Tunnel
where we see military, we see army members marching information.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yeah. Yeah. And also, you know, I have to say
that the Mount Fuji segment also feels very Honda like.
You can imagine him at least standing in the background
nodding and being like, yep, you've nailed at Krisawa on
that one, all right. Getting into the actors here, starting
with the Dreamer, generally credited as I because we keep

(27:46):
having that dead for us, where we read the words
I had another dream, and then here's our dreamer, our
dream walker. I. Our Dreamer is played by Akira Tera
Hope born nineteen forty seven. Born into successful acting family.
He's also a musician, having been in the nineteen sixties
band The Savage Joe. I included an album cover from

(28:09):
The Savage They don't look very savage. They look just
like some very clean cut guys here. Yeah, they look
like they're they're ready to head down to the sokop. Yeah.
But he subsequently launched a successful solo career, and I
think in this he took on a more edgy persona
and often had kind of like a like a nihilistic
kind of like dressed in black, wearing sunglasses thing going.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
On, holding a twelve string guitar, looking like nothing matters.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah. So yeah, successful musician, award winning musician, and then
as an actor. He debuted in nineteen sixty eight The
Sands of Krobi and later appeared in Karasawa was Ron.
He's also in nineteen ninety six's Rebirth of Mathra and
two thousand and four's cas hern This is one Caserne
is not. I haven't seen either of these two films, actually,

(28:57):
but cass Herne is one that I've seen get video
stores for years because it has some sort of like
a space ninja on it. I don't know much about it.
If you out there are fans, write in and tell
me all about it.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
You know. I was gonna say in talking about the
themes of the film that one of them is the
self as both fluid and constant. The protagonist in each
of these dreams, I think you could say, is the
same person and yet is also quite different and both
in terms of apparent life history, some aspects of personality

(29:34):
seem to change. Sometimes the protagonist is assertive, sometimes the
protagonist is quite passive. That just varies a lot between
the segments, and there's no narrative continuity between them, but
there is a kind of thematic continuity, like the segments
are strung together by associations and preoccupations rather than causality.

(29:57):
And so this was making me think. I was trying
to the performance, like, do the events of one dream
at all affect the protagonist in a different dream? And
I think you could see it going both ways, Like
the events of the movie never seem to be literally additive,
and yet they may be kind of like the other

(30:19):
dreams are kind of stirring in the memory of the
protagonist in the other segments. You know, I don't know
exactly how you would read that into Tara Oh's performance here,
but that does feel right. It feels like it's part
of his story that there is I don't know, somehow,
like not complete conscious knowledge of what was dreamt in
the other dreams, but a kind of vague sense of

(30:41):
I've had a feeling like this before.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, And I mean that's the way it often feels
with dreams. You know, you might bring the content of
one dream into the next. And also, at least in
my own experience, like, sometimes you're you, and the dreams
sometimes you're less you. And then so I feel like
this character is you know sometimes you know. I think
in general we can think of him as a Krosawa
stand in. Sometimes he's more of a voyeuristic figure or

(31:08):
even an avatar by which we experience the dream, though
his role is more personal and intense in certain segments,
namely the Tunnel, which we'll get to.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yeah, definitely, I certainly had the Tunnel in mind for
his more like assertive and active roles. But almost always,
and I guess this is often true of dreams, he's
more reacting than acting on the world, and often reacting
with a kind of futility. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, Because again, there's all these or most of these dreams,
if not all of them, they begin with the sense
of being trapped in something like we're maybe not trapped
trapped is too strong a word, too nightmarish, like you know,
in the texture of dreams, like sometimes you're just there
and you're a part of it. I don't know, it's
hard to really state it, but anyway, yeah, I liked

(31:57):
his performance. It kind of the exact details of it
change from sequence to sequence, and then to be clear,
in subsequences. I the Dreamer is played by a child
a couple of different actors I believe, Mitsunori Issaki born
seventy seven, and then another actor by the name of
Toshiko Nakano playing younger versions of the Dreamer.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
I think you could argue that the segments of the
film are roughly chronological in terms of the protagonists age.
I don't know if exactly, but like the first one,
the protagonist is the youngest, the second one, he's the
second youngest, and then becomes an adult, and it does
seem to progress through a kind of maturity arc in
life from there.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, I believe so, all right, Rolling through some of
the other performances here, of note, we have Metsuko Basho
as the Dreamer's mother in the first sequence born nineteen
forty six, Japanese Academy Award winning actress, whose credits include
nineteen seventy nine s Vengeance's Mine, nineteen eighty's Kja Musha,
and a voice roll in two thousand and six is

(33:00):
Tales from Earth. See that's a Goro Miyazaki.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Film adapted from the Ursula of the Win.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yes, Yes, Yeah, Then of course eventually we're gonna get
our yuki Ono the snow Fairy or the snow Woman
the snow Witch. More on the details of this character
in a bit, but this is of course a yokai
that pops up throughout Japanese media, played here by Miko
Harada born nineteen fifty eight. She was also coming off

(33:27):
a major role in Kurosawa's Ron, and her other credits
include seventy nine's The Inferno, nineteen eighty eight's Tokyo The
Last Megalopolis. That's one I haven't seen, but that one's
kind of famous for a couple of different reasons, including
the fact that hr Giger designed something for it, twenty
twelve's Helter Skelter, and Oh, I don't know anything about

(33:47):
this one, but sometimes the title just catches you twenty sixteens.
If Katz disappeared from the world, I'm enthralled. I need
to know more about that one, but anyway, she's won
multiple acting award in her native Japan. All right. In
the tunnel sequence, we have a ghostly figure from the
past that shows up, Private Naguchi played by Yoshitaka Sushi

(34:12):
born nineteen fifty five, another Ron cast member who was
also in a number of other pictures, including two other
Kurosawa pictures, sixty five's Red Beard and nineteen seventies Dotsukatton.
Now late in the picture, we're going to have an
old man character who is fabulous, played by Chishu Ryu,
who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen ninety three. Award
winning and long lasting Japanese actor, his work spans six decades,

(34:35):
and his other credits include Red Beard, nineteen fifty three's
Tokyo Story and nineteen eighty five's Mishima, a Life in
four chapters. He also appeared in Vim Vendors Until the
End of the World in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
And in many ways, this old man is kind of
the soul of the movie, especially appearing as he does
in the last segment.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah, he's terrific. I really love this performance. This guy's
great and.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
He has some opinion. He's of all the segment. He's
just like saying opinions into the camera.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yes, but he's great.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
It's got that quality of like he's old, let him talk.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, and I think he may have. I think
this guy speaks more than anyone else in the picture.
I don't know. We get a lot as well from
the Crying Demon. And this character was played by Chosuki Ikaria,
who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and four.
His other credits in Beclue, nineteen ninety one's My Son's
and nineteen ninety eight's Base Side Shakedown.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
You know, one thing I didn't know about the cast
when I pictured this movie is that it was going
to have Martin Scorsese acting in it.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, playing Vincent van Go. You have legendary
American director and noted Corosala admire. Yeah, he's definitely in
that documentary Krosawa's way talking about his experience on the
film and his admiration for Krosawa's work. And it's interesting because, yeah,
so Scorsese himself an admire of Corosawa and study or

(36:03):
of Corosawa's work here playing a master painter admired by
the dreamer, and so it's kind of a neat inversion there,
literally following the master into his work here.

Speaker 3 (36:15):
Yes. Yeah, is it true that he interrupted making Goodfellas
to like fly in to shoot this.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Oh I didn't read that, but that sounds or hear
that in the doc, but that that sounds likely. Yes,
I mean that's the kind of respect that all of
these directors had for him.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
I also found Scorsese's screen presence interesting because he does
not come in the way sometimes like a well known
director cameo and acting can feel where it's like, oh,
I don't know, it's like I'm the big important person
now here. I'm ego crashing into the scene and taking
it over. He feels very in service of the scene.

(36:53):
He feels it's one of those performances where it feels
like he is just trying to do what Corrosawa wants
of him and is telling him to do.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, Martin Scorsese occasionally does these little acting but sometimes
playing a fictional version of himself, sometimes playing a fictional
a different character. But he's generally pretty good. Sometimes it's
certainly a little broader in his performance, but yeah, that's
a good point is he does seem to be essentially

(37:23):
trying to play Vincent van Go here, and I was
also thinking this is also perfect like dream logic, you know,
like I had a dream last night and I was
having a conversation with Vincent van Go, but he was
also somehow Martin Scorsese at the same time. Yes, that's
kind of the vibe here. Another fun little cameo, I
guess would say in that particular segment, the woman in

(37:46):
the fields that the dreamer initially interacts with before being
sent in the direction of Vincent van Go is played
by Catherine Cadau. Kursaw was longtime personal translator and director
of that twenty eleven documentary Charsawa's Way.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Oh. Interesting, So she's the one washing washing in the
river who tells him that tells him to stay away
from van Go because he's a madman.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yes, yeah, yeah, I just came out of the asylum. Yeah. Oh.
And then getting to the music, the music here is
of course terrific, and the composer credited is Shinichiro Akibi
born nineteen forty three, Japanese composer whose film work includes
Chris always Keji Musha Rhapsody in August and Madeo. His

(38:29):
other scores include TV's Future Boy Conan from nineteen seventy
eight that was an early directorial effort from Hayo Miyazaki,
and two thousand and seven's Glory to the Filmmaker. He
won the Japanese Academy Award for composing multiple times.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
I think in addition to some original compositions, this movie
does also feature some classical compositions. Like I think there's
some Chapan in it and stuff. But yes, the music
is wonderful special. Oh, it's wonderful throughout, especially thinking of
the mysterious music in the very first segment.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Also, I love the funeral procession music at the end.
I'm not sure, yes, I'm not sure at different points
in the film whether we're looking at the composed score
or needle drop score, but at any rate, it's all
really good.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Finally, I also want to note that if you start
looking at the special effects credits on this film, you'll
notice a lot of Western names via those connections that
Kurosawa had with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Its industrial
light and magic handling the special effects on this, you know,
Otherwise Japanese production. Apparently they did this at cost, though
I have to say watching the picture, I mean, it's

(39:44):
not like you really notice. It's not like ILM came
in and made all the Fox people look like wookies
or anything. I don't know. It's like the effects are
I guess, really good and often invisible.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
They're very organic. Yeah. Yeah, the effects feel almost humble
in a way. Does that make sense, not flashy, just
kind of manifesting. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah. There is some behind the scenes footage on the
Criterion collection just showing Carosawa directing the scenes where we
have the makeup effects for the Fox people as well
as the hornet demons, and you know, he's he seems
to be like, you know, sort of tweaking things a
little bit, and in the case of the demons, saying like,
let's tone it down a little bit, like essentially they

(40:30):
look too much like monsters. We want we want the
viewers to understand that these are humans. So I get
the impression that carasaw will, maybe even's head of them,
scale back a little bit on things, because you know,
often I think it's the case in this picture that
otherworldly beings they do have a kind of like stage presence,

(40:51):
Like they certainly come off like human beings in makeup,
and there's not there. There doesn't seem to be an
overt attempt to portray them as overtly otherworldly beings, Like
there's a humanity to them that I guess is essential here.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Should we jump into the plot.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
Let's do it?

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Okay? So, as I mentioned, there are these eight segments.
We're going to talk about some of them, I think,
in more detail than others. I wanted to start off
talking about the first one. I love all the segments
in this movie, but the very first one is probably
my favorite. So I want to kind of look at
it in some detail. And this is the one called
Sunshine through the Rain. So it begins with a young

(41:41):
boy coming out the front door of his house looking
like he wants to go play outside. But just as
he is heading out, it starts to rain. And I
don't know, somehow that beginning in itself, even before we
really are thinking of this as a dream, that's so
evocative of childchildhood, you know, the feeling of wanting to

(42:02):
go outside and play and it starts raining, Or at
least it was for me. I don't know that that
feels like such a familiar and cutting kind of frustration.
So the boy, he's come out the door of his house,
but he stands under an archway in the gate that
goes around the outside of the home, and he's watching
the rain come down, and it is a sunshower, so

(42:23):
the sun is shining even though there is precipitation. And
then from the background, we see the boy's mother emerge
from the house and she hurries out into the courtyard
to gather some baskets of something. I think maybe she
was drying some kind of food items in the sun
or something. And she's pulling the baskets inside, and she
calls out to the boy and she says, you're staying home.

(42:44):
The sun is shining, but it's raining. Foxes hold their
wedding processions in this weather and they don't like anyone
to see them. If you do, they'll be very angry.
And she runs back inside. So actually, maybe here should
we do a little sidebar on the folklore of the
Kitsuni no yumeiri. This is the fox's wedding.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, yeah, Katsuni we've discussed on the show before. We're
talking about fox spirits In Japanese traditions, so yo kai
with supernatural abilities often depicted as tricksters, though in this
case not so much tricksters and more in line with
sort of global traditions of like fairy folk of the
unseen world who are out there going through their rights

(43:30):
and observations, and sometimes humans can see into their world,
but perhaps at their peril.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
So he's received this warning, but the young boy, he
is maybe not deterred. He looks out at the downpour.
He stands there and stares for a bit, and then
he wanders off into the forest.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah. I mean mom's warning here was kind of asking
for it, like, don't go outside now because there are
fox spirits out there.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
You might see something amazing. Yeah, And I love the
scene in the forest here. So the forest is eerie
and just pulsing with magic. So the trees are enormous.
We don't see really the tops of the trees. We
just see these column like trunks, and the ground is

(44:22):
covered in sprouting plants with long green leaves that come
up to the boy's waist, and we can see sheets
of rain and mist are billowing sideways through the gaps
between the trees, and then you can also see individual
shafts of sunlight crossing down through holes in the canopy,
and all this together makes the air appear to have

(44:45):
a kind of silky, shimmering texture. It's so beautiful and
it looks like a place absolutely where magic happens. And
as we watch the scene, there is just this mounting
sense of the strange and unreal. For example, one thing,
you see a close up of the boy who is
he's walking silently through the woods. He's looking around, not

(45:05):
saying anything, and I noticed he's dry. It's raining, but
he's not wet. There's no music, no talking, just this
kind of soft skittering sound of rain on the leaves,
and the boy just keeps looking around, wide eyed, like
he is expecting to see something. And then he does
see something. There's a bank of white mist, and through

(45:28):
it he sees the outline of a shrine carved in stone.
And then slowly music begins. We hear drums and a
wood block and a flute playing a slow, mysterious melody.
The rhythm on the drums in the woodblocks is also
kind of slow and stuttering, and over the background of

(45:51):
this music, the boy watches a procession of figures slowly
marching out of the fog. They are human dancer in
fox makeup rob as you were saying there, they're distinctly
human in forms, so they didn't try to make them
quadrupedal or anything. They're standing upright basically human, but their
faces are painted a rosy white color, with red fur

(46:15):
over their noses and cheeks, and they have whiskers. The
women are wearing veils over their heads, and the men
wear a sort of disc shaped hat. The first two
men in the procession are carrying these cylindrical objects. I'm
not sure what these are, but they might be some
form of paper lantern. I know that fox wedding processions

(46:35):
in folklore are sometimes said to be carrying paper lanterns
like you can see them as dancing lights.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
Yeah, I think that's what this is supposed to be.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
And their style of dancing is so interesting and evocative.
There are these slow, almost glacial movements as they march along,
and then sudden moves where they bend and twist and
assume a pose, all looking in the same direction. I
think this is supposed to evoke when a wild animal
senses your presence or gets spooked and then suddenly like

(47:06):
flinches and freezes looking at you. Did you take the
same thing from it?

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Rob, That's a good point, you know. I don't think
I've literally put that together when I was watching it,
but I think it's a great read. I will note
that this is definitely one of the many sequences in
the picture that feels like it could possibly go on
forever in a good way, in that dream sense where
it's like this is this is happening, and and you're
just in it. You know, who knows if the dream

(47:32):
is going to is going to continue on to some
point of emotional upwelling, though of course it will in
this case.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Lost time, very little consciousness of past or future. You're
just you're just stuck in this moment. And the boy
is watching this procession from behind a tree. He's very cautious.
He's trying to hide, and the dancers keep stopping and
suddenly looking in his direction, but at first he stays
hidden until the last time they stop and sudden he's caught.

(48:01):
They all turn and look at him, and the boy
panics and runs away back home.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
This is not played for horror or anything but and
again the makeup is is subtle, and it's definitely holding back,
but it is a frightening sequence in its own way,
Like that, you know, the child has seen into a
world he should not bear witness too, and they have
looked back and seen him as well.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
But when he gets home, the danger is not over.
Actually that you might think, Okay, he's escaped, he's back
home now. When he gets back to the house, he
finds his mother waiting for him at the front gate,
and she's looking very stern, and he approaches her kind
of bashfully, like he knows he's done something wrong. But
she does not comfort him. Her face is very stiff

(48:48):
and her expression is cold, and she says, you saw it,
didn't you. You saw something you shouldn't have. I can't
have such a child in my house. And angry fox
came looking for you. He left this, And then from
a pouch in her sleeve, the mother produces a tonto knife.

(49:10):
The boy takes it and he pulls the knife from
the sheath and the mother says, you're to a tone
by cutting your belly open. And I was like, WHOA.
That hits hard because this is a little child. This
is not like a you know, not even like an
like the little kid, and it hits hard. But this

(49:31):
to me felt so real as a child's dream turning
into a nightmare. It is so much more unacceptably threatening
and dangerous than adults like to imagine children's dreams are.
But this is, I mean, this is what I remember
children's dreams being like that. There's a way that the

(49:51):
child's mind is sort of uncensored. It is it like
it goes to much more bold and horrible and frightening place,
says than adults want a child's mind to go to.
And this felt like a real dream in multiple ways,
with like the you know, the threat that you have
to cut your own belly open, but also in the

(50:11):
in the way that the mother is not comforting, like
he's done something bad and the mother has become alien
and threatening to him.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Yeah, But then here in the dream, the mother offers
an alternative. She says, she says, go quickly and ask
their forgiveness. Give that back to them, talking about the knife,
give that back to them, and beg for your life
on your knees. And then the mother literally turns her
back on the boy. She turns her back on him
and goes inside and starts to close the gate in

(50:42):
her son's face. And as she's closing the doors of
the gate, she says, they rarely forgive even trivial things.
You must go prepared to die for your sin. And
then as the gate is almost nearly shut all the way,
she says that until they forgive him, she can't let
him back in. And then finally the boy speaks. He
pleads that he doesn't know where their home is, but

(51:04):
the mother says, of course you do. Their home is
beneath the rainbow. And so now we and the gate shuts,
and so, now afraid and alone, the boy sets out
again into the woods with the deadly knife in his hands,
and eventually he comes to a clearing and it's a
meadow full of flowers. It's just huge mass of flowers,

(51:26):
millions of flowers, all in bloom in spring colors yellow, white, pink,
and violet, and this mysterious music swells and then we
can see the boy from behind. This is probably the
most iconic shot from the film. The boy is now
entering a narrow valley framed by dark mountains, and in
the middle ground there there's the meadow of the spring flowers,

(51:51):
and a rainbow bends over the field. And this has
got to be the most beautiful and certainly the most
frightening use of a rainbow in a film that I
can think of, because it's a rainbow that's obviously not
just a disconnected vision that is pretty to look at,
as rainbows are often in movies. This is a place,
and it is the spectral castle of the vengeful Fox Spirits.

(52:15):
And the boy stands there facing the rainbow. He's clutching
the knife. He is amazed and afraid, and he begins
again to walk to its center, and the music is
swelling up with these ominous notes on the woodwinds and
then fade to black. Yeah, and that's the end, So
we never see him face the fox Spirits. In the

(52:35):
true essence of a dream, these vignettes often begin in
the middle of the action, or begin with a kind
of unexplained arrival, and they often stop right in the
middle of the story as well, usually right as the
tension is kind of rising to its peak.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Yeah, I mean, that's the way it often is in dreams.
How how many times have any of you ever had
a dream that finished had a third act you know,
sometimes I guess that's the case, but generally it's like
things kind of peter out or shift. And yeah, I agree,
very strong opening segment here. I agree on the danger
and seriousness of children's dreams displayed here, and it seems

(53:11):
a fitting way too, to look at the way that
children are you eventually thrust, maybe without warning, into you know,
out of their lives of protected curiosity and into a
more serious world of reality. Though of course in this
case it's it's it's not quite reality. It's a supernatural threat.
But still it's like his world of just sort of

(53:32):
play and curiosity has suddenly taken this sharp turn into
a into threatening confines.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
Yeah, I agree with all that, and I just love
so many things about this opening. The way it captures
this authentic feeling of a child's imagination and dream world,
the way that there is a thin line between beauty
and amazement and absolute horror, and that the way the
story can just shift back and forth between the or

(54:00):
kind of capture them both at the same time, especially
with the image of the rainbow.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, And again you have such an ominous use
of the rainbow here, This rainbow gait to a certain
degree of more adult world.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
Okay, do you want to look at the peach orchard?
The next one in order. So this one also begins
with a young boy in a house a little bit
older than the boy in the previous dream, and it
starts with him taking a tray of cakes to his
big sister and her friends. And this episode takes place
on Hina Matsuri or Doll's Day, also known as Girls' Day.

(54:38):
I didn't know anything about this beforehand, so I had
to look it up. But this is a festival celebrated
at the transition from winter to spring. I think these
days it's often on March third, where families pray for
the well being of their daughters. It's sort of a
health and well being of our Daughter's Day. And the
festival includes the display of dolls known as Hena Nino

(54:59):
or Hena doll, which are styled after the imperial court
of the Hayan period. So the protagonist, the boy, he
brings a tray of goodies to his older sister who
is with her friends, and they're in a room with
a tiered display of Hena dolls in the background, and
the boy stops to look at the dolls and there's
kind of a strangeness, a music sting that indicates something

(55:21):
is a little striking or unusual. And then he realizes
that he brought more food to his sister and her
friends than is needed. He thought that she had five
friends with her, but there are only four friends there now,
and he insists that he saw another girl with them earlier,
but the sister tells him no, there are no other
girls here. He is being strange. But then he sees

(55:43):
the girl again. The other girl is dressed in pink
and white, and she's watching him from the hallway, but
she disappears when he tries to get his sister to
look and see the.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Other girl is already a little creepy.

Speaker 3 (55:54):
Yeah. Yes, So he follows the girl in pink out
through the back door, out into the bamboo forest, all
the way to a green hillside with tiered terraces, much
like the tiered display with the Hena dolls in the house,
and the hill is covered in soft grass, and when
he arrives at the hillside, he's sort of ambushed by

(56:16):
a mass of people. They all come running out on
the terraces and they are dressed up like the Hena dolls,
but in life size, and I think there's sort of
an Emperor doll Man, the leader of them all. He
addresses the boy sternly, and he says that they will
never return to his house again because his family cut
down the peach orchard that used to be on this hill.

(56:38):
And he explains that they are the spirits of the
peach trees, which are celebrated on the Dolls Day festival.
And there seems to be kind of an implication that
because of the family's treachery, they will also withhold their
blessings from the family, and the boy begins to cry,
and the Emperor yells at him. He tells him it's

(56:58):
too late for tears. But then the Queen Doll remembers something.
She says, this is the same boy who cried for
the trees when they were being cut down. They say
they remember he even pleaded with his family not to
do it, not to cut down the orchard, and the
Emperor at first he scoffs at this. He says that
was only because the boy knew he would stop getting
peaches to eat, and all of the members of the

(57:20):
court laugh at him, but the boy protests. He says no,
He says you can buy peaches at the store, but
where can you buy a whole orchard of trees in bloom.
He says he was crying because he loved the trees
at themselves as living things, and then he starts to
cry again. And then the doll people seem sort of ashamed.
You can see them sort of looking at their feet

(57:40):
and hanging their heads. And the emperor accepts the boy's explanation.
He says he's a good boy and that he will
be allowed to see the orchard in bloom one last time.
And then there's a dance with all of the figures
taking place on the terraces, and they perform these choreographed
movements to symbolize the flowering of the trees. And then

(58:02):
at the end of the dance, the boy sees the
peach trees blossoming again, and there are petals falling everywhere.
He also sees the girl in pink, and he tries
to run after her, but suddenly he's back in the
real world and all the trees are chopped down. Now
they're just bare stumps, all except one. There's one tree
that has a limb covered in flowers, kind of bouncing

(58:23):
in the wind. And he goes over to it and
he looks at it, and the end, what was going
to happen next we don't get to see.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
This is also a strong segment. I mean, like they're
all strong. It's not like there's a week one in
the bunch. This one maybe hit me. I think is
weirder just because I wasn't familiar with the traditions, and
also I think my fever might have been spiking a
little bit during the sequence as well. But yeah, I
also really loved this one. Similar in some ways in

(58:56):
theme to the first Sega segment.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
I thought this one was interesting because the Peach spirits
themselves seem to abide by a kind of child's internal logic.
The way that they think that he's actually a good
boy because he cried because of the trees themselves and
not because of just wanting to eat peaches. I don't know.
That just feels like such a like a kid's way

(59:19):
of thinking about this thing. Yeah, all right. The next
segment is the Blizzard. I think we can be a
little bit more cursory and talking about this one. Basically,
it is four mountain climbers who are going up this mountain.
They get hit by this blizzard. They're struggling in the snow.

(59:41):
We see for a long time just them fighting against
the wind and the snow, trying to make their way
up hill but it is and they're trying to make
the way to camp, but they can't see which way
they're going. There's disagreement about whether they're on the right track,
and eventually they begin to sort of get snowed in.
They succumb to the snow and they're being covered up
and they're freezing, and they sort of settle down, and

(01:00:02):
there's the implication that if they do this and they
don't reach camp, they're going to die. And then we
see things from the perspective of the lead climber. It's
sort of the leader of all of them, who's been
trying to rally his friends to keep going. We see
a figure begins to sort of put blankets over him,
these shimmering blankets and shawls that go over his body

(01:00:24):
like layers of snow. And this is from what I've read,
this is supposed to be a traditional figure from Japanese
folklore known as the yuki onna, which might be like
the snow princess or snow fairy, snow witch, something like that,
the snow spirit, who I think is often threatening in
nature and here or she's ambiguous at first, but then

(01:00:46):
I think by the end we can learn as definitely
a threatening figure.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Yeah, my understanding is that it does kind of vary. So.
Yuki Ona is a pretty famous yokai, generally regarded as
a yo kai because she's often more of a personification
of the snow or of blizzards, though some tellings depict
her as more of a yuri or a ghost that

(01:01:10):
of a woman who died in the snow. As Heroko,
Yoda and Matt All discussed in the book Yokai Attack.
There as many different versions of this tale, as there
are mountains in Japan. The tale of the Yukiyono was
famously adapted in the nineteen sixty five film Kaitan, which
we might come back to. The core stories involve her
sparing a handsome young man during a blizzard like after

(01:01:34):
like brutally killing his compatriots with winter powers, but then
sparing him on the condition that he never tell anyone
about this, and so the young man survives, and then,
as luck would have it, he meets a beautiful young
woman the next day. The two fall in love, they're married,
they eventually have children, and yet the whole time, this

(01:01:54):
need to tell the story of the woman in the
snow steadily builds up inside him, till one day he
breaks and he tells his wife about what happened in
the snow that day. And I don't want to spoil anything,
because it's pretty pretty amazing, but essentially we see the
ramifications of him breaking his promise to the YUKIONO.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
Oh well, the Yukiona in this segment is is quite scary,
and eventually though the climber does sort of overcome her influence.
She's sort of lulling him to sleep in the snow,
and there's one moment when she is sort of defeated
or blown away. She turns into some kind of white cloth.
It's like a white piece of clothing or flag or something,

(01:02:39):
and just like blows away in the wind. But then
the man wakes up after the blizzard is gone, and
he sort of tries to he revives his compatriots. I
think they're all still alive, and he sort of shakes them,
tries to get them to wake up, and then they
realize their camp is like right there, they're right beside
it and they didn't know because of the storm. A

(01:03:00):
lot of reviewers flag this, I at least from what
I've seen online, as their least favorite segment. I think
primarily because of how slow and monotonous parts of it are.
Like it is very dreamlike in that respect, especially in
the first half of them just fighting through the snow
and the wind is blowing. But I don't know. I
like this segment, and I really like the part where

(01:03:21):
the snow witch speaks. You know, when the snow witch
comes up over him while he's lying down. She's putting
the shawls over him, and there's some kind of modulation
on her voice, like it's doubled or something, so it
sounds very strange. And you hear her saying, the snow
is warm. It's so frightening.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Yeah, yeah. And my understanding is that that this it's
sort of like the general vibes of the Yukiona. It's
kind of a take on hypothermia and the idea of
like giving in to death in the cold snow zihia.
It's pretty creepy stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
The snow is warm. Okay. Next segment is the tunnel.
As we explained, this one begins with a military officer
walking by himself on an empty road that cuts through
the mountains, we somehow understand I think that he is
coming home from war. I would guess by his uniform
that it's World War two, And he seems weary and

(01:04:15):
beaten down, but he's still kind of clutching a sense
of formal dignity, has a kind of headheld high aspect
that some of the other characters and protagonists here wouldn't
necessarily have. And as he comes up the road, he
faces the entrance to a tunnel. It's hard to say
exactly why, but there is something really just cursed and

(01:04:36):
ominous about this tunnel. I don't think it's a set
made for the film. It looks like it's probably just
a real concrete tunnel somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Yeah, but what a location. It's amazing, like just again,
so ominous, and you know, it reads on so many levels,
like like what is this? Is it a gateway to
the underworld? It is nothing else, literally a gateway through
the mountain. Yeah, so many ways to take it apart.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Don't go in there. But then from inside he hears
howling and whimpering, the sounds of a dog, and then
a dog runs out of the tunnel, and this is
from what I've read, supposed to be an anti tank dog.
So it is a dog strapped with timed explosives, which
was explored and then there were many of these trained

(01:05:20):
as a weapon by multiple armies in World War Two.
I'm not sure how much they were actually used in combat,
but they were at least trained. So in this case,
it is a dog with a kind of saddle on
its back, covered in pockets, and the pockets are stuffed
with grenades. It is a bleak and horrifying image.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
Yeah, and certainly fits with some of the themes explored
in the picture about humanity's relationship to nature. Here a
great example of nature being twisted beyond mere domestication into
actual weaponization. Pretty horrific.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
So the dog approaches the officer and snarls at him,
but does not attack, and then the officer walks on
into the tunnnnel, which is cavernous and echoing. We see
these tracking, these moving shots going through the tunnel, just
looking up at the ceiling of the tunnel as kind
of light plays on it as he's walking along, and
we can see the officer's breath, we hear his boots

(01:06:16):
kind of clapping and reverberating as he makes his way
down to the other end, and then we see at
the emerging side of the tunnel the sky is dark
blue and illuminated by a red lamp, which I thought
was interesting. Kind of reminds me of that Charles Dickens
ghost story we talked about last October, the signalman with
the ghost or the premonition appearing by the red light

(01:06:37):
at the end of the rail tunnel. And so after
the commander comes out the other end of the passage,
he stops because he hears steps behind him. Who's that
He turns around to see and it is a ghost.
It is a soldier in combat uniform with rifle and
helmet and his skin painted blue blue fleshed being who

(01:07:02):
should not be and the commander recognizes him. This is
someone known to the protagonist. This is Private Naguchi, but
Private Naguchi was killed in action and Noguchi is confused.
He believes maybe he is still alive. He remembers going
home after the war and being given rice cakes by

(01:07:22):
his mother, remembers being comforted by his mother, but the
commander has to explain to him, no, that was a
dream you had. This is a dream about you know,
the dreams of others. That was a dream you had.
You were shot in battle and you passed out, and
you woke up, and you told me you had that
dream where you went home and saw your mother and
she gave you rice cakes. Then you died in my

(01:07:44):
arms a few minutes later, and Noguchi is so confused.
He's he points out a light in the mountains beyond
and he says, that's that's my parents' home, that house
right there where the light is. But the commander argues
with him. He tells him that he has to act up,
that he is dead and he has to go to
his rest, and he eventually the ghost seems to give in.

(01:08:06):
He turns about face and he walks back into the tunnel.
But it's not over because then here comes everyone, the
entire company who served under this commander, and they come
marching out of the tunnel. Information they're you know, they're
like calling out drill instructions. They call him marching and
they stand in order in front of him. And here

(01:08:30):
there's a confrontation where ultimately the commander has to accept
his responsibility for their death in battle, where he says
he would like to blame the stupidity of war for
the deaths of his men, but he knows in his
heart that he bears personal responsibility for sending them into
certain doom because it was it was a feudal attempt,

(01:08:50):
but he sent them into battle anyway. And I feel
like this moment highlights a theme that I think appears
in multiple segments of this movie, which is the theme
of individual responsibility versus a kind of collective blame or stupidity. Specifically,
like there's a theme of the inadequacy of placing blame

(01:09:12):
for tragedies on abstract, impersonal forces or diffuse collectives. So
there's the case here, But then the same thing happens
in the next segment in Mount Fujian Red where or
actually two segments later, where there's like a bureaucratic man
in a suit and glasses who kind of contrasts a
force of impersonal stupidity and arrogance that allowed the nuclear

(01:09:36):
meltdown in that segment to occur. But then he acknowledges
that he is personally to blame somehow, though he doesn't
explain how. And this seems to be something that's on
the dreamer's mind. It's one of these themes that comes
up in multiple cases.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Yeah, yeah, I want to also flag he hear that
the makeup for the soldiers the ghosts here is really
really well done. It is it is again you get
a sense of Corosawa pulling back from anything too monstrous,
like these are not like, this is not zombie makeup

(01:10:11):
or what you might think of a zombie makeup. It
really but it's also not like straight up kobuki makeup either.
It's kind of like somewhere in this perfect place between
kabuki makeup and like just a corpse like.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Pallor Yeah, the blueness of their makeup is so interesting.
Is a color choice. It doesn't exactly suggest rot. It
suggests a kind of changedness and like become a different
kind of being. Yeah, but anyway, so the commander accepts
his responsibility and he orders his men to turn about

(01:10:42):
face and to march back into the tunnel, to essentially
accept their destruction and go into death, go into their rest.
And then you might think the encounter is over, but
there is another escalation because we get the return of
the dog. So the anti tank dog runs back out
again and begins it starts snarling and menacing the officer,

(01:11:03):
and once again it just ends at this moment of
heightened menace where we don't know how it resolves.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
Great segment though, really everyone in it is stellar, just
the I mean everything about it, the way it's framed,
the costuming, the location they use, just everything lines up
on this one for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
The next segment is Crows. This is the one that
has the paintings of Vincent veng Go. So it begins
with the Khorsaur protagonist in a museum looking at Vengo's paintings.
He's looking at starry Night and one of his self portraits.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
Then he experiences a little Stendel syndrome and just walks
right into that thing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:38):
He goes into the paintings. I think the first one
he enters is so Vengo did a number of paintings
of the bridge at Arla ar l e s if
I'm saying that right, Arla's or Arla, And I think
the specific one that he appears in is the Langlowy
Bridge at Arla with women washing. So that's a painting

(01:12:01):
you can look up if you want. It shows like
a bridge with a sort of you know, drawbridge characteristic
that can be raised so boats can pass underneath. But
there's a carriage, a horse drawn carriage on the wooden
part of the bridge, and then down in the foreground
there are women washing clothes in the river. And our
protagonist just sort of wanders into this scene and it's

(01:12:22):
reproduced in a spectacular way. I love the way that
the color qualities of the van Go paintings are recreated
in the sets and the lighting that Kusawa puts together here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
Yes, agreed, And I also like this is a nice
pivot from the more serious, or at least the more
dramatic vibes of the last segment. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
So the protagonist here wants to meet ven Go and
he wanders around looking for him. He asks the locals
where he is. They say he's a madman. But he
finds van Go in a wheat field painting or observing
the wheat field and talking about painting. This a major
visual theme here is van Go's painting wheat field with crows,

(01:13:04):
which shows like, you know, these the tall staves of
wheed and then the crows flying up out of them
into a blue sky. The version we see a van
Go portrayed by Martin Scorsese, and this vignette seems to
resemble the figure, at least as I found in a
Vango painting called Painter on the Road to Tarasan or Terrascon. Again,
I'm not sure how to say that, but he's got

(01:13:26):
a you know, a wide straw hat and just a
lot of stuff with him. You know, he's got all
his gear and his painting and a satchel and all that.
The VANGOI meet is very distracted, you know, he's never
really giving the protagonist his full attention. His attention is
on the scene and the landscape. And there's a lot
of idea of like, you know, what's really valuable here

(01:13:47):
is this scene and its beauty, and I must consume
it and process it and turn it into something and
that's what that's what matters. And I'm sort of halfway
giving you enough attention to talk to you, but only
about what I I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
Doing, doesn't he This is the part we have a
line where old Marty van Go says, well, why aren't
you painting? Like you got your stuff? Like what are
you doing out here? Like this is this is why
we're here, This is the reason we exist. Get to paint?

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
Why are you talking to me? Why aren't you painting? Yeah?
I think that's a nice little, uh, gentle self criticism
here from Corsawa. You know that apparently Corsawa was personally
very interested in Vango, like he had read a lot
of his letters and stuff and was interested in the
man's life as well as to his work.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
Yeah, and again makes sense given Chrisau was an early
interest and in a career as a painter before pivoting
to a film.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Next couple of segments, Mount Fujian Read and The Weeping Demon,
or sort of the nuclear horror segments. So Mount Fujian Read.
As I said, the protagonist just finds himself in the
middle of a disaster scene. I think when we first
see him, everybody else is running in one direction and
he's walking in the opposite direction. He's like the only one.
He's going against the flow of the crowd, and he

(01:15:13):
sees Mount Fuji just it looks like hot lava. It's
just you know, glowing hot, and there are these explosions,
and he learns that it's due to a nuclear meltdown.
And as we talked about, they have these discussions. A
man in a suit appears and he kind of explains things.
There's this long digression about the different colored like the

(01:15:34):
different colors of fog and what radioactive isotopes they represent,
and how each one kills you in different ways, and
they're like, well, we color coded them so you can
know which type of fog is killing you, but it
doesn't help you survive. It seems to be some kind
of commentary on like the absurdity of like false senses
of security provided by technology and that there are these,

(01:15:59):
you know, threats that people just kind of rush into
and we're given false assurance that it's going to be okay,
but in fact that that was all you know, that
was all just rosy talk, and in fact this is
real stupidity and people are really to blame for this disaster.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
I mean, there's a lot to unpack here with just
the symbolism of all of this. Because Mount Fuji, of
course is a dormant volcano. It's the tallest peak in Japan.
I believes the last eruption was seventeen oh seven, But
at the same time it is very much a symbol
of Japan. And then on top of that we have
the like the dream logic here as well of the

(01:16:37):
mountain we learn is not actually erupting. It is nuclear
meltdowns happening like behind the mountain. But at the same
time everything has like the flavor of volcanic eruptions, so
it's like both things at once without being either.

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
This one also has that horrifying sense of futility because
it ends with a really just gut wrenching scene with
there's like a woman with two children who have joined him,
and the protagonist is trying to protect them as like
the fog clouds billow toward them, and he's in this
utterly feudal gesture. He's like waving at the fog clouds

(01:17:13):
with his jacket, trying to fan them away. But there's
a sense that everyone is just doomed and there's nothing
anyone can do. Again, ends right at the height of
the action, and then goes on to the next segment,
another nuclear horror segment called The Weeping Demon, where our
protagonist is wandering in this volcanic landscape very much it's
almost like the slopes of Mount Fuji maybe, where there's

(01:17:36):
a kind of dark volcanic soil and all these rocks
and mist and fog billowing everywhere, and he encounters this
monstrous looking figure with a horn on his head, which
I think is initially styled to be some sort of
some kind of onny.

Speaker 2 (01:17:50):
Yeah, definitely some onny vibes to this creature. I also
have to flag that I again am sick and I
had a few while watching this film. I think my
eyes shut for a second at the very end of
the Mount Fuji segment and then reopened during the Weeping Demon,
and I thought it was one segment, but there is

(01:18:11):
kind of like a similar vibe, like he's heading off
into the nuclear waste at the end of Mount Fuji
and now here we are in a different atomic wasteland.

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):
Yeah. And then after this we get a long discourse
from the demon as he explains this hell they have created.
He sort of explains himself as a mutated product of radiation.
And then they sit under these tree sized dandelions that
are twisted and mutated by the radioactive fallout. And then
he talks about these different kinds of demons, these like

(01:18:44):
grades of demons. The demon with one horn is scary,
but the demons with one horn get eaten by the
demons who have two or three horns. And they're also hungry,
and then we see there's like a scene where the
demon is like, come, I'll show you, and he leads
the protagonists to this overlook where they look down at
these gross like pools of pink and red water, where

(01:19:06):
all of these demons are like running around them in
circles in a way that suggests representations from Dante's Inferno,
where you know, in hell you will have the damned
sort of like running in pointless circles around something.

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):
Uh and it uh.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
And it's like they're they're calling out, they're you know,
they're ready, they're gonna come eat them soon. But they're
in pain themselves. They're suffering. Their their horns cause them pain.
And we learned so many things. The demon explains he
was again there's this thing of like eyebear individual responsibility.
He explains, I was a farmer who destroyed my harvest

(01:19:43):
as part of a scheme to keep prices high. And
and but they talk about other people who did other
things who may have become even worse kinds of demons themselves.
And so another just bleak, horrifying segment that also ends
with the demon just menacing the Krusauur protagonist and the
protagonist is running away down the side of the mountain,

(01:20:04):
looking constantly like he's about to go headlong and tumble away.

Speaker 2 (01:20:08):
Yeah, he's like he's berating him right, like, get out
of here. Do you want to become a demon too?

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
So this one was at once like as bleak as
the previous segment, but also since we had these monster
like beings, it also felt like a little more escapist.
So I was again, all of these segments are excellently
put together, but in a way, this one felt like

(01:20:35):
a nice turn away from the seriousness of the previous
Mount Fuji sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:20:40):
And then we get a very sharp turn into different
territory for the last sequence, which is the Village of
the Watermills. So our protagonist here the Dreamer, arrives by
foot in a small rural village beside a river. There
are these old wooden water wheels turning in the current,
and I guess they're running mills, and they're flowers blooming everywhere,

(01:21:03):
and kursaw, what really takes time to show us the
nature around there, to show us like green water plants
waving in the stream, kind of like hair blowing in
the wind. And the dreamer comes in and he watches
the children as they sort of gather on a little
island in the stream that's bridged, you know that they
reach by bridge and they pick flowers there, and they

(01:21:25):
take the flowers and they lay them all on a stone.
It's a very just beautiful, kind of gentle scene. And
the dreamer meets an old man who's working on a
water wheel mechanism of some kind, and they have a
long conversation where the old man just kind of explains
his philosophy. They talk about all kinds of things. He
A big part of it is him talking about how
they don't need technology in this village. The man's like,

(01:21:48):
don't you have electricity here? And the man's like, we
don't need it and he's like, yeah, but what about
at night when it gets dark? And the guy's like,
night is supposed to be dark. And so the main
thrust of the old Man's philosophy is that people and
people in the cities think that labor saving technology will

(01:22:09):
make them happy, but secretly it just makes them more miserable,
and they don't realize it until they have already destroyed
the natural world and they can't get it back.

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):
Yeah, this segment is great in so many ways, like
it's it's definitely another rumination on this idea of the
idyllic rural Japan versus modern urban Japan, something that you
see in multiple studio ghibli pictures. So if any of
you are certainly more familiar with the works of Miyazaki,

(01:22:42):
you've seen this kind of vibe. And I believe and
I would go as far as to say, like this
the sequence too, like it feels very much in line
with like a Miyazaki film too, and that we have
just such vibrant colors, like this is the world in
full bloom. This is like it is almost like an
Eden to some extent. And oh and by the way,

(01:23:02):
I should mention that that documentary Cursaw Was Way also
features interview segments with me asz Aki. He's one of
the many directors who talks about his admiration for Cursawa's work.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
This segment absolutely has strong me az Aki vibes, yeah,
in that love for verdant nature and the environmentalist outlook
and all that sort of thing. And then also I
think in this next moment, because after this, the protagonist
hears what sounds like a celebration, He hears laughter and
shouting and happy music, and the old man explains to him, actually,

(01:23:36):
what he's hearing is a funeral. It's a good, happy funeral,
and this is another part of his philosophy. He says, well,
when someone dies young, it's sad, but when someone dies
in old age, it's a joyous occasion because they lived
a full life. So the people march and they sing
happy songs. And the woman who died in the funeral
that's being celebrated today was almost one hundred years old.

(01:23:58):
In fact, she was this old man's first love when
they were both very young. She broke his heart she
married another, and then he just laughs about it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
I love his laugh here.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
Yeah, there's also The protagonist asks the old man about
the stone where the children laid the flowers, and the
man tells the story. He says that long ago a
traveler came to the village, much like our dreamer here,
but he arrived sick like he brought the sickness of
the modern world with him, and he collapsed and died
beside the river, and the people took pity on him

(01:24:31):
and they buried him right where he fell, and the
stone is his grave marker, and the children place flowers
on it. It's hard not to think about the man
who died as being kind of suggested as another version
of the visitor of the dreamer here and then from here,
the old man goes off to celebrate the death of
his first love, and the traveler watches the funeral march
and listens to the happy music, and he feels kind

(01:24:53):
of infused with the goodness and the happiness of this place,
and we hear the music as well. That's the end.

Speaker 2 (01:25:01):
The music is so terrific here, as I mentioned earlier,
like I don't know exactly what you call this type
of song, like how this factors into traditional Japanese music,
But it's very joyous, like the old man explains it,
like this is a celebration of life, and you totally
feel it. You see it on the faces of all
of the villagers in this procession. It's just such a

(01:25:23):
great vibe.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
I want to come back to that joy in just
a minute, but I guess before we wrap up, I
just wanted to mention a couple of the other interesting
themes and threads I saw tying together these very different narratives.
One thing that I noticed, Rob, did you notice this
theme of the dilemma of being destroyed versus being transformed.

(01:25:44):
That like, in several of the more nightmarish scenes, especially,
there is a dilemma faced by the characters in which
they can either be annihilated, they can cease to exist
or live on transformed into something tortured and unnatural. This
is a major theme of the Weeping Demon. It comes
up in Mount Fuji and Red, where they talk about
the idea of immediate death versus a slow death from

(01:26:06):
the effects of radiation. It comes up in the Tunnel
because the dead soldiers can't acknowledge that they are dead
and they must cease to exist. Thus they go on
in this baffled, twisted state of blue undeath. This clearly
seems to be something that is on Krosova's mind. Another
thing is across multiple scenes, I noticed a repeated theme

(01:26:29):
of people getting no help from authorities and in fact
authority figures suggesting that you must die like. There are
multiple scenes where someone is denied aid by someone who
should help them, or by an authority figure like a
parent the mother in the first sequence, or a government
official or a military commander.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
And a corporate world.

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
Yes. In all these cases, the authority figure suggests there
is nothing I can do to help you, and you
must die. But then finally, and I think this brings
us back to the last segment. There is a more
theme that you get in both negative and positive visions,
and it's something about the holiness of nature, something about

(01:27:13):
how the holiness of nature is not appreciated, but that
there is promise in coming to see it. And so
I think the clear statement of the idea is that
the natural world is absolutely vital to us, but that
we remain blind to how important it is until we
have already destroyed it. This theme is made very plain

(01:27:35):
in the speech given by the old Man and the
final Dream, where he's talking about the virtues of living
simply and being in harmony with nature. He talks about
the false promise of happiness through technology and convenience and materialism.
But you see this theme occur at different levels through
I think most of the segments, like the boy in
the peach orchard is redeemed by proving that he hated

(01:27:58):
the idea of cutting down the peach trees, and that
he loved the orchard for the living beauty of the plants,
not just for the produce. Not just for the material,
you know, the peaches they grew.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
And in that segment we see that some level of
regeneration is possible, like the we see that one plant
that is growing back the promise of the future. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:28:18):
And in the crows segment also this is part of
what van Go like, he discusses this kind of almost
life or death drive to find purpose and positive meaning
in life by like seeking out what's beautiful and valuable
in nature and kind of processing it through, you know,
to take that scene of nature and to make it

(01:28:40):
part of himself and to make himself part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
And then of course that brings us back to the
funeral at the end. There's something relieving and gorgeous and
cathartic about the funeral because it suggests a kind of
a way of happiness, happiness and purpose and goodness even
in death, by finding your life in the kind of
state that these villagers find it that you know that

(01:29:05):
they live in harmony with nature, and they realize they
see beauty around them and they take part of it.
They don't, you know, they don't remain blind to it.
They become part of it and they work with it,
and it makes even death a happy thing.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
Yeah, yeah, return to nature or return to traditional values.
This is you see this as a recurring theme in
Japanese media of this time period especially, but also I
think globally as well. I mean, this idea of of
returning to nature, returning to the garden, you know, you
see that certainly throughout the later half of the twentieth

(01:29:43):
century and on through storytelling today. I don't think it's
a revelation that thankfully we've completely abandoned.

Speaker 3 (01:29:52):
Or could hope to put into a kind of happy synthesis,
because I also don't think it's quite fair to fully embrace,
like the the philosophy that all labor saving conveniences are
bad or something, you know, that happiness is necessarily through
like destroying all machines and not having electricity. I mean,
maybe it is, but I'm not sure that's the case.
But certainly there is a lot of wisdom in the

(01:30:14):
movies plea to be more conscious and protective of nature
and to see ourselves as being in an absolutely vital
kind of personal relationship with it, each one of us,
and also together as a community.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
Yeah, absolutely, that's the dream. Anyway, in this case, Kurosawa's Dreams.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
All right, well, I guess that's what I've got on Dreams.
Rob is the is the cold medicine flagging? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
Probably so, I believe. I believe I'm running out of
energy here, but this is a great one. I'm so
glad you picked Dreams for us to watch here for
this episode of Weird House Cinema. Again, it's widely available,
It's well worth watching, and again it's really hard to
think of. I love dream sequences in films and television,

(01:31:06):
but I find it rare that a filmmaker actually captures
some true essence of dream and a character of Saul
absolutely nails it here. Yeah, yeah, all right, we're gonna
gohe and close it up. But hey, we'll be back
next week with another cinematic masterpiece. Stay tuned for that one.
Just a reminder that Weird House Cinema this is the

(01:31:29):
episode that publishes on Fridays and the Stuff to Blow
your Mind podcast feed. We're also experimenting with a standalone
playlist of Weird House Cinema, so you can find Weird
House Cinema listed separately on whatever platform it is you
having to get your podcasts at. So check that out
and if you are on a letterbox dot com. You
can find us there. We are Weird House. That's our username,

(01:31:50):
and there's a list of all the films we've covered
thus far, and sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming
up next.

Speaker 3 (01:31:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you were like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:32:16):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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