SEVEN SAMURAI ... TO INFINITY

Seven is the number. Seven samurai. Seven cowboys. Seven space wanderers. Seven women. Seven other samurais, well six, plus a robot ...

Many stories, several genres, even different media but all one inspiration. The inspiration being The Seven Samurai, the 1952 movie by Akira Kurosawa that deserves the status of classic as much if not more than most movies.

Iconic is certainly the word you can use to describe this movie. A movie that at first glance is very Japanese; set in that country's feudal history it is a story of honour, of devotion and of a way of life that that for all that honour could not possibly sustain itself.






Yet there is a universal aspect to the story, or fighting men with nothing left to fight except for the very honour of fighting itself. For men who in their honest moments of reflection could find little honour in their past so decide that perhaps, at the end, they would find honour in folly ... of seven warrirors, pitting themselves against impossible odds, defending a village against bandits, all for a handful or rice.


It is why the story has been adapted, or translated you could say, by so many other story tellers all over the world. The most famous example of this resulted in another iconic movie: The Magnficent Seven, the classic western by John Sturges. Another one of my favorite movies of all time, the Seven spawned serveral sequels that were although entertaining, never achieved the glory of the original

The plot of this movie follows the originally fairly faithfully in most regards; poor villagers, beset by bandits, inlisting the fighting skill of a group of men for little pay. In this case it is gunfighters instead of samurai but the spirit is the same. Samurai is more atmospheric, Kurosawa is never afraid to take his time building his stories; Magnificent Seven is more stream lined but both films get the most out of their characters. Toshiro Mifune's peasant-turned-warrior from Samurai finds an unlikely home in Horst Buckholtz the German actor playing Mexican .. but it still works.

From the iconic past of Japan and the United States, Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars takes the seven into the future and into space.





After the success of the original Star Wars movie, a lot of B grade space operas came oozing onto movie screens and direct to VHS (if you don't remember VHS you may have no point reading this blog but of course there is no point to this blog) but this one stands out. Mostly for its sense of humour and its unrelenting allegience to the conept of the Seven, right to the inclusion of actor Robert Vaughn, who was among the cast of the original Magnificent Seven. The movie is a lark and if you take it as such, it's a lot of fun. It is not however the only sci fi interpretation of the Seven but I'm getting ahead of myself.


From feudal Japan to the American old West to goofy outer space our next tale of the Seven takes us back to feudal Japan but with a couple of differences. The most significant difference is that in this story, Obakemono, is that the seven are all women. The other difference is that it is not a movie at all, it's a graphic novel.

Written by Finona Avery and illustrated by Billy Tan, this is a standalone story associated with Top Cow Comic's long running Witchblade universe of stories. It is the Seven, featuring magic with an all female cast. I really enjoyed the feminine take on the story. In Kurosawa's Seven women were not ignored but they played a very traditional role, a supporting role. As they do in the western version as well. I've always thought that an all female Seven was overdo and it is handled very well in this story.

There have been many many variants on the Seven story but I'm not going to list them all here. That isn't the point of this post ... yes yes yes there is no point this blog really but you can't blame a fella for trying.


What inspired this post was a particular take on the Seven story which I recently encountered. Like Battle Beyond the Stars, it takes the seven into the future and like Obakemono it takes them in a new medium, this time, Japanese anime. I give you Samurai 7.

This was a series that originally ran in Japan in 2004, produced by Gonzo Studios. I recently bought all 27 half hour episodes as a deluxe box set. This interested me because this is a new Japanese interpretation of a Japanese classic. So these are samurai, not cowboys, they are all male, they have Japanese names, they use swords and once again are being paid in rice. And rice features prominantly in this story as it could not in most other cultural renditions.

This is Japan, feudal Japan, but it is a future feudal Japan. It features such anime favorites as gigantic flying robots, slightly smaller ambulatory robots, swords with even more abilities than usual, cybernetics etc. But this future is still a feudal system, with an emperor, lords, merchants and a samurai class.

The story is set after a long penultimate war that has seen the era of samurai replaced by the era of merchants. Commerce has replaced the katanna as the weapon of choice. The war is thought to be the war to end all wars (gee where have we heard that before) and at the end of it, there no longer seems a need for the samurai. Most become ronin while others, still hungry for war, transform themselves into the aforementioned giant flying robots.

Said robots become bandits, terrorizing villages, robbing them of their hard won rice. And guess what ... one village decides to take a stands and goes out to hire themselves some ronin.

Most of the story is very much a remake of the Seven Samurai, the story is even credited to Akira Kurosawa. Some scenes gave me a little chill of prescience, I knew what was coming because some of the shots mirrored those of the original. There are some differences, a love interest is changed and about half of the episodes pick up after where Seven Samurai left off but the feel is pretty much spot on.

There is honour won and lost, there is fealty, heroic battles, betrayal, misunderstandings, and standing tough for the sake of standing tough. It all fits well with the futuristic setting. I've always been fond of the romantic notion of swords being wielded on flying ships, it's very Edgar Rice Burroughs. The futuristic setting also makes possible the transformation of Toshiro Mifune's rambunctious farmer-turned-fighter character into a huge "robot samurai" This interpretation actually works better than that of Buckholtz in Magnificent Seven. The robot is good for laughs but also capable of some touching moments.

The animation in the series is a bit uneven; the flying robot bandits and certain backdrops are rendered in an almost 3 dimensional detail where other backgrounds and some characters are barely above Saturday morning cartoon levels. The story starts out slow, with a bit of uneven pacing, and some of the secondary characters, like a young girl who ends up tagging along, are just downright annoying. Other characters new to the story, like a new evil emperor work extremely well.

All of this proves how timeless Kurosawa's original story really is. And while I enjoy Samurai 7 because it is another Japanese interpretation, Kurosawa was influenced by many other story telling cultures; in fact, he was a big fan of Western movies which lends a lovely irony to the creation of the Magnificent Seven.

The story of a small group of people, strangers thrown together by circumstance, going to their deaths for a handfull of rice and a shot at redemption certainly has a lot of appeal. Additional to that there is this sense of a passing time, a passing era, and those left behind, be they samurai or cowboys. Samurai 7 hits this point particularly well and for being an anime series it is not afraid to dive into the bittersweet essence of the thing.

There were Seven. There are Seven now. There will be Seven in the future. Count on it.