Various tales in the lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, including a mentally deficient young man obsessed with driving his own commuter trolley."Dodesukaden" was Kurosawa's first color film, and is notable for how well he transitioned. After the success of "Red Beard", it took Kurosawa five years before this film appeared. Very few of the actors from Kurosawa's stock company of the 1950s and 1960s were in it, and most of the cast were relatively unknown. "Dodesukaden" was unlike anything Kurosawa had made before. It gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film in the 44th Academy Awards.Apparently it did not do well, though, and only added to Kurosawa's depression. The next film didn't come out for another five years, and his output in general greatly slowed down. This film is a prime example of an artist not recognized in his own time. Today Kurosawa is widely considered the greatest Japanese director (with the only real competition coming from Ozu), but apparently this acclaim came later, as he had trouble filling theater seats...

DODESKADEN, 1970. Rarely Seen Kurosawa masterpiece viewed at the ENCORE theater, Hollywood - An expressionistic pageant of The Human Comedy that ranks with the best of Kurosawa: Written as Herman Pevner for the Rafu Shimpo, Japanese daily of Los Angeles. (Spring 1975). When Dodes'kaden first came out five years ago it was not too well received, mainly because the Japanese public had come to expect a certain kind of Picture from Master director Akira Kurosawa -- movies with lots of samurai action, a definite story line, and especially, lots of Toshire Mifune, the Japanese equivalent of John Wayne in Kurosawa films.Dodes'kaden, a Fellini-like portrait of a shanty town built from the debris of the Tokyo city dump and populated with the dregs of society with no plot to speak of and no swashbuckling central hero, was just too different and too far-out for most people to accept. Of course it is not unusual for the public to find it difficult to accept a radical change in style from an established director. When Hitchcock came out with "The Birds" a lot of people accused him of sensationalism, senility, and everything else -- now, a dozen years later, Birds is generally recognized as one of his masterpieces."Dodeskaden" was Kurosawa's first color film and, like Fellini and Antonioni before him, when he finally turned to color he went directly to surrealistic expressionism. As Antonioni in "Blowup" he had whole sections of the ground painted in bright colors to suit his vision for certain scenes, and in general the use of color in the film is not only spectacular but ingenious. Now that the real world has -- shall we say, "caught up with" Kurosawa -- vis-à- vis the absurdity of life here in 1975 -- the absurd world of Dodeskaden, 1970 May not seem so far-out after all. As for the title, "Do-des-ka-den" is the sound that a trolley car makes -- something like "clackety- clack" -- in everyday Japanese. The hero, Rokuchan, (Yoshitaka Zushi) is a strange but jolly teenage boy who has a thing about trolleys and makes a daily round of the shantytown in an imaginary trolley car shooing people from the tracks, picking up and discharging invisible passengers, and lustily shouting "do-des- ka-den!" as he goes on his merry way. Taking Rokuchan's trip with him around Hovel City we encounter an incredible variety of people including a couple of grungy alcoholic wife swapping buddies -- a striking comment on today's decadent sex-obsessed suburban mentality. The people in the film are more or less carnival mirror images of the people we see around us every day. The whole film is, in fact, a commentary on the absurd pretentious of an insane society, and the message, if there is one, is perhaps that we would all be a lot better off if we were more accepting of each other's foibles. No matter what the content of his films, Kurosawa's message has always been "Why can't people try to be a little happier?"Particularly outstanding in a cast loaded with talent is Banjun Zaburo, one of the world's cleverest screen comedians, as Mr. Shima, the little man with the epileptic tic and oversized limp -- shades of Chaplin at his best -- and Kiyoko Tange is also memorable as his Amazon-like, no-nonsense domineering wife."Dodeskaden" is an expressionistic pageant of The Human Comedy that ranks with the best of Kurosawa and, if viewed with an open mind, can only make you feel a little better about being a member of our more and more endangered human species.

An invisible train rides into a poor, gloomy neighborhood to show us the lives of its peculiar and unique dwellers. Dodeskaden stands for the sound of rail wheels as they advance on the track, although rather than real wheels, the sound is articulated by Roku-chan, the character that leads us to the place where the film unravels.The place, as I mentioned above, is inhabited by some really atypical people; we have two men that are very good friends to the extent they would exchange their wives so they can forget about their daily discussions for a while, as they usually arrive home drunk; There is a father living in the streets who often imagines building a mansion piece by piece in an unknown location, getting his son involved in the process; there is also a mysterious man who never utters a single word and whose presence is reminiscent of death itself. Characters like these are what make this film worth the watch (accompanied by superb acting).Any Kurosawa fan should not hesitate to pick this one up, they will surely find something of interest here.

This is similar to another one of Kurosawa's films 'the Lower Depths' but instead of using theatrical comedy, this film tends towards a more realistic drama to carry out its multi-character case study. Each of the slum residents, who again like in LD are from diverse backgrounds and each of them have a story to tell, and those stories range from heartbreaking to inspirational, though mostly their pasts are not revealed so the viewers had to take a wild guess on how each of them ended up living in the slums.The plus point of this film against LD is that each character has their own arc so we can solely focus on the person matter without interruption from other characters; in LD everyone tells their stories in the same room which can be quite confusing at times. The minus point is that there seem to be a less clearer picture of the daily, mundane activities by the slum residents to carry on with their lives, aside from the scenes where the little boy begs for leftover foods. Overall, this is a very well-made movie that still put many modern movies of similar theme to shame.