Incredible movie. One of the best ever made. It's nerdy but I love that Kurosawa intentionally merged King Lear with the Tale of the Three Arrows to make this masterpiece. I mean, he's famous for use of John Ford western stylization to make samurai movies, which then amazingly created new tropes that were reintroduced into cowboy movies by directors who ripped him off. And he did a similar thing to Ran in Throne of Blood and Macbeth. But here the film he created in neither a western style movie with samurai, or Shakespeare with katanas and japanese mythology... It's a whole different story - vaguely king lear and vaguely the three arrows story gone wrong. A true synthesis. Add to that a director at the peak of his career consciously experimenting with color photography after mastering black and white. It's incredible. The man was a genius