No film has ever depicted feudal Japan as well as Ran. It won the Academy award for best costume design and received three best foreign film awards, including, NY Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, and Los Angeles Film Critics. It also won "Best Film of the Year" from the National Society of Film Critics. Ran is an epic reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear blended with Japanese history. This was not Kurosawa's first attempt at synthesizing western work into Japanese film. It wasn't his first attempt at Shakespeare for that matter. While some Japanese audiences and critics disliked Kurosawa's reworking of Western classics, he won accolades from across the rest of the globe. Kurosawa's adoption might have been subtly more Japanese than his Japanese critics would like to admit. Japan has a long history of borrowing from other cultures and improving upon or adjusting things to make them their own. If it is language, culture, sports, or religion, Japan, more than almost any other nation, has had an appetite for things foreign. I feel that Kurosawa has done that by crafting something so uniquely Japanese out of something so uniquely European, and in doing so, also produced one of his best films. In this clip we can see the intricate detail of the costumes. The armor and weapons are crafted with great majesty. Ran also offered Kurosawa a chance to showcase his love for horses. We get to see amazing landscapes be traversed by samurai on their horses. We also get to see the movements of samurai in there full gear, mounted and on foot, moving in great numbers against backdrops of soaring fortresses and castles. The tragedy itself culminates in the beauty of the warriors coming to an end. We see in the one final clash the other side to the brilliant warriors. No longer do we see the majestic landscapes and well kept warriors. Armor is broken, noble samurai are bloodied and smashed, and the blue skies are no longer filled with billowing clouds, but with smoke and grey. There is no more green to be seen anywhere. This marked the beginning of the tragic downfall of lord Hidetora. This film provides a gross of images from feudal Japan. Any art historian could use this film as a treasure trove of material.