Akira Kurosawa and Mickey Free

September 1, 2011

It's official: This August is the hottest Arizona August on record. "People keep askin' me when is it going to cool off, and the flippant answer is Halloween." That's the dude for the National Weather Service. Scary, huh?

Try Living On This
Elihu Washborne, age 14, is hired as an apprentice printer in 1848. He gets room and board and "the promise" of $24 a year.

The last two nights I watched "The Bonus Material" on the making of Kagemusha, a film by the legendary Akira Kurosawa. One of the highlights of the bonus features is a documentary on Akira doing 200 storyboard watercolors to map out the movie. I was struck by how simple and crude, but yet powerful they were. Some were pieces of art, others were quite simple, really almost stick figures, but they cut the illustrations together and then used sound from the actual movie to tell the story. So, THAT was worth the Netflix price of admission right there. I was also struck by how much some of his illustrations resembled my efforts on Mickey Free. Here is a good example:

Very inspiring. Now if I could only conquer my ADD, stay on target and finish this sucker I would be dangerous. Gee, I wonder what the former King of France has to say about this?

"There is little that can withstand a man who can conquer himself."
—King Louis XIV