(Akira Kurosawa with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas)

In my later years of high school, I started to read more Shakespeare plays and learned other stories and myths like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Reading these kinds of stories like the works of William Shakespeare eventually led me down this rabbit hole thanks to a certain couple of factors.

For starters, I remember first watching the 2019 film Joker with my family in theaters. After watching the movie, my parents were mesmerized with how identical and realistic Gotham City in that movie was to New York City in the early 1980s. My parents were both in their young adolescent years during that time, and they remember how bad the city and subway system was.

This then spiraled into my dad showing me and my sister videos of what the city was like back then and in comparison, to Joker. We then stumbled onto this documentary which I think was made in the early 1990s about storytelling in the media, and we saw Curtis Sliwa being interviewed. Sliwa, as some of you may know, is an important figure here in New York City as he’s an activist and radio show host who formed the Guardian Angels back in the late 1970s. Basically, they were a vigilante group who combated crime and violence on the subways and streets in a time when NYC was at its lowest, experiencing a huge crimewave and later on a period of bankruptcy in the mid 1980s.

(Curtis Sliwa)

Other New York figures were also being interviewed in this documentary and I think the point of my dad showing us this was a lesson in storytelling, since me and my sister were taking early college level English courses at BMCC in high school. But I think the main topic of this documentary was mainly about Miguel de Cervantes and his story of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is largely considered as being one of the first modern novels to be ever written and was also said to be the beginning of western literature as a whole. It was a story that inspired a lot of stuff that we see in pop culture today like Batman and Robin and in revolutions like Che Guvara in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare are sometimes compared to because they both lived and died around the same time. Despite their social classes (Shakespeare being wealthy and Cervantes financially struggling for most of his life), they both had a passion for writing plays and novels.

(William Shakespeare – left and Miguel de Cervantes – right)

Although judging from their works, it seemed that Shakespeare was more into writing poems and romance stories while Cervantes wrote more relatable stories based on realism. Don Quixote being somewhat of a counterattack on traditional fairytales centuries before Monty Python or Shrek did it.

My dad then recommended this movie I watched called Seven Samurai. It was a movie similar to The Three Musketeers and was also heavily influenced by Don Quixote.

(Disney/Pixar’s A Bug’s Life – top and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai – bottom)

When I eventually saw the film, it immediately reminded me of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life as both were essentially the same film. Both movies had a similar structure of a small community being invaded by a band of bad guys and someone from this small community has to go out and find a group of fighters to defend their community from the invaders so they can grow their crops with it being stolen. Both have a “liar revealed” trope where the fighters aren’t what they seem, but they soon redeem themselves and prove everybody wrong by thwarting all the bad guys and ridding the small community from invasion for good.

I was amazed by this kind of storytelling as it was basically a tale or moral of standing up and revolting against tyranny but also an allegory to a reality that good deeds in corrupt societies unfortunately will go unnoticed. As it is the case for the samurai acknowledging that their actions and victory was for the sake of the farmers being able to plant their crops again without interference from bandits and that samurai in feudal Japan will soon come to an end. Or Flick in A Bug’s Life trying his best to convince his colony that his ideas to defend them from the grasshoppers will work only for him to be treated like an outcast by his own kind. It’s only the circus bugs who truly acknowledge Flick’s creative talents and he is shown completely wasted working for an ant colony that doesn’t admire him trying to make a difference.

All of these story points I think can tie back to Miguel De Cervantes’s philosophy of pretending to be the hero leading to revolution and heroic deeds found in his works. Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants were also big sources of inspiration on both movies as it also tackled the idea of being prepared for when challenges or conflict arrive. Being ready, prepared, planning out and organizing things like a defense from an invasion or an attack or an assault on enemy territory to prevent further attacks from the opposite side.

In another case, rebels revolting against an empire!

(George Lucas’s Star Wars IV: A New Hope – top and Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress – bottom)

Upon doing some research on Akira Kurosawa, I was pleased to find that another film on his filmography was a feature that he did five years later after Seven Samurai called Hidden Fortress. It was a movie that also what later inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars. Hidden Fortress is about two low lives who get themselves wrapped up into a war that is occurring in their homeland. They later bump into a samurai and a princess who are hiding in disguise to avoid getting caught and executed by the empire that is orchestrating this war. Throughout the movie, the two low lives are constantly trying to look for gold and are always coming and leaving the aid of the princess who is trying to take back her kingdom. The samurai also has his own motives but always tries to act selflessly to protect the princess and is loyal to his job, unlike the two low lives who are only in it for the gold and to return to their home village.

It’s similar to A New Hope as the movie begins with the two droids R2-D2 and C-3PO trying to escape a brutal conflict that is going on in a spaceship. Other similarities include the lightsaber duels and samurai fights and other architypes between both movies such as how Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi who are all similar to the samurai character in Hidden Fortress who is defending the princess. There is a sense of greed in both movies where Han needs the money to pay back Jabba the Hutt instead of helping out the rebellion to destroy the Death Star and the two low lives in the other movie wanting to take the gold for their own personal needs. Selfishness vs selflessness is also a big key factor in these stories about rebellion and revolution. You can either fight a bigger fight for a better cause or just care only about yourself and the rest of the world will suffer without your help.

All these stories are essentially about violence and revolution. Violence for a cause. Violence being organized by groups that either want to see a change in society for the better or for the worse. Especially when you take into account that all these stories were written in a time of political and global conflict like the aftermath of World War II with American troops leaving Japan and the Cold War, or more specifically the aftermath of the Vietnam War with American troops coming back to the United States which at the time was also going through its own problems like the Watergate scandal, the Black Panther party movement (which also led to the creation of the Marvel superhero by the very same name) and of course New York City being a much more dangerous and messier place than it is today.

I guess the point I am trying to make here is that the more I research these kinds of stories and how it reflects to real life historical events, the more I want to take these historical events and personal experiences into my own work and writing and have that be the driving force for my stories. I hear that a post-war/reconstructive environment is much more complicated, if not much more brutal than a world currently going through a war.

Try looking at how the other side of the world is doing right now in the years after the war in Afghanistan and the coronavirus pandemic. There are still civil conflicts going on within those nations that don’t seem like it’s ending anytime soon. Nothing really ends.

Great Books Don Quixote (youtube.com)

For Any Job | Harbor Freight (youtube.com)

George Lucas on “The Hidden Fortress” (youtube.com)

George Lucas on Akira Kurosawa (youtube.com)

On the Violence of Seven Samurai (youtube.com)

A Bug’s Life Is LITERALLY Seven Samurai (youtube.com)

Fresh Femme | American Eagle (youtube.com)

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