Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Ikiru (1952) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Takashi Shimura, Haruo Tanaka, Nobuo Kaneko, Bokuzen Hidari, Miki Odagiri, Shinichi Himori DIRECTOR: Akira Kurosawa CINEMATOGRAPHY: Asakazu Nakai MUSIC: Fumio Hayasaka PRODUCTION: TOHO

Box Office Performance

Ikiru earned $60,239 domestically and $-4,999 internationally, for a worldwide total of $55,240. The film skewed heavily domestic (109%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

Kurosawa believed William Shakespeare's play Macbeth could serve as a cautionary tale complementing Ikiru, thus directing his 1957 film Throne of Blood. Ikiru was remade as a Japanese television film that debuted on TV Asahi on 9 September 2007, the day after a remake of Kurosawa's High and Low. The Ikiru remake stars kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshirō IX.

Anand, a 1971 Indian-Hindi film, was inspired by Ikiru. In 2003, DreamWorks attempted a U.S. remake, which would star Tom Hanks in the lead role, and it talked to Richard Price about adapting the screenplay. Jim Sheridan agreed to direct the film in 2004, though it has not been produced.

A musical adaptation was produced in Japan in 2020, with music by Jason Howland and book by Chikae Takahashi.

A British remake titled Living, adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Oliver Hermanus, and starring Bill Nighy, was released in 2022.

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

The film marked the first collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and screenwriter Hideo Oguni. According to Oguni, the genesis of the film was Kurosawa's desire to make a film about a man who knows he is going to die and who wants a reason to live for a short time. Oguni was an experienced writer and was offered ¥500,000, and co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto was offered ¥150,000. Initially, Kurosawa told Hashimoto that a man who was set to die in 75 days had to be the theme and that the character's career was less important, with the director saying criminal, homeless man or government minister would be acceptable.

The screenwriters consulted Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Oguni envisioned placing Watanabe's death halfway through the film. Kurosawa dictated the scene where Watanabe is on the swing and mentioned the beginning lyrics of "Gondola no Uta." Because none of the men were familiar with the song, they consulted their eldest receptionist on the rest of the lyrics and the song title.

Kurosawa renamed the draft The Life of Kanji Watanabe to Ikiru, which Hashimoto found pretentious, but Oguni supported. The screenplay was completed on 5 February 1952.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: Nominated for 1 BAFTA Award6 wins & 2 nominations total

Additional Recognition: The film competed for the Golden Bear at the 4th Berlin International Film Festival in 1954.

! scope="row"| Berlin International Film Festival

! scope="row"| Kinema Junpo Awards

!scope="row" rowspan=3| Mainichi Film Awards

! scope="row"| Ministry of Education

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The film won critical approval upon its release. Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, called it "a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond," which he deemed "anticlimactic." Crowther praised Shimura, writing he "measures up through his performance in this picture with the top film actors anywhere," and complimented Miki Odagiri, Nobuo Kaneko and Yunosuke Ito.

Roger Ebert added it to his list of Great Movies in 1996, stating "Over the years I have seen Ikiru every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us." In his Great Movies review of Seven Samurai, Ebert called Ikiru Kurosawa's greatest film. In 2008, Wally Hammond of Time Out praised Ikiru as "one of the triumphs of humanist cinema." That year, The New Yorker's Michael Sragow described it as a "masterwork," noting Kurosawa was usually associated more with his action films. The scene featuring Watanabe on the swing in the playground he built has been described as "iconic." Writer Pico Iyer has commented on the film's depiction of the postwar Japanese healthcare system, and historian David Conrad has remarked on its portrayal of Japanese governance at the moment Japan regained its sovereignty after a 7-year American occupation.

In 1972, Sight & Sound critics poll named Ikiru the 12th greatest film of all time. In 1999, The Village Voice ranked the film at number 212 in its list of the top 250 Best Films of the Century, based on a poll of critics. Empire magazine ranked Ikiru 459th on its 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time, and 44th on its 2010 list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema." In 2009, the film was voted at No. 13 on the list of "The Greatest Japanese Films of All Time" by Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo.