Akira Kurosawa really can't catch a break, the poor guy. Yojimbo is rivalled only by Seven Samurai in the amount of films which have begged, stolen and borrowed from - with Hollywood the most common culprit. Arguably the director's most famous film, this feudal Japanese epic involves a small farming village under siege from a group of bandits who keep turning up and stealing all their crops. A few enterprising farmers decided to recruit a group of wandering, masterless samurai to their cause, intending for them to fight back the next time the bandits turn up. Which they do, and there's some glorious Kill Bill-style blood sprays all over the place as soon as the swords get drawn. It's like watching a beautiful water fountain. Except with clarion. Seven Samurai has been described as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, and is one of the few Japanese films to have such worldwide penetration. Film nerds know Yojimbo, pretty much everyone knows of Seven Samurai. Which is partly down to the pub quiz trivia that The Magnificent Seven, one of the greatest and most influential westerns ever made, took its entire premise from Kurosawa's original. Director John Sturges specifically took Seven Samurai as his template for a film about seven American gunmen hired to protect a small Mexican village. From bandits. Who want to steal their crops. At least Sturges had the decency to credit Kurosawa for the plot, which is more than we can say for John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. Tom Cruise may have stolen Wall-E, but Pixar had already ransacked the Seven Samurai (along with Aesop's fable of The Ant And The Grasshopper) for their second film, A Bug's Life. Seriously. Look, just go through the synopses we gave for The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai, swap out the villagers for ants, the bandits for grasshoppers, and the samurai/gunslingers for circus bugs. Exact same film. And they thought they could get away with it, too. They didn't reckon on us meddling kids, though.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
