2014: The Year of Zatoichi

Katsu at the helm

2014 inadvertently turned into "The Year of Zatoichi" around here with 6 of 13 posts dedicated to the venerable movie series, so there seems no harm in closing it out by going an even 7 for 14 and see which directors graded out with the best scores.

Way back in February when I posted my first look at the Zatoichi Box Set, I mentioned that I disagreed with Tony Rayns's choices of Kenji Misumi and Kazuo Mori as the two best regular directors. I agreed on Misumi but took Tokuzo Tanaka over Mori. Now that the reviews are done, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look and see which directors graded out at the top. In case you missed the reviews, here are all the links in one place:

Zatoichi: Birth of a Franchise
Zatoichi: Formula and Fighting
Zatoichi: The Golden Years
Zatoichi: Guest Stars and Black Holes
Zatoichi: The Renaissance

Method

When I was rating and viewing the movies, I didn't pay close attention to the directors, so there was no intentional bias in the ratings or self-fulfilling prophecies. It was only after the last blog post went live that I inventoried the reviews and averaged the scores. Directors who only made one movie were not included due to small sample size.

Results

Director	Films	Average Rating
Tokuzo Tanaka	3, 4, 13	****
Kenji Misumi	1, 8, 12, 17, 19, 21	***1/2
Kazuo Mori	2, 11, 23	***
Kazuo Ikehiro	6, 7, 14	***
Kimiyoshi Yasuda	5, 9, 15, 18, 22, 25	**1/3

Analysis

Despite rating the films without reference to the director, Tanaka and Misumi did end up taking the top two spots in my director standings. What surprised me was that Tanaka took the overall title. If someone had asked me to name the best Zatoichi director off the top of my head, I would have said Misumi. Perhaps making six films to Tanaka's three was his downfall. After all, the more films you make, the more likely you are to make a dog.

Tony Rayns

I thought it was nice to see that Mori averaged a solid three star rating, so it's not like there would be some huge argument should Rayns and I ever speak on the subject (and given his apparently encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese film, that would be a treat).

The other thing I enjoyed about ranking the directors was the realization that Kimiyoshi Yasuda was responsible for my least favourite movies, so I know who to avoid when diving back into the set for a Zatoichi fix.

Best of the Rest

The following directors only made one Zatoichi movie each, so there is not a fair sample size to compare them with the directors who were under pressure to produce multiple entries in the series. The ratings of their contributions are shared for information purposes.

Director	Film	Rating
Shintaro Katsu	24	*****
Satsuo Yamamoto	16	****
Kihachi Okamoto	20	***
Akihiro Inoue	10	**

A Second Opinion

For those readers who found themselves disagreeing with almost every Zatoichi opinion I shared, I would suggest they head over to the Digital Bits web site. While they shared my enthusiasm for the series they also tended to inversely value the movies I preferred. If you agree with their ratings, I'll leave it to you to compose an alternative set of director standings.

Into the Sunset

As much as I enjoyed writing about this series, it sure consumed an inordinate amount of my attention this year. I'm looking forward to broadening the scope of the Over a Hedge again in 2015. See you soon.

If you liked reading my Zatoichi reviews, you might be interested in my novel, The Samurai Poet, which is available in Apple's iBookstore. You can download a free preview of the first 20%, so it's a low-risk proposition. Thanks in advance.