"Ran", czyli Szekspir po japońsku
"Ran", or Shakespeare in Japanese

Summary/Abstract: Pointing to the plot similarities between Kurosawa’s film and Shakespeare’s tragedy, the author notes the original approach of the outstanding director to the play written for the theatre. What he has in mind is not the simple mingling of the Elizabethan theatre with the Japanese aesthetic tradition, but the way the source material was processed without the use of simple transpositions and illustrativeness. At the stylistic and narrative levels, references to the classical nō theatre, "Kaidan – Stories and Studies of Strange Things", and folk myths and legends, especially the use of animal metaphors, characterising the protagonists both in Shakespeare’s drama, and in Kurosawa’s film play an important role in "Ran". The last interpretative trope which Loska notes is the presence of religious references, particularly visible in references to the Buddhist tradition, which lightens the pessimistic message of the work.

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