Ran is the last important film in Akira Kurosawa's career and also one of the greatest. It is an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'King Lear', a very significant choice. Kurosawa was pretty much ridiculed his entire life for being too Western by the Japanese public. They were going through a wee bit of an identity crisis after WWII because of the American occupation and expected the self indulgent conformity that Ozu provided. Now to deny the fact that Kurosawa was not western at all is to ignore the man himself, he admitted he had influences from Ford but so did the Western genre have influences from him. The western and the Samurai film are ironically similar with their themes of justice, honour and warfare.
Seven Samurai has been remade into a western so is perhaps the most ideal of his films to choose as an example. Kurosawa deliberately sets his characters up with western conventions; Katsushiro meets a girl, wins a war but then does not 'get the girl' because of his ties to the samurai. Kurosawa does something similar with Ran, he chooses a quintessentially western texts and modifies it to Feudal Japan. The film is made through it's distinctions not it's similarities.
I'm off to write an essay about the homeric links between the Aeneid and the Illiad. -_-'
