Who is the best Japanese Director?!
Question: Ikira Kurosawa was certainly the best regarded Japanese director for decades, and I think it will be a long time before any other Japanese director will top Kurosawa's body of work. He made not one or two great movies but many, and I find it to his credit that the universal aspects of his middle period films made it so easy to transform "Seven Samurai" into "The Magnificent Seven" and "Yojimbo" into "A Fistful of Dollars." He was also canny enough to take Shakespeare and make it seem Japanese, which is no mean trick. "Stray Dog" is the best film I have ever seen about post-war Japan, and deserves to be better known.
I am very fond of the bulk of Kurosawa's films, and I doubt we'll ever see his like again.
Answers: Ikira Kurosawa was certainly the best regarded Japanese director for decades, and I think it will be a long time before any other Japanese director will top Kurosawa's body of work. He made not one or two great movies but many, and I find it to his credit that the universal aspects of his middle period films made it so easy to transform "Seven Samurai" into "The Magnificent Seven" and "Yojimbo" into "A Fistful of Dollars." He was also canny enough to take Shakespeare and make it seem Japanese, which is no mean trick. "Stray Dog" is the best film I have ever seen about post-war Japan, and deserves to be better known.
I am very fond of the bulk of Kurosawa's films, and I doubt we'll ever see his like again.
Hayao Miyazaki, hands down.
Hayao Miyazaki
Katsuhiro Otomo
Satoshi Kon
Makoto Shinkai
Hayao Miyazaki is the most obvious answer.