Akira Kurosawa's final script to be made into an animated film

by Chris MaGee

This is intriguing. Anime News Network has news today about how legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's last script is slated to be used as the basis of an animated feature film. Apparently at the time of his death in 1998 Kurosawa had co-written a script with his frequent collaborator Masato Ide titled "The Masque of the Black Death," based on the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Masque of the Red Death." As the colour change in the title indicates Kurosawa and Ide took some liberties with the story of a prince (played above by Lon Chaney in the 1925 adaptation) who is holding a masquerade ball during a deadly plague and transplanted it to the Russian Revolution of 1917-1918. Quite an interesting choice as not only were the Tsarist autocracy under siege by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, but in 1918 the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping the globe.

Kurosawa never planned to direct "The Masque of the Black Death," in fact his son Hisao was looking for funding and a director for the project at the time of his father's death, but obviously the project was shelved... until now. A Japanese/ American and Singaporean animated co-production of "The Masque of the Black Death" will be released in 2010 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Akira Kurosawa's birth. No director has been announced yet, but one's imagination could run wild with who might fit with this type of project. Hiroyuki Kitakubo? Makoto Shinkai? Shinichiro Watanabe? The possibilities are endless, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.