What movies influenced you in writing Usagi Yojimbo?
(WWW Board May 2000) I’ve been greatly influenced by Kurosawa’s films. His cinematography, pacing, staging, etc. are wonderful. But if you’re asking if there is a particular movie that contributed to the creation of Usagi, that would probably have to be Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, one of many films based on Eizo Yoshikawa’s book Musashi. (The Comics Journal #192 Interview, December 1996) I grew up watching the samurai movies. The theater down the street from where I lived showed them every Saturday; you’d get in for a quarter and you could stay there all day. So I grew up on all those Toshiro Mifune movies, I used to see them every week. There’s one that I’ve been trying to find on videotape for the past, oh, 20 years. I don’t know if it’s out. I remembered it as a kid, it’s called Satomi Hakkenden. It’s based upon a classic 49-volume book from the 12th century, and that movie had everything. It had huge battles, lots of magic, witches, monsters, giant snakes, devil dogs, it had a trans
