Song of the Horse / 馬の詩 / Uma no uta (1971)

Obscure Japanese Film #121

 

Toshiro Mifu-neigh?

Akira Kurosawa’s only work for TV was this documentary co-produced by his own company and Nippon Television. It’s unlike any of his feature films and should not be approached with high expectations. 

Kurosawa had always loved horses, which were of course an important element in many of his movies, perhaps most memorably in the post-battle sequence in Ran, where we see them dying in slow-motion to the strains of Toru Takemitsu’s haunting score. However, Song of the Horse is far lighter in tone, and therein lies the rub…

Although it would have been preferable to present this as the life of a single horse, as such an approach would have involved a shoot spread across a number of years, it's understandable that Kurosawa opted to structure the film more loosely around the lifecycle of horses raised for racing. Following some introductory footage of a traditional festival at which horses are dressed up and paraded, we see a horse being born and later cavorting in a field on its first day out of the stable. The film goes on to show us how racehorses begin to be trained at one year of age before running their first races at the age of two and competing in major events the following year. This is interspersed with footage of horses having their hooves trimmed, horses being groomed, horses being sold at auction, etc. Throughout the film, there is intermittent narration in the form of an informal conversation between an elderly-sounding man and a young child, both of whom are reacting to the images we see, most of which is comprised of endless scenes of horses running in slow-motion. (The narration is by Noboru Mitani and Hiroyuki Kawase, who played, respectively, the homeless father and son in Dodes’ka-den; I suspect that Mitani was given scripted material and Kawase reacted spontaneously, but this is speculation). There's also a music score by Kurosawa regular Masaru Sato which is decent if not great.

Shortly before the documentary concludes by showing us a horse thought to be a likely future champion, we see a retired racehorse now living in luxury, and I could not help but wonder if this was really representative of how such horses were treated in Japan at the time. Were none turned into dog food and glue once their usefulness had expired? Kurosawa never addresses the issue of how these animals are exploited, and for me that makes this film feel rather dishonest. Instead, we are presented with a world in which horses only want to do their best and are thrilled when they win a race for their benevolent two-legged masters.

Kurosawa is my favourite director, so it pains me to be so negative about this one, but in my opinion Song of the Horse is worth watching for Kurosawa completists and equestrian freaks only.