Takeshi Kitano arrived on the filmmaking scene in Japan with his film “Violent Cop”. He had been an actor and a comedian and… Really just a general purpose renaissance man up until that point. He was cast in the comedy action film Violent Cop as a supporting character, but when the director dropped out, he took the reins of the film as the new director and rewrote the entire script into a sort of Dirty Harry story about a sociopath detective who will literally stop at nothing to kill the bad guy. Kikujiro is a much different film than that one, and certainly belongs on your must download internet movies queue.
Kikujiro is really something different, or was at the time, for Kitano. He had generally been creating violent gangster films about the Yakuza. He first moved away from that genre with a film about surfers. When asked why his new movie had no yakuza in it, he said “Well you know yakuza have to chop off their fingers on their left hand when they disobey orders. And surfers have to paddle their boards out to sea. If a yakuza tried to surf, he would only paddle in circles.” This sense of humor defines all of his work, including the sentimental, touching tale told in Kikujiro.