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Innovations
Narrative

According to Michael Jeck's DVD commentary, Seven Samurai was among the first films to use the now-common plot element of the recruiting and gathering of heroes into a team to accomplish a specific goal, a device used in later films such as The Guns of Navarone, Sholay, the western remake The Magnificent Seven, and Pixar's animated film A Bug's Life.[9] Film critic Roger Ebert speculates in his review that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (in which the samurai shaves off his topknot, a sign of honor among samurai, in order to pose as a monk to rescue a boy from a kidnapper) could be the origin of the practice, now common in action movies, of introducing the main hero with an undertaking unrelated to the main plot.[10]

Technical

Through the creative freedom provided by the studio Kurosawa make use of telephoto lenses, which were rare in 1954, as well as multiple cameras which allowed the action to fill the screen and place the audience right in the middle of it.

Kurosawa quickly earned a reputation with his crew as the ‘world’s greatest editor’ because of his practice of editing late at night during the shooting. He thus describes as practical necessity a procedure that is incomprehensible to most directors, who on major production spent at least several months with their editors assembling and cutting the film after shooting is completed.