You may have guessed that Dreams is my favorite Kurosawa film, and the first two vignettes are perhaps the best babysitter short films ever made - try it if you have the right audience. Sunshine Through the Rain shows the consequences for a transgression against the balance with nature:



The Peach Orchard celebrates a past that can never be returned to:




Amongst the next few films you get a Chopin video with some animation I am quite fond of and have watched many times, starring Martin Scorsese as a certain Dutch painter (tho I like Maurice Pialet's Van Gogh even better):



Then you have two films that warn Japan of the perils of nuclear power, the transgression against nature that all the other vignettes point towards symbolically and becomes the symbol for all of mankind's environmental devastation, Mount Fuji in Red and The Weeping Demon. I don't like to watch them and certainly not tonight. I just watched Fuji. As I write this, radiation has already been discharged from Fukushima Dai-chi nuclear plant and there are concerns of a meltdown. Barack Obama is asking for $58 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, triple the previous available amount, an industry which already is kept profitable only through federal subsidies. His campaign manager and former Chief of Staff are lobbyists for the industry. A Japanese firm is contracting to lend money to a poorly regulated Texas plant.

The film ends with Village of the Watermills, one of my favorite films of the master, a funeral procession in a town without electricity: