Kon Ichikawa, Japanese Film Director, Dies At 92

Kon Ichikawa, the Japanese film director whose versatility ranged beyond his well-known antiwar dramas like “The Burmese Harp” and “Fires on the Plain” to comedies, documentaries and literary adaptations, died on Wednesday in Tokyo. He was 92.

The cause was pneumonia, said a spokeswoman for the Toho Company, which released many of Mr. Ichikawa’s more than 80 films and announced his death, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Ichikawa’s career reached what many consider its high point when Americans were streaming to art-cinema houses in the 1950s and ’60s to see movies by emerging masters like Ingmar Bergman. In those years some critics rated Mr. Ichikawa on a level with Akira Kurosawa. He was “once hailed as one of the world’s greatest directors,” Olaf Möller wrote in 2001 in Film Comment.

He was also versatile in his 60-year career, directing hugely profitable thrillers, very black comedies and cartoons.

The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”

His films included one narrated by a suicidal cat, “I Am a Cat” (1975), and “An Actor’s Revenge” (1963), in which a Kabuki female impersonator avenges the death of his parents.

“I just make any picture I like or any that the company tells me to do,” he was quoted as saying in World Film Directors. In practice, that did not mean following a creative picture with a crowd-pleaser; rather, it meant he tried to squeeze art even out of a potboiler, critics said.

His flexibility and what seemed to be an ever-greater taste for proven formulas prompted some critics to suggest that his work suffered a long decline. Mr. Möller, who has written extensively on Japanese cinema, chided him for becoming “a relic from another era stubbornly refusing to retire, and, worst of all, a sellout.”

But few found much fault with his two antiwar films.

“The Burmese Harp” (1956) tells of a young Japanese soldier in Burma who fails to convince other Japanese soldiers that the war is over. They refuse to believe him and are killed. The soldier escapes execution by disguising himself as a Buddhist monk. He ends up staying in Burma as a monk and devoting himself to burying the Japanese dead.

Alastair Stewart wrote in Film Journal that he was “impressed by the film’s dignity.” It won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It was not shown in the United States until 1966.

“Fires on the Plain” (1959) tells the grisly story of Japanese soldiers retreating during World War II. Blood oozes from wounds, teeth drop from the hero’s head because of malnutrition and a soldier kills a comrade to make a meal of him.

Mr. Ichikawa’s “Odd Obsession” (1959) concerns an elderly man who concocts elaborate erotic games to revive his sexual potency. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it “perverse in the best sense of the word.” It won the special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Kon Ichikawa was born in Uji-Yamada, Japan, on Nov. 20, 1915. His father was a kimono merchant. He was a sickly child and spent a lot of time drawing. He also fell in love with cinema.

After seeing cartoons like Mickey Mouse and “Silly Symphonies,” Mr. Ichikawa said in World Film Directors, “I realized that pictures and film were deeply, organically related. All right, I decided, I’m going to try making animated films, too.”

He attended a technical school, worked as an animator and then became an assistant director on live-action films. Around the time he began directing, he married Yumiko Mogi, a screenwriter with whom he had collaborated. She became known professionally as Natto Wada.

They did many literary adaptations, which were known for their fealty to the books’ texts. One early work was a satire called “Mr. Pu,” inspired by a popular Japanese comic strip. They continued to cooperate on many of Mr. Ichikawa’s best-known movies.

She died in 1983. Mr. Ichikawa is survived by two sons.

She retired after the two collaborated on a highly praised documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Her husband said that she was put off by “the new film grammar.” He explained, “She says there’s no heart in it anymore, that people no longer take human love seriously.”

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