Critics reviews

I prefer skewed visions [of war] like Hell in the Pacific (1968) or Joyeux Noël (2005), where the human scale is emphasized. And that's the core of The Human Condition: our nature and responsibility to each other... For me, there are too many reasons for drawing a love letter to this movie, but probably the most important one is because I believe watching it can lead us to make better people of ourselves. At least it will make you feel like a better person for nine hours.

Concluding as the installment began with the twilight image of Kaji instinctively heading south to return home to his beloved Michiko, Kobayashi creates a sobering allegory for a tainted national soul in the indelible image of noble determination and blind delusion.

Ultimately, perhaps, the film suffers from its sheer magnitude, from the almost unrelieved somberness of its prevailing mood. Content, driven by the director's uncompromising seriousness, bursts the bounds of form; eased of the burden of his personal memories, Kobayashi would attain a finer balance of the two in Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion. But The Human Condition stands as an achievement of extraordinary power and emotional resonance.

Having watched Human Condition in a relatively condensed period of time, what most stuck with me was the way in which the sheer size of Kobayashi's film, its unapologetic and at times difficult length, contributed to how intimately and powerfully I came to know the disappointments and disillusionment of its protagonist.

This is one of the most ambitious works in cinema's history, and one may gain better appreciation of its vision by seeing its three parts in one fell swoop. More importantly, the big screen allows the viewer to fully admire the director's mastery of black-and-white 'Scope.

War and Peace is the obvious humanist monument that The Human Condition echoes, with its ground-level view of history ("Minor facts ignored by history can be important to the individual. He who has seen such failings can never wipe out the memory," Kaji postulates when confronted with the Soviets' ideological tunnel vision), but Renoir, as stated before, is all over the film's musings on man's potential.

It runs just shy of 10 hours and is an arduous watch in ways beyond its creator's intentions... This overly melodramatic trilogy set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria depicts the dehumanizing brutality of war with on-the-nose pedantry, never subtext, and offers little richness to Western eyes already adjusted to the next half-century's deeper anti-war tales.

Kobayashi's long march through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria is not "the finest achievement yet made by the cinema," per historian David Shipman's existing-to-be-pullquoted pullquote. (He also nominated it for a Nobel…) It is, though, a never less than engrossing field study of a belief system in contact with the world, composed by Kobayashi in classically delineated, high-contrast space that would make his peak 60s works self-contained worlds for thought-out consciousness.