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Poster for Madadayo
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Released
1993 · FILM

Madadayo

A beloved professor faces retirement in postwar Tokyo, sustained by the annual celebrations of his devoted students in Akira Kurosawa’s warm, comic farewell to life, friendship, and the art of never saying goodbye.

Directed by
Akira Kurosawa
Written by
Akira Kurosawa, Hyakken Uchida
Runtime
134 min
Language
JA
Drama
Streaming on
  • The Criterion Channel

Synopsis

In postwar Tokyo, beloved writer and professor Hyakken Uchida retires and is supported through difficult times by the unwavering loyalty of his former students, who annually honor him with a boisterous "Not yet!" birthday toast. Told in warm, gently humorous vignettes, Kurosawa’s film serves as a farewell to themes of aging, friendship, and the enduring tradition of a teacher and his pupils resisting the final goodbye.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 17

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Akira KurosawaShot by Takao SaitoScored by Shinichiro Ikebe

Box Office

1993 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.2× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$1.9M

Budget$8.0M
Worldwide gross$1.9M
break-even (2.5×)

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