Tokyo Olympiad (1968)
Toho Company

Description

A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film. Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalogue of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. The glory, despair, passion, and suffering of Olympic competition are rendered with lyricism and technical mastery, culminating in an inspiring testament to the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit.

Tags

1960s, Japan, Olympic games

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Amazon user reviews

The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo were a milestone as much for the intense athletic competition as the joyous commemoration of Japan's recovery following its defeat in World War II. Director Kon Ichikawa created an epic film of the event, a documentary that covered the entire athletic competition while also capturing the surrounding atmosphere.
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10 Washington Post | Hal Hinson

"Tokyo Olympiad," Kon Ichikawa's 1965 documentary on the 18th Olympic Games, is one of the most compelling records of sport on film, and as an expression of the mind of the athlete, it is unsurpassed. The film's greatness lies in the director's ability to abandon the conventional big-game, crucial-moment approach of most sports movies and concentrate on the stories within the Games.
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10 Washington Post | Desson Howe

This isn't about glory, it's about the butterflies in your stomach when you hope for glory. And watching Ichikawa's work, you're not watching athletes from a distance, you're running, jumping and throwing with them.
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10 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

Tokyo Olympiad finds poetry in defeat, when the body reaches the end of its capabilities or simply shuts down from exhaustion. But more than that, Ichikawa cares about the transcendent spirit of the Olympic Games, which at their finest promote a vision of a peaceful and unified world, defying the barriers of nationality and race.
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10 Entertainment Weekly | Joshua Rich

''Tokyo'' broke ground by focusing -- without bias -- on athletes' internal struggles. Freeze-frames catch a judo participant's unlikely moment of triumph. Close-ups reveal the intensity in a sharpshooter's eye. Microphones pick up the lonely patter of a pole-vaulter's approach.
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10 allmovie | Tom Wiener

Tokyo Olympiad is an impressive achievement that can be compared favorably to any sports documentary.
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10 DVD Talk | Glenn Erickson

Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad knocked me out. The film is three solid hours of concentration on the athletes themselves, mostly in competition, and not only the winners. The point of the show is not to document the games and catalog the winners and the losers, but to celebrate the spirit of the competition as embodied by the athletes themselves.
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10 dvdmoviecentral.com | Michael Jacobson

I don’t believe there will ever be another real sports movie like Tokyo Olympiad, which captures something much more than just games, results and statistics. It’s a complete artistic package of athleticism, human emotion, and the pride of a great city coming together to make for one of the Olympics’ finest years ever.
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9.2 digitallyobsessed.com | Mark Zimmer

Where Riefenstahl emphasized grace and poetry in motion, making the athletes seem effortless or weightless, Ichikawa takes the very opposite approach. His emphasis is on the strain of competition and the exertion of the human body to the utmost extremes.
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9.0 filmcritic.com | Christopher Null

Ichikawa turns the Games into something full of life, drama, and subtext. He gives us the events, but we also catch the undertones of, say, the doping of the German team, the subtle corporate sponsorships, and slow-motion looks at the athletes' impossible muscles in motion.
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9.0 New York Times | Bosley Crowther [shortened version]

This "Olympiad" focuses, as it properly should, not so much on records, although many of these performances are caught by the cameras, but on the faces, and thus the hearts and minds, of both competitors and viewers.
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9.0 DVD Town | Yunda Eddie Feng

Ichikawa celebrates the community and communality of people who have dedicated their lives to athleticism. This includes spectators in the stands and in the streets, witnessing and sharing in the joy of celebration. It matters not that a medal was not obtained; it is enough to have simply made it to the Olympics.
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9.0 DVD Times | Raphael Pour-Hashemi

Tokyo Olympiad almost acts as the perfect sports movie without any plot or characters. The pain and anguish of the competitors faces are recorded in glorious widescreen and in colour, combined with smooth slow motion editing, gives an almost poetic stylising of the events on screen.
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8.4 Apollo Movie Guide | Scott Weinberg

Though this documentary may move far too slowly for the taste of most 21st century viewers, there’s something almost hypnotic about the way Ichikawa allows his camera to linger on a flapping banner or a competitor’s feet for over a minute at a time.
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8.3 Old School Reviews | John Nesbit

A more sports obsessed director would focus far more on the winning efforts, the awards ceremonies, and the tears of triumph and joy. Tokyo Olympiad serves more refreshing coverage by turning the cameras occasionally towards the small moments that make up the nuts and bolts of the Olympics, in the process documenting Japanese thinking from the 1960s.
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8.0 DVD Journal | JJB

Ichikawa decided to use all of the tools of cinema at his disposal to record the events in cinematic terms, rather than as a journalist, historian, or documentarian.
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