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The Tale of Genji (1987) was a unique watching for me. All stories share one very common goal, telling a story. There are many forms of story telling based on the format an author chooses to present his or her story to the audience, and each form of story telling has its own strengths and limitations depending on the format. Books are some of the oldest form of storytelling, and they rely on the literary skills of the author to tell the audience what is going one using only words. A movie needs visuals, environments, acting, and many other factors on top of a well ... written script in order to effectively tell a story. Filmmakers have to find the perfect balance between visuals and dialogue to tell their stories based on what the story they want to write demands. In the Tale of Genji (1987), director Gisaburo Sugii chose the "show, don't tell" narrative technique to story telling. This technique focuses more on visuals to tell the story as opposed to dialogue. In my opinion, the movie had too much emphasis on the visuals and not enough on the dialogue to form an easy to understand story, and then it ends abruptly. After some brief research, turns out the movie only adapted the first third of the entire story. This is a movie that is visually beautiful, but hard to follow if the viewer isn't already familiar with the overall story. I appreciate the movie for what it is, however I regret to say that I am not the target audience for this style of film.