he tried to be like Fellini, thats why it failed

I feel it is a good movie but probably one of Kurosawa's lesser works I've seen. I did like this better than "Dreams", I haven't seen a lot of his really obscure films, Rhapsody in August or Madadayo. But it's still probably in the bottom portion no matter how you slice it given how many masterpieces Kurosawa has.

I feel like this is a movie of parts better than the whole, where Magnolia, for example, is a whole better than the parts. What I mean by this is Dodes'ka-den has moments of greatness and the individual stories can be compelling on their own, but there's a lot of "filler" and a lot of unnecessary stuff, and it doesn't seem to flow well. It's a little clunky. It seems to be very much an experiment for Kurosawa. I don't think it suffers from trying to be too much like Fellini, I think it suffers from editing.

I thought of Fellini too while watching this film, but I think the film's biggest failure is that it's just downright dull and uninvolving. Plus, it's way too long.