The analogy of the development of "Ran" to Shakespeare's "King Lear" extends also to the thematic elements as they are found in the film. As with "King Lear", the central theme of the film is its thematic study of the inheritance of power intergenerationally between a single parent and his three children. John F. Danby argues by analogy that "Lear" dramatizes, among other things, the contrasting meanings of "Nature". In "Ran", the thematic study in cinematography and content of "nature" and the "natural" are revisited numerous times from the starting scene depicting expansive clouds to the closing scene depicting a sole figure filmed against an expansive landscape. The "unnatural", or the word ""Ran"" translated as chaos or the "disordered", occurs in the thematically recurrent scenes of warfare and nihilism depicted throughout the film. In analogy to Shakespeare, Kurosawa reflects a debate in Shakespeare's time about what human nature and nature really were like. There are thematically two strongly contrasting views of human nature in Kurosawa's film: that of Hidetora's party (analogous to Lear, Gloucester, Albany, Kent), and that of his older sons who come to rule (analogous to Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril, and Regan).