The main purpose of this article is to analyze the text of Shichiro Fukazawa’s The Ballad of Narayama, its two Japanese film adaptations by Keisuke Kinoshita and Shohei Imamura, and to explain the idea behind another attempt by cinema and cinema audiences to assimilate the story into the changing film discourse. Referring both to classical and postmodern theories of adaptation of literature represented in the works of Alicja Helman and Marek Hendrykowski, and to current film studies strategies, the author deconstructs the movies, describes the differences in adaptation processes, and looks for their causes, using historical and anthropological contexts. The results of the analysis are contrasted with the reception of the films by Polish critics who attempted to interpret Imamura’s film by emphasizing its animal motifs and often juxtaposed it with the highly theatrical manner of the earlier work by Kinoshita.