Noel Burch first acclaimed Hiroshi Shimizu to the West in his 1979 book To the Distant Observer, calling him “the most ‘spontaneously Japanese' director of his generation...unrivaled as an emblem of the essence of this golden age.” The British Film Institute's John Gillett calls Shimizu “one of the most important formal innovators in this age of experimentation...his was a warm, witty, essentially likeable talent.”
Gillett describes Shimizu's 1930s masterpiece The Four Seasons of Children, a 2-part story of orphaned children who are sent to live with their grandfather, as “an expressive fusion of all his thematic and stylistic preoccupations: distant shooting of figures placed in a living, open-air landscape, a loving regard for children (and their early experiences of adult chicanery), and a traveling camera which always reveals. The passage of time is conveyed in sequences of limpid, lyrical impressionism (laced with humor), which look forward to early Satyajit Ray; the framing style is masterly and the whole makes one wonder yet