Of the generation of Japanese film directors who began to make films during or just after the Pacific War, Kon Ichikawa ranked second only to Akira Kurosawa in terms of international recognition. His flair and versatility enabled him to work adeptly in genres spanning comedy, drama, war film and documentary.

Born in Mie prefecture in western Japan, Ichikawa attended school in Osaka before joining the animation department of J.O., a Kyoto-based film studio, where he wrote scenarios and supervised and edited cartoon films. He also served as assistant director in the studio's live-action department and, in 1945, made his own directorial debut, The Girl at Dojo Temple, a puppet film based on a traditional kabuki story. After the war the print was confiscated by the Allies and for many years was believed to be lost.

By 1948 Ichikawa was directing live-action features. After a few potboilers, he hit his stride in the early Fifties with a sequence of hilarious satiric comedies such as Mr Pu, a drama about a hapless night school teacher, which commented acidly on postwar society.

Ironically, Ichikawa's reputation on the international festival and repertory circuit rested largely on his more atypical work. In 1956 he replaced the ailing director Tomotaka Tasaka on The Burmese Harp, the story of a former soldier turned Buddhist monk who roams Burma to recover the corpses of Japanese servicemen. This sombre, sentimental film earned wide distribution, gaining admiration for its humanist sentiments.

Ichikawa subsequently made Fires on the Plain (1959), a more direct and horrifying war film notorious for its depiction of cannibalism among desperate soldiers in the Philippines.

At home Ichikawa was most admired for his sensitive versions of classic and modern literature. In the opinion of many critics, his masterpiece was Conflagration, a brooding 1958 adaptation of Yukio Mishima's novel about the disturbed monk who burnt down the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto in 1950. He also adapted Soseki Natsume's The Heart (1955), about a student who idolises his guilt-ridden teacher; Toson Shimazaki's The Outcast (1962), about the prejudice faced by members of Japan's burakumin underclass; and Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key (1959), an ironic study of an elderly man striving to overcome impotence.

Ichikawa also made several striking films about alienated youth. Punishment Room (1956), a melodrama about a juvenile delinquent, and The Full-Up Train (1957), a comedy about a recent graduate searching for a job, formed a fascinating diptych examining rebellion and conformity among the postwar generation. Her Brother (1960) was a sad but beautiful film about a disaffected boy dying from tuberculosis.

Two of Ichikawa's finest and most uncategorisable films appeared in 1963. Alone on the Pacific (1963) recounted the true story of the 23-year-old Kenichi Horie's solo voyage from Nishinomiya in western Japan to San Francisco. Ichikawa's subtle analysis of his hero's motives and emotions made enthralling drama from ostensibly uncinematic material. An Actor's Revenge (1963) was an eccentric period film about a kabuki female impersonator using his wiles to exact vengeance on the men responsible for his parents' suicide. Forced by his studio to make what he considered a commercial chore, Ichikawa turned it into a magnificent exercise in style.

The next year Ichikawa made perhaps his most prestigious project: Tokyo Olympiad, the official documentary of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics. A remarkable technical achievement, this surprised audiences by concentrating as much on the athletes' personalities as on the events. After this triumph, however, the quality of his work declined as the Japanese studio system entered a period of crisis. After a flirtation with independent production, which yielded the bitterly satiric period film The Wanderers (1973), Ichikawa returned to the mainstream with The Inugami Family, the biggest hit of 1976. This success enabled him to direct busily through subsequent decades at a time when contemporaries such as Kurosawa were barely able to find work in Japan.

In these later years Ichikawa settled consciously into the role of veteran, remaking a past success with the 1985 version of The Burmese Harp, and recreating the old-time Japanese film industry in Actress (1987), a biopic of the great Kinuyo Tanaka.

In 1999 he exhumed a 30-year-old script, originally written in collaboration with three other distinguished film-makers: Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi and Keisuke Kinoshita. By then the only survivor of the four, Ichikawa realised it as Dora-Heita (The Alley Cat, 2000), a witty, mellow period film. His last feature, which he made in 2006 aged 90, was a new version of The Inugami Family, but he remained active to the last; his final contribution to the cinema was a cameo appearance playing a film director in Koki Mitani's as yet unreleased The Magic Hour.

Ichikawa's first marriage ended in divorce, but his second, to Natto Wada in 1948, was both lasting and professionally significant. Wada was his regular screenwriter throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, the period when Ichikawa made his most critically acclaimed films. Their collaboration ended with Tokyo Olympiad, but their marriage lasted until Wada's death in 1983. He is survived by their two sons.

Kon Ichikawa, film director, was born on November 20, 1915. He died on February 13, 2008, aged 92