Giants and Toys (Kyojin to Gangu)

jac 02/26/03

Released: 1958
Length: 95 minutes
Producer: Daiei
Director: Yasuzo Masumura
Screenplay: Ishio Shirasaka
Original story: Ken Kaiko
Cinematographer: Hiroshi Murai
Music: Tetsuo Tsukahara

Cast:

Nishi…………………………………………………..Hiroshi Kawaguchi
Kyoko………………………………………………………Hitomi Nozoe
Harukawa……………………………………………………Yunosuke Ito
Yokohama………………………………………………………Kinzo Shin
Goda…………………………………………………….Hideo Takamatsu
Kurahashi…………………………………………………….Michiko Ono

General Description:

Giants and Toys tells the story of the mid-fifties life and death struggle for market share between three Japanese candy companies, Apollo, World, and Giant. Every year each company searches for the advertising gimmick that will boost its sales and ruin its rivals. World's sales have been falling, and they are desperate for a new marketing trick.

The film centers on World's search for a fresh face to launch its annual advertising campaign. World's Goda accidentally discovers Kyoko in a restaurant, puts her in a spacesuit, and makes her a household image in spite of her bad looks (including teeth that have been ruined by eating the very caramels World is pushing). Subplots focus on the cut-throat competition between former friends at the three companies. In the end, Kyoko "goes bad" and the campaign fizzles. In the final scene, the young World salaryman Nishi dons Kyoko's spacesuit and wanders the streets of Tokyo trying to salvage his company's fortunes.
 

Commentaries:

Giants and Toys is bitter satire, quite unlike any other Japanese film you have seen this year. Director Masumura (1924-1986) was one of Japan's "New Wave" directors, whose films rejected both traditional Japanese content and traditional Japanese style. While on the surface this film is farce, its purpose is deadly serious: To critique the Japanese Economic Miracle and the society it was creating in the late 1950's.

Masumura's directorial training was quite different from that of other directors whose work you've seen this year. Rather than being apprenticed to a Japanese studio, he was trained at Rome's Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico from 1949 to 1953, and counted among his teachers such luminaries as Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni.

Nagisa Oshima, probably the best known of Japan's "New Wave" directors, wrote the following about Giants and Toys:

Masumura turns his back on the overriding lyricism, reality, and atmosphere of the Japanese film and the society that produces it, [and in so doing] achieved shocking effects by creating characters with completely free hearts and bodies. Americans had their own cinematic send-ups of Madison Avenue advertising and corporate competition in the 1950's, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything as biting as Giants and Toys in its indictment of the corporate lack of soul. Japan's economic miracle may have generated decades of growth in excess of 10% per year as Reischauer describes, but Masumura rubs his audience's faces in the cost of that growth.