NYAFF 08: Dainipponjin (Big Man Japan)

Last year the Japanese media was abuzz as two of their most popular comic personalities Takeshi Kitano and Hitoshi Matsumoto squared off on the big screen in dueling films. While Kitano is a world renowned filmmaker with a trophy case that would make Akira Kurosawa blush from the grave, it was cinema neophyte Matsumoto who emerged the victor both critically and at the box office. His film Dainipponjin (Big Man Japan) takes on the quintessentially Japanese Kaiju genre (giant monster movies preferably done with men in rubber suites) and strips away all the artifice with a This is Spinal Tap-esque mockumentary. The film follows hapless Dai-sato (Matsumoto), a 40 year-old loser who spends most of his days wallowing in his own insignificance. We have no idea why a documentary crew would want to follow such a schlub until he receives a call sending him to the nearest power plant where a quick dose of 20,000V to the nipples turns him into Japan’s defacto protector Dainipponjin. The only problem is no one seems to like or care about his heroic exploits as he fights a slew of outrageous monsters with his trusty stick.

Told with perhaps the driest deadpan humor ever committed to film, Dainipponjin is an unrelenting deconstruction of both Japanese culture and society. The sheer ambivalence that Dai-sato is met with by those he is charged to protect as a product of entertainment and advertising is satire at its finest. When a superhero is marginalized to the point that he must become a walking billboard and is concerned with the ratings of his TV show, what does it say about the world he is fighting for? That’s not too say the picture gets bogged down in these issues; it merely presents these ideas at face value and lets the audience digest them as they wish. Taking a page from Kitano the film operates at a leisurely pace, allowing Matsumoto to setup Dai-sato’s world before he puts on his purple tights and smashes it to pieces one block at a time. While a bit too long (a common problem with recent cinema in general), Dainipponjin is a brilliantly executed satire with a truly unique perspective on the monster movie.