The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will present a screening of the 1958 Japanese film Giants and Toys (巨人と玩具) on February 4, part of this term's Asia POP series of events. A 2021 New Yorker synopsis:
The heartless pressures of corporate life and the giddy wonders of its mass-media creations merge in the Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura’s derisively satirical 1958 melodrama “Giants and Toys” (streaming on Amazon). The story involves three big candy companies and their duelling ad campaigns. Goda (Hideo Takamatsu), a ruthless manager at World Caramels who’s also the boss’s son-in-law, turns an eighteen-year-old taxi dispatcher named Kyoko (Hitomi Nozoe) into the company’s spokesmodel—for a publicity scheme, aimed at children, featuring spacesuits and ray guns—but she fights for independence as her stardom quickly outshines the product. Meanwhile, Nishi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), Goda’s right-hand man, finds his personal life—his friendship with one competitor and his romance with another—falling prey to intrigues of corporate espionage. Masumura fills the movie’s sleekly modern settings with splashily colorful costumes and knickknacks, and his sharply inflected images exalt the hard-edged forms of industrial design. Yet the turbulent, teeming drama lampoons Japanese society over all—its Americanized habits and the endurance of oppressive traditions, the unreasonable power of nepotism and the pointlessness of rational bureaucracy—and scathingly, sardonically leaves its striving workers no way out.
