Big Man Japan is a mockumentary about a long haired, flowered shirt wearing burnout named Sato who resembles a faded rock star. This small, thin man lives alone in his house, feeding stray cats, eating his favorite food “super noodles,” having bricks thrown through his windows, and waiting for his cell phone to ring.

For the first 10 to 15 minutes, Sato is being casually interviewed; the first question is what he thinks of the weather, and he responds by saying how much he likes his umbrella. Sato carries it with him all the time because it is very compact and “only gets big when it needs to, and then it’s very useful.”

Eventually Sato gets phone call, and then he’s off to a local power plant plastered in angry painted signs about littering, destruction of public property, and misusing energy. The small man is then is taken where the cameras cannot follow, and a power surge follows.

Next thing you know, Sato is now a 50-foot tall CGI-generated giant fighting the first in a series of bizarre monsters whose sole interest is destroying buildings. Sato and these monsters do battle in what is not so much a Godzilla free-for-all as a demonstration of the world’s worst dog catcher.

The monsters that Sato faces serve as distortions of himself. These creatures appear as psychosexual demons taunting him with their distinctly human faces. His adversaries include the Strangling Beast (who only wants to throw castles and buildings around, lay his eggs, mark his turf, or otherwise inseminate the ruins), the Leaping Monster (who has the intellect of an 8-year-old who only wants to jump around, no matter what it breaks), the stink monster (who appears for a public sexual encounter and is unaware that it stinks of 10,000 pounds of feces), the Cyclops creature (whose eye is attached to a long tendril which descends from its groin), and finally the “Child Monster,” who is weak and sickly, and only trying to get home.

Big Man Japan is a profile of Sato, the last of Japan’s Big-Men who are seemingly normal humans bred to do battle with the giant monsters that periodically appear in Japan. These Big Men transform into giants themselves via high voltage electroshocks to the nipples. Sato’s father had destroyed himself trying to become “bigger than the rest,” so Sato’s grandfather raised him and returned as the family’s Big Man champion; unfortunately, the grandfather has exposed himself too much high voltage recharges, and has rendered himself senile. Big Man Japan is thus a story of a somber man who becomes his country’s biggest spectacle as he wrestles all manner of horrors in his underwear.

Films like Jean Claude Van Damage, They Call Me Bruce, and Zebra Man (another Japanese film about a faded superhero in the modern world) deal with fallen heroes, myths descended into the grim and grit of modern life and humor. Big Man Japan follows suit, but manages to balance its self-deprecating realism with the wide eyed absurdity that made such heroes so interesting in the first place. It’s largely a parody of Ultraman a Japanese super-hero franchise later imitated in North America by the Power Rangers in 90s.

There’s also some gentle fun poked at the loss of traditional culture (the sacred growth ceremony once attended by geishas and crowds is now performed like an old habit by Sato and a priest in a storage room), the non conflict oriented post-war Japanese (Sato tries to talk to the stink monster into just leaving the town instead of fighting it), and the flip side of such passive aggression, and the obsession with violence (best illustrated in the final scene’s surreal duex ex machina, which make the superhero team come off as a gang of bullies, degrading and humiliating their chosen “bad guy” target).

In some patches, Big Man Japan does become more dead than just dead pan, and the jokes fall flat, but the more quiet moments make the clever scenes all the brighter. The third film from the Six Shooter series, which gave us Let the Right One In and Time Crimes, has mostly succeeded here with their third genre fusion of superhero, mockumentary, and comedy.

Big Man Japan is an entertaining and grandiose weird tale and modern fable about being emotionally stunted, by family, country, duty, and cowardice. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, indeed. Literally.

Tags: big man japan, dai nipponjin

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