General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Giants and Toys (巨人と玩具)

Giants and Toys (巨人と玩具, Kyojin to gangu; also released as The Build-Up) is a 1958 Japanese satirical film directed by Masumura Yasuzo (増村保造) for the Daiei studio, adapted by Shirasaka Yoshio (白坂依志夫) from a novel by Kaiko Takeshi (開高健). It follows a fierce advertising war among three caramel companies, one of which builds an ordinary teenage girl into a celebrity spokesmodel, and it satirizes the mass media and corporate culture of Japan's postwar economic boom.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title / English titles	巨人と玩具 (Kyojin to gangu); Giants and Toys; The Build-Up¹
Director / writer	Masumura Yasuzo; screenplay by Shirasaka Yoshio from Kaiko Takeshi's novel¹
Studio and release	Daiei (Tokyo studio); released June 22, 1958³
Format	Color (Agfacolor), 35mm, CinemaScope 2.35:1, monaural sound³^•⁴
Running time	95 minutes (some listings give 96)³^•⁵
Principal cast	Kawaguchi Hiroshi (Nishi Yosuke), Nozoe Hitomi (Kyoko Shima), Takamatsu Hideo (Goda), Ono Michiko, Ito Yunosuke⁵^•²
Recognition	Chosen in Kinema Junpo's top ten for 1958, one of only two entries directed by young filmmakers⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Three confectionery companies, World, Giant, and Apollo, are locked in a cut-throat struggle for the Japanese caramel market, which is increasingly dominated by imported American candy.⁹ At World, the publicity department faces constant pressure to produce dramatic sales increases.¹⁰ Goda (Takamatsu Hideo), a ruthless manager who is also the boss's son-in-law, spots an eighteen-year-old taxi dispatcher, Kyoko Shima (Nozoe Hitomi), and decides to remake her as the company's spokesmodel for a space-themed campaign aimed at children, featuring spacesuits and ray guns.²^•⁹

Kyoko, averagely pretty and with notably bad teeth, takes to the transformation quickly, leaving her job at a failing taxi firm and her family behind.⁹ Her celebrity saturates magazines and television, and she grows into a star singer and dancer whose fame begins to outshine the product itself.¹⁰^•² Meanwhile Nishi (Kawaguchi Hiroshi), Goda's assistant, dates a woman executive from a rival firm and proves a useless industrial spy; his personal life is drawn into the corporate espionage between the companies.⁹^•² The film's ending turns on whether Nishi will follow his own moral course or submit to the demands of the corporate world.⁹

Production background

The film was produced by Nagata Hidemasa (永田秀雅) with Fujii Hiroaki (藤井浩明) as planner, photographed by Murai Hiroshi (村井博), with art direction by Shimogawara Tomoo (下河原友雄) and music by Tsukahara Tetsuo (塚原哲夫).⁵^•⁶ Kaiko Takeshi had made his literary debut with "Panic" (パニック), and the film was made while he was still a new literary figure; he won the Akutagawa Prize for The Naked King (裸の王様) with his next work.⁷ Shirasaka Yoshio and Masumura were themselves young newcomers at the time.⁷

The National Film Archive of Japan holds a 1958 theatrical print: 35mm color, 8,541.01 feet, with an optical sound track.⁸

Themes and style

The title's figures are explained in a contemporary 1958 account: the "giant" represents the mass media, the monster of print, sound, and image that drags people along, while the "toys" are the small humans living within it, typified by the star manufactured and swept along by publicity until she loses her own face.¹¹ Critics have read the film as a critique of Japan's postwar "economic miracle," its Americanized habits, nepotism, and corporate life; Richard Brody in The New Yorker called it a derisively satirical melodrama in which the pressures of corporate life merge with the giddy wonders of mass-media creation.¹²^•² Anton Bitel, writing in Little White Lies, compared its focus on advertising to television's Mad Men avant la lettre.¹³

Visual style. Masumura filled the film's modern settings with colorful costumes and props, and its images exalt the hard-edged forms of industrial design.² The film was shot in Agfacolor; some contemporary critics blamed Masumura for spending his budget on the color stock and ignored what they saw as the unnaturalness of the performances.⁴ A later scholarly account notes that the grammar of film noir is applied in the film as a genre element.¹⁴

Reception and legacy

The film placed in Kinema Junpo's top ten for 1958, one of only two films that year directed by young filmmakers, though the screenwriter Shirasaka recalled audiences muttering "What the hell is this?" at screenings.⁴ Masumura was celebrated in the late-1950s media as a "new director" (shinjin kantoku), and the film's energy pointed toward the 1960s Japanese New Wave; the Independent Cinema Office quotes Nagisa Oshima's declaration, made about Masumura's early work, that "a powerful, irresistible force has arrived in Japanese cinema."⁴^•¹² Tony Rayns, writing in Time Out, called it "the best of all proto-new wave movies" and compared it to Sweet Smell of Success as a film of its moment.⁹

The film made a star of Nozoe Hitomi, and it has remained in circulation: a KADOKAWA DVD appeared in 2007 and 2016, and Arrow Video issued a Blu-ray in 2021 with a commentary by the Japanese cinema scholar Irene González-López, an introduction by Tony Rayns, and a visual essay by Earl Jackson.¹⁰^•¹⁵^•¹⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from six critics and an 81% audience score.¹³ The British Board of Film Classification, for a later UK release, rated it with content advice covering moderate sex references, language, and drug misuse.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026