GUMPY IN KAIJU GUY!

JUNICHIRO YAGI: KAIJU GUY! 怪獣ヤロウ! (2024) JAPAN CUTS 2025

Chubby fanboy bureaucrat gets to make a monster movie to promote his town

This is a kind of underdog film that celebrates DIY filmmaking along with the Japanese popular monster movie tradition almost everyone knows. A "kaiju movie" is a monster movie.

We first visit this film's protagonist, chubby, bespectacled Ichiro Yamada as a youth, when his dream was to make a Japanese kaiju or monster movie. The job doesn't quite come off. His classmates greet the youth's film with riotous laughter - not what he had wanted, crushing the dream. But this is the story of his second chance as a grownup and a civic employee, member of the Seki City tourism bureau. The tight-assed lady mayor proposes a PR film, but as the descendant of many generations of mayors whose motto was Don't Change, she wants something ordinary and conventional. The trouble is, though, Yamada and his colleagues have already promoted the local seafood and traditional sword-forging artisans to death, and they really need someting new and fresh. The role of Yamada as an adult is played in his movie debut by Gumpy (aka Gunpi) a huge, and hugely popular, Japanese comedian (part of a duo) who already has 1.5 million YouTube followers.

This is the story of how Yamada gets to blow things up, film his very ample body in jockey shorts looming huge over the city, and roar amd spew fake fire in his own film introdcing enthusiastic brief endorcements from most of the town's main businesses - and the whole town loves the result. There is a DIY spirit about his team's effort that is endearing to them, and to us.

At first the prissy municipal accountant lady Yoshida (Yuka Sugai) is in charge of production for the town film, in cooperation with the department head, Chosuke Muto and his grouchy deputy Fuko Furukawa. Then while editing on her own, Yoshida accidentally deletes the entire film - and it turns out there weren't enough funds allocated for backup. It's up to Yamada to come up with something fast. Needless to day, he delivers.

He has a strategy. As a kauju movie fan, he knows that the revered genre filmmaker Eiji Honda (Akaji Maro, in a nod to Gojira, or Godzilla, director Ishiro Honda) maintains a warehouse full of his old kaiju props right in town. And when Honda learns that Yamada is desperate after the footage is all lost, he agrees to lend a hand, and a vintage monster bodysuit.

Because of Yamada's enthsiasm and the desperate deadline everyone in the department bows to the kaiju theme, and it turns out that a lot of the locals think were already thinking this is a great idea for a promotional film.

This is a charming, quiet study of local bureaucratic pressue, Japanese style, and of the survival of fanboy enthusiasm for a Japanese tradition everyone knows, of the monster movie, which is accessible to amateurism because it was always low-fi. When the movie gets made and the town greets it with an ovation, Yamada's old sensei (Yoji Tanaka), luckily, is present to nod his approval. The filmmakers boldly show us the film that Yamada and company have produced, too, and it has the same kind of informal charm as the rest of the film as a whole. This is a Japanese film that is very local - it pokes fun at Japanese deference and fear of authority y- et quite accessible and entertaining to westerners.

Kaiju Guy! 怪獣ヤロウ! ("Kaijū Yarō!"), 80 mins., released Jan. 31, 2025 in Japan, is distributed by Nikkatsu, the venerable Japanese studio which is representing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's newest film Cloud. The film was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 10-20, 2025 Japan Cuts series, where it showed on July 20, 2025.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.