Giant Robot Turns Thirty

By the end of its run in 2011—sixty-eight issues in all—the zine had gone glossy and Giant Robot had opened stores and galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Operations have now consolidated to one store and one gallery in LA, but Nakamura carries on steering Giant Robot in new directions. The fifth Giant Robot Biennale is currently on view at the Japanese American National Museum in LA, and Drawn & Quarterly has just published Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture, a collection with contributions from Margaret Cho, Randall Park, and Jia Tolentino.

“The photography from that period still looks fresh, and the writing—a mix of casual snark and in-depth research—remains sharp,” writes George Chen for Alta. “Reading the anthology brought me back to my twenties as a Gen X Chinese American forming an identity at a time when obscure cultural knowledge (and consumption) was a form of social capital. I appreciated that Giant Robot did not pearl-clutch or make sweeping declarations about the state of Asian America. It was a given that this product was always meant for outsiders and that the outside was a better place anyway.”

On December 15, Chen will discuss the book and the legacy of the zine with Nakamura and Wong at the Los Angeles Public Library, and starting this Friday, UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities will present a film series. Admission is free, and Nakamura and/or Wong will be taking questions before or after most screenings.

Following a 2022 episode of PBS’s Artbound, essentially an hour-long Giant Robot primer, the series will open with Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), which Amy Taubin has called “the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for ‘the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola’ in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.”

The series wraps on November 17 with Derek Yee Tung-Sing’s One Nite in Mongkok (2004), a Hong Kong noir starring Giant Robot fan and contributor Daniel Wu. “Stock figures emerge as complex, living, breathing individuals, propelling a character-driven drama that bears equal comparison with Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels in tone and, in its own way, accomplishment,” writes Keith Hennessey Brown at Eye for Film.

The series overall is unsurprisingly eclectic, and Saturday offers a double feature. Jon Moritsugu’s films are “funny, anarchic, provocative, and exhilarating,” wrote Mike Hale in the New York Times in 2015, and Terminal USA (1993) “gleefully trashed the notion of Asian-Americans as a ‘model minority.’” Reviewing Mysterious Skin (2004) for the Village Voice, Dennis Lim wrote that “Gregg Araki’s best film in years proves that it’s possible to talk about pedophilia—indeed, to condemn it— without resorting to the histrionics of Fox News amber alerts . . . Jaggedly dreamy, tucked into an ambient cocoon of a score (by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie), Mysterious Skin suggests a reverie with multiple awakenings.”

As Jenna Ng wrote for Rouge in 2009, Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) “portrays violent, wayward, alienated teenagers who seek solace in a virtual world where they swear devotion to singer‑musician Lily, yet in their real lives conduct and are subject to acts of alarming cruelty.” In the Voice, Michael Atkinson found that “the story wanders like a brooding punk, and the camera succumbs to swooping perspectives, hyper-green grasslands, dust devils, desolate consumer aisles, and spasms of home-video horror.” Iwai’s film is “an overripe pop song, mourning the despoiling tragedies of pre-adulthood and the infuriating inadequacy of nostalgia.”

“Beautiful and a touch bewildering,” wrote the NYT’s Manohla Dargis in 2007, Michael Arias’s Tekkonkinkreet (2006), based on the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, “kinks up a fairly familiar story of love and loyalty with a helping of underworld crime action, the usual juvenile agonies, and some fuzzy philosophy.”

Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) is the ninth film in a series starring the flying, fire-breathing, prehistoric turtle introduced in 1965 to compete with Toho’s Godzilla. And by the way, starting Friday in New York, the Museum of the Moving Image will present its series Godzilla vs. MoMI through the weekend.

Back in LA, there will, of course, be giant robots. Spider’s Revenge is a 1966 episode of the animated black-and-white series Gigantor, and Voyage into Space (1970) is a feature that Roger Corman cobbled together from episodes of Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, a series that first aired in Japan in 1967 as Giant Robo.

“The beloved telefilm became a staple of local stations and UHF channels for over a decade—at one point airing five nights a week on KTLA in Los Angeles due to its popularity,” writes John H. Mitchell Television Curator Mark Quigley. “In addition to the allure of its mod-mecha production design, the true heart of the series is the powerful bond between young Johnny Sokko (played by the charismatic Mitsunobu Kaneko) and his heroic giant robot, a seemingly skyscraper-sized automaton (with King Tut stylings). Together, they save Japan and the world.”