A G-rated film from the creators of "South Park"?
J.F. Lawton was 6 years old when he saw the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice" (screenplay by Roald Dahl!) in 1967. But the film's peek at an exotic Japanese culture, with its kimonoed beauties and training camps full of stealth warriors, had him hooked. Young Lawton began devouring books about Japan, studying martial arts and, inevitably, delving into the antagonistic latex world of Rodan, Mothra and Godzilla.
Thirty-nine years later that Nipponphilia paid off. His original comic screenplay, "Giant Monsters Attack Japan!," is a deadpan pastiche of a variety of Japanese pop cultural forms, icons and fetishes. Ninjas, samurai, cutesy mini-monsters, giant robots and the country's most enduring export, city-stomping mega-monsters played by men in rubber suits, all make appearances in an amusing story about an 8-year-old American boy obsessed with Japanese pop culture who moves to Tokyo when his widowed father is transferred there for work.
Lawton plays all of these cliched cultural inventions straight, as actual elements of a modern Japanese society that has long since made peace with its little monster problem. And in keeping with the original films' goofy innocence, Lawton always intended the film to engage children at a PG or even G level, with the filmmakers forgoing CGI for the old-school technique of nothing but a sculpted bodysuit and a committed actor.
"I'm not sure exactly where the ratings board is on monster-to-monster violence, what their reaction is to men in rubber suits wrestling but never getting hurt," Lawton says, laughing.
Well, if there's a filmmaking pair that can get imaginative feedback from the ratings board, it's Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who have signed on to direct and produce "Giant Monsters!" Parker and Stone have desecrated everyone and everything in the crudest ways possible in "South Park," its film treatment "South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut" and their last feature, "Team America: World Police." And Parker wrote and directed the four-quadrant slam-dunks "Orgazmo" and "Cannibal! The Musical," so it's not immediately obvious why this is a perfect match.
"It's funny, Trey and Matt said that they felt that they could do a G movie or a PG movie easier than they could a PG-13, because it's their nature to push an issue," says Lawton, pointing out that as filthy as some of their material is, there is still a childlike (or childish, depending) quality.
