Minoru Kawasaki (film director)


Minoru Kawasaki, born 15 August 1958, is a Japanese filmmaker, best known for low-budget parody films featuring surreal humour and traditional practical effects.
Kawasaki began his career with mostly self-financed work, including the Den-Ace short films, featuring a parody of kyodai-style Japanese superheroes, before working on Tsuburaya Production's Ultraman Tiga. He had his first hit with The Calamari Wrestler, about a wrestler who inexplicably becomes a giant squid. He followed this up with Executive Koala, about an anthropomorphic koala salaryman who may or may not have murdered his wife, and Kabuto-O Beetle, another wrestling-themed movie, this time with a giant stag beetle. In 2006, he released The World Sinks Except Japan, a spoof of Shinji Higuchi's remake of Japan Sinks, and Crab Goalkeeper, a film Kawasaki describes as being his Forrest Gump.
Kawasaki has also directed 2008's , a sequel to the 1967 Shochiku kaiju film The X from Outer Space. While the original, made during the height of Japan's "Kaiju Boom", is played straight, the sequel is another parody. He has since directed two more kaiju films: Kaiju Mono and Monster Seafood Wars.

Filmography

As Director