Name: The Origin of Ultraman
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2026-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

A filmmaker celebrated for the smallest of human gestures has turned his attention to a thirty-meter silver giant. The Origin of Ultraman, the documentary planned by Hirokazu Kore-eda, gathers an international set of directors and craftsmen around a deceptively plain prompt: what, exactly, is Ultraman, and why has a monochrome hero from a children’s television broadcast outlived almost everything produced beside it? The question sounds like fan service. The film treats it as a problem of cinema.

Rather than catalog nostalgia, the documentary returns to the workshop of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special-effects director who assembled the original series from rubber suits, miniature cities and optical sleight of hand. It follows the visual grammar he invented as it traveled out of a Tokyo soundstage and into the working vocabulary of filmmakers continents away. The premise is less a tribute than a claim about authorship: that a figure long dismissed as disposable entertainment for the young was, in truth, a designed language with its own rules, rhythms and silences.

The film makes that claim through its interview roster, and the roster is the argument. Guillermo del Toro, Hideo Kojima, Nicolas Winding Refn, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi appear not as devotees paying respects but as working artists accounting for what they took from the source. When Anno and Higuchi, who rebuilt Japanese tokusatsu for their own generation, sit in the same chorus as a Mexican fantasist and a Danish stylist, the through-line becomes hard to miss. Ultraman operates here as foundational grammar, a shared first language for filmmakers who agree on almost nothing else.

That breadth is the documentary’s strongest evidence. The testimony reaches from the games studio of Kojima to the animation tables of Shannon Tindle and John Aoshima to the science-fiction prose of Pat Cadigan, and each contributor describes a different inheritance: a sense of scale, a tolerance for stillness, a faith that a costume can carry sorrow. None of it reads as coordinated, which is rather the point. A single influence rarely surfaces independently across this many disciplines unless something structural is being handed down.

It helps that the film never loses sight of where the language began. The original broadcast ran for a single season and a few dozen episodes, a monster arriving each week to be met by a giant who came from light and left in silence. That economy, born partly of budget and partly of conviction, fixed the template: the human scale of the defenders below, the cosmic scale of the figure above, and a designed face that managed to look both heroic and unbearably sad. The documentary argues that those constraints did not limit the form so much as define it.

Kore-eda’s involvement is the most revealing choice the project makes. His own cinema lives in kitchens and hospital corridors, in the patient accounting of what families owe one another and what they leave behind, and convening a panel around a monster suit looks, at first, like the least likely entry in his work. Yet the curatorial instinct is continuous with everything he has directed. He approaches Ultraman the way he approaches his characters: as something inherited, fragile and worth examining rather than worshipped. The assembly itself falls to directors Yu Nakamura and Kazuki Yoshida, who thread the interviews through archival footage of Tsuburaya guiding his crew.

What the film keeps circling back to is craft as meaning. The performer inside the suit, the deliberate slowness of the movement, Toru Narita’s severe and faintly mournful design for the character’s face: these were aesthetic decisions, not technical compromises, and the documentary reads them as such. Seen in that light, the muteness of the first Ultraman, who never speaks, becomes a formal choice whose consequences ripple forward into the wordless spectacle of present-day blockbusters.

A still from the documentary The Origin of Ultraman (2026) — A still from *The Origin of Ultraman* (2026)

The interrogation has limits the film never fully escapes. It is produced and distributed by the franchise’s own rights-holder, which makes the anniversary timing as much a brand exercise as an honest inquiry, and a documentary assembled largely from admiring testimony risks answering its central question with reverence in place of analysis. A viewer arriving without the tokusatsu grounding may watch a procession of respected names agree that Ultraman matters, without being shown, in critical terms, why a skeptic should. The question in the title is far easier to pose than to settle.

The Origin of Ultraman is directed by Yu Nakamura and Kazuki Yoshida, planned by Hirokazu Kore-eda and supervised by Takayuki Tsukagoshi, produced and distributed by Tsuburaya Productions with Toho Next. Alongside the international filmmakers, it gathers figures from the original production, among them Susumu Kurobe, the actor who first wore the suit, and Hiroko Sakurai, with further interviews including Takashi Shimizu, Shannon Tindle and the writer Pat Cadigan. The documentary opens in Japanese theaters on July 3, 2026, timed to the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary, and makes its international premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal on July 17.