\"Happy families are all alike,\" begins Leo Tolstoy\'s Anna Karenina, in one of the most famous
opening lines in world literature, \"every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\" This study
purports to investigate the truth of this remark, especially its second part, by examining two very
different families, the Hirayamas from Japan and the Bennedicts from Texas, in the world of
fictional filmed art, Yasujiro Ozu\'s Tokyo Story and George Stevens\' Giant, based on the
best-selling novel by Edna Ferber.
On the surface, no two families could be more unlike, but despite differences in culture, setting,
environment, social status, and glamor, both are involved with matters which touch to the core of
human existence. The reason for this is simple: both films are centered on the concept of the
family, the basic unit upon which society, east and west, was founded.
Through analysis of the texts of the two films and the novel on which one was based, this study
arrives at its main focus, the denouements of each film, which comes at the halfway point of the
twentieth century, a crucial period in the histories of Japan and America. Living in what should be
the golden twilight of their years, the Hirayamas and Bennedicts discover old and familiar values
are giving way to the new; the modern world has disrupted the continuity of the old way of life.
If society has changed so dramatically, the family unit itself cannot have remained the same.
This study investigates the style in which these two families on either side of the Pacific Ocean
deals with the predicaments they find themselves in, coming to its own conclusion about the
accuracy of Tolstoy\'s generalization about unhappy families.
Art can provide more truth about the human condition with more immediacy and depth than
mere historical fact. If we know where we have been, we better know where we are, and will have
gained some insight as to where we are going. A study of these two works sheds light on what
really happened in the events of fifty years ago, the consequences of which ultimately shaping life
as it is lived in today\'s world, inexorably continuing on to the future, as the countries of the world,
especially Asian nations, make their headlong rush in quest of the promises of an industrialized,
globalized and internationalized twenty-first century.