Films that purport to go behind the scenes of an industry or institution — with the enthusiastic support of the folks they are supposedly unmasking — are almost by definition PR exercises if not outright recruiting tools.
One of the most notorious was "Top Gun," the 1986 Tom Cruise movie about U.S. Navy fighter pilots that lengthened lines at recruiting offices.
The past masters of the genre, however, are the Japanese producers who have long enlisted said industries and institutions as not only investors, but promotional partners, while making feature-length celebrations of their corporate underwriters' trades. An early example was "Chokoso no Akebono" ("Skyscraper"), a 1969 film about the construction of the Kasumigaseki Building in Tokyo, then Japan's tallest. Builder and film backer Kajima Construction reportedly pushed 1.7 million advance tickets on not only its subcontractors, but the ramen vendors who sold lunch noodles to Kajima employees.
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