There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.
The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongaryand Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of thoseas well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?
This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.
How long has it been since I wrote about a yōkai movie? Clearly, far too long.
I’ve already written quite a bit about the long history of tokusatsu depictions of Japanese spirits and monsters, which bridge the traditional stories and the modern kaiju and kaijin material that take inspiration from them. Considering that deeply-rooted connection, you can understand why some tokusatsu production lifers would eventually choose to make something yōkai-related—and Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (Japanese subtitle Yōkaiden) is a prime example of just that. Director Tomoo Haraguchi’s “tokusatsu lifer” status is inarguable: he started out working on models and make-up as far back as Ultraman 80 in the early eighties, eventually working on to previous site subject Ultra Q The Movie and the the nineties Gamera trilogy (more recently, he has some credited design work on Shin Ultraman.) The movie he produced is a smaller scale project that showcases some of what classical effects could do in the new millennium, one set of traditions nestled within a story based on a much older set of traditions.
As we discussed in the Zone Fighterpost, the early seventies were a pretty weird time for kaiju in film, but things were going swimmingly for Ultraman and Tsuburaya Productions (at least for a while). 1972 was the company’s tenth anniversary, and for such an occasion they teamed up with Eiji Tsuburaya’s longtime partners at Toho to make a completely new giant monster movie, which turned out to be Daigoro v.s Goliath (full title Great Monster Battle: Daigoro vs. Goliath in Japan, a title that is both generic and possibly overblown, given the movie its attached to.) There is some speculation that this project evolved out of the unmade Godzilla vs. Redmoon, which was also supposed to have Tsuburaya Productions involved and has a small number of surface similarities to Daigoro, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual proof that the two are connected. Written and directed by regular Ultraman and Ultra Q director Toshihiro Iijima (he would be at the company long enough to direct the first Ultraman Cosmos film in 2001)—whose screenplay credit is under the pen name Kitao Senzoku—with special effects by fellow Tsuburaya regulars Minoru Nakano (later of The Last Dinosaurand Ultra Q The Movie) and Junkichi Oki, what this collaboration produced is something that is definitely of its particular era of giant monster movies, and then some.
By this point, kaiju film was firmly in the realm of children’s entertainment first and foremost, taking the kiddie-pandering that had been working for the Gameraseries (already ended at this time) and running with it—even Godzilla had become a cute, pug-faced superhero figure by the early seventies. Toho ended up leaning into this through their Champion Festivals in Japan, which showcased multiple kaiju movies new and old, animation, and TV compilations, and was often the debut for whatever their latest tokusatsu movie was, whether that be something like Space Amoebaor the latter day Godzilla films. Daigoro vs. Goliath premiered alongside a shortened version of Destroy All Monsters(re-edited by Ishiro Honda himself)and Panda! Go Panda!, an early animated short film by future Studio Ghibli co-founders Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki—that should give you an idea of what the intended audience for this movie was. But even that might not prepare you for the juvenile lightness of it all.
As a crowd-funded kaiju project (reaching 150% of its goal in 2017 and guaranteeing credits full of bizarre nom-de-plumes), the thirty-minute short film Howl From Beyond the Fog is already marked as something fuelled by fan passion, but it has even deeper historical roots that further illustrate that. Director Daisuke Sato had worked on the suits and models of the Millennium-era Godzilla films and Gamera the Brave, and his main collaborator on both the effects and the cinematography was Keizo Murase, whose credits include…well, almost every single Toho and Daiei kaiju movie I’ve written about on this site (as well as Yongaryand The Mighty Peking Man), usually as the one sculpting the suits—obviously, they are two veterans of this style of film, although they also chose to go a slightly different direction this time by using puppets to portray the human cast alongside the traditional man-in-suit and miniatures. The choice of story is also very much a nod to the history of giant monsters: a re-interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Fog Horn”, a melancholy tale of a gigantic marine reptile who mistakes the titular sound as the call of another of its kind, which was sort of co-opted into the 1953 Eugène Lourié/Ray Harryhausen monster film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (the original title of Bradbury’s story), which in turn served as the inspiration for Toho to produce the original Godzilla. I don’t think there’s any greater signal of passionate fandom than going all the way back to one of the source texts of the genre (Sato even directed another short film based on the story in 2007), and this not only uses it as the basis for its imagery, but also for the tone and atmosphere, creating a giant monster that is much more sympathetic than most of the ones that directly followed “The Fog Horn.”
One of those useless thoughts I’ll sometimes have when taking in something aimed at a younger demographic is asking whether I’d have enjoyed it when I was a kid, rather than the wan and decrepit skeleton beast I am currently. My youthful tastes were so contextual and arbitrary that I can never hope to have a definitive answer, but as someone who got really into reading about mythology and folklore in grade school (with, as I have mentioned in the past, their own ambitions of creating the ultimate bestiary of mythological creatures—I still have all my notes in a manila folder), and who then loved to see those stories and creatures I was reading about referenced in the wider culture (so I got to think “I know that one!”), Hilda endeared itself to me very quickly. Created by illustrator Luke Pearson (who has also worked in animation as a storyboarder on Adventure Time), Hilda began as a series of graphic novels, starting with 2010’s Hildafolk (sometimes titled Hilda and the Troll), carrying an adventurous and whimsical spirit that brings to mind both the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Tove Jansson (the latter can especially be seen in the clean, wide-eyed characters Pearson draws), reinterpreting and modernizing (mostly) Scandinavian legends in clever and often beautiful ways. In 2018, Netflix released an animated series adaptation, capturing Pearson’s art with its very smooth and colourful animation (and its ethereal soundtrack, with a theme song provided by Grimes), and expanding on the world presented in the comics, mixing direct adaptations of the books with original stories that fit the tone. I wrote briefly about watching the first Netflix season back in 2019, but after going through the second season that premiered last month, I have an even greater appreciation for the whole series, especially in the way it thoughtfully introduces all the fun stuff about folklore (the silliness, the scariness, the endless possibilities they present) to a new generation of kids.
There have been more than a few more intelligent, revisionist takes on monster tropes in the past, ones that take the basic idea and attempt to add a more human dimension, or use it to directly commentate on what the monsters actually mean—I’ve written about a few of them here. Jellyfish Eyes is the cinematic attempt to give that sort of treatment to the monster collecting/kids-and-monsters subgenre (Pokemon, Digimon, et. al.), which by 2013 had become a part of the lexicon, something with a near-instantaneous draw for the youth of the world—I’ve said before that the fantasy of having your own monster friend has been something of a near-universal one for kids for decades now, with the monster collecting games simply being the purest distillation of it. Directed by contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, this movie really does get the emotional attachment kids have these fantasy creatures, and presents them in a story that outright describes them as what they are—a personal expression of their hopes and dreams, and something to protect them from cruel realities—in a story that vacillates from child-like simplicity to hard social commentary on the edges. While my previous Criterion Channel watch, The X From Outer Space, fit into that channel’s ethos for its historical interest, this is definitely more in line with their support of smaller, independently-minded films, and despite taking on fairly mainstream ideas, it does so in a way that’s way more interesting than the norm.
Lost childhood memories have a way of being dredged up in unexpected ways: in the book Abominable Science!, which is a skeptical analysis of cryptozoology that I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned a few times before, co-author Daniel Loxton has an aside in the section about the semi-legendary Canadian sea serpent Cadborosaurus where he mentions the children’s book Serendipity, which is about a pink sea serpent. He even contacted the author of that book and got a short quote from him. This reference was part of a larger point Loxton was making about how sea serpents, both fictional and “real”, are modelled after the horse-fish hybrids regularly depicted in Classical Greek art, but as soon as it was was mentioned, I was instead struck with familiarity, and thought to myself “Wow, someone else remembers that thing, too!” The wide world of monsters seemed a lot smaller in that moment.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 