Let’s return to the Showa era, and examine how the Godzilla series looked towards the youth in two different ways.
Continue reading Zillatinum: Part 3 (All Monsters Attack & Godzilla vs. Gigan)
1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.
These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?
Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.
Continue reading Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.
While the original 1954 Godzilla remains a startling effective film, it’s clearly also something improvising a genre as it went along, experimenting with special effects, with tone, and with ideas throughout its run time—it becomes its most cohesive mainly during its latter half. It’s the starting point for all kaiju films to follow, but the point where Ishiro Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, and the rest of their crew really found the path forward was two years later in Rodan (Japanese title Giant Monster of the Sky Radon, and the name will always have two vowel-switched regional variations for the rest of time), the first kaiju film in colour, and the one where Honda found a steady way to handle this type of story. It is kind of amazing to see what a difference two years can make, and how quickly these filmmakers went from figuring out how similar and different these movies could be from their American counterparts to finding their footing in this entirely idiosyncratic take on monster movie, allowing them to experiment with the details of the genre instead.
Toho was seven years into the Great Kaiju Project, having produced sombre nuclear disaster stories like Godzilla (or The H-Man) and more traditional prehistoric monster mayhem like Rodan (or Varan), and were really putting in the work to find the next big (BIG!) giant monster film. This involved hiring three authors (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta) to write a serialized print story that was then given to screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote previous Toho genre projects Varan and Battle In Outer Space, and would write the massive King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962) to adapt. The story that resulted has the city destruction scenes you’d expect, but otherwise was very different from previous kaiju movies: lighter in tone, more fantastical, and less a grim warning of humanity’s negative impact on this planet than a gentle reminder, and all based around a rather unusual monster (which is also one of the few explicitly female giant monsters.) Sure, there were giant insect movies well before Mothra, but none were this colourful, and certainly none posited that the enlarged arthropod was probably in the right.
Of all the non-Godzilla Toho genre movies, Mothra probably had the largest impact, and its titular lepidopteran would thereon become the company’s second most recognizable creature, appearing frequently alongside the King of the Monsters (Godzilla movies featuring Mothra were often the most well-attended ones in their eras, just to show how much the Japanese audiences dug that bug.) The original movie reflected the changing tone in giant monster movies in the new decade, with subsequent movies often maintaining a similarly lighter touch with much more upbeat endings that allowed the monster to live on—but very few of them have the consistent sense of whimsy that this one does. It really feels like Sekizawa, director Ishiro Honda, and effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya understood exactly how a movie featuring a giant caterpillar that becomes a giant moth, alongside a duo of tiny singing women, should look and feel, creating something that is a little strange and a little beautiful (and even a little satirical), and one of their most cohesive monster fantasies.
Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.
Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.
Of all the non-Godzilla kaiju movies from the Toho’s Showa era run, The War of the Gargantuas (called Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira in Japan) is one that really stuck with certain members of the audience on both sides of the world—it was used as a reference point by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 2,is a favourite of directors like Guillermo Del Toro, and, no joke, inspired Brad Pitt to become an actor. Part of what makes it unique among the Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya collaborations of the sixties stems from the unusual circumstances of its development: it’s a bizarre pseudo-sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World (Japanese title Frankenstein vs. Baragon), a film produced a year earlier that had its origins in the same international deal that led to King Kong vs. Godzilla. Originally, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien had been pitching a King Kong vs. Frankenstein concept around Hollywood before a producer unscrupulously sold it Toho without O’Brien’s involvement, with the idea morphing into separate King Kong vs. Godzilla and Frankenstein vs. Godzilla scripts, the latter being rewritten to remove the Big G (the whole thing would remain a Japan/US co-production, with producer Henry G. Saperstein from UPA heavily involved in both Frankenstein and Gargantuas.) Frankenstein Conquers the World feels like a sort of prototype, giving Honda and Tsuburaya a chance to test out something new for their giant monster movies: a monster played by an actor without a full suit, giving him a wider range of emotion and more opportunity for the audience to sympathize. That, alongside the smaller scale of the monster action, was something that appealed to both directors, and would continue in its follow-up to an even greater effect, creating a conflict between monster brothers with diametrically opposed natures, a traditional narrative that nonetheless is highly engaging when presented in the form of a kaiju rumble.
We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.
As we edge closer to the release of one of the biggest kaiju films in recent memory, it seems like a good time for this column to cover some of the lesser-known entries of the genre. Specifically, I’ll be writing about the lesser-known entries made by Toho, who obviously needed something monster-related to put out in between Godzilla movies, and so has a wide swathe of giant monsters that will probably not be making a cameo in any Hollywood movies anytime soon, but are still part of the canon, and also represent different eras in the studio’s monster history.
Daikaiju Baran (English translation Giant Monster Varan, although the actual English title is the superlative Varan the Unbelievable) was the fifth of Toho’s giant monster movies released since Godzilla in 1954, and the fourth of them directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda (yes, we’re counting The Mysterians in that, even though it’s not strictly a giant monster movie, but look here buddy, they consider it part of the sequence, so I do, too) alongside special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya—looking back on it, that level of productivity in such a short time frame feels almost, well, unbelievable. Varan is once again filmed in black-and-white, which seems like a step back from the full-colour spectacles of Honda and Tsuburaya’s Rodan and Mysterians, but the conditions under which it was made explain why: this was initially conceived as a joint venture between Toho and an American film company, and was supposed to be made for television—the Americans eventually dropped out, and the film was shown theatrically in Japan (where, based on the title, they find things like Varan to be totally believable), with the Unbelievable English language version being released on TV in 1962, hacked to pieces and with scenes of American actors inserted so American viewers wouldn’t be threatened by a blatantly foreign film (I guess), just like most of Toho’s monster movies. I watched the Japanese original, so as much as I’d like to keep inserting the Unbelievable into this post, it technically wouldn’t be accurate, and I’m all about accuracy.
That this movie was originally made for television in mind might explain why it feels like it has a much smaller scope than its predecessors—a very straightforward plot without a lot of the cultural meaning of Godzilla, or the showmanship of Rodan. This is probably why it’s often been relegated to the lower tiers of the Toho monster oeuvre, with its titular monster mostly making cameos in movies like Destroy All Monsters (as well as in merchandise, including video games and even action figures released outside Japan—I remember when the Varan action from Trendmasters’ mid-nineties Godzilla line was rare and highly sought-after by collectors.) But even if this movie mostly just feels like “another one of those” in many ways, with less of a sense of scale than most other kaiju movies, you can still see bits and pieces of those other movies within it, showing that it still carries the torch fairly early on in their decades-long reign.
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