Shin Ultraman (2022)

Shin Godzilla proved to be a bit of an inflection point for tokusatsu cinema, and its success gave director Hideaki Anno and effects director Shinji Higuchi, both veterans of the field in one way or another (the latter having worked on the Shusuke Kaneko Gamera trilogy), the keys to some of the most influential franchises of the form. They’ve ended up using the “Shin” moniker to denote all their creations as one loosely connected meta-series, but just how connected would these subsequent reboots be? Shin Ultraman, the first of the follow-ups out of the gate, provides a surprisingly complicated answer. Directed by Higuchi and written by Anno, this new version of Tsuburaya Productions’ signature kaiju vehicle inherits some of Shin Godzilla‘s aesthetic preoccupations (and a few of the thematic ones), but is not really aiming for the same apocalyptic feeling—in keeping with the general tone of the material it’s based on, this is a lighter affair that is less focused on re-imagining its monster action to fit modern anxieties, but rather transplants much of the original vision of Ultraman into a modern setting and sees how it plays out. That allows them to be more openly fannish in the number of callbacks to the original series they include, some going so deep as to be based in the details of the series’ production, but the most surprising thing about that is just how invested they are in really examining the ideas present in the original.

Ultraman: The Next (2004)

There aren’t many standalone Ultraman things out there—as in, ones that are completely outside the historically-minded franchise entries (like the Ultra Galaxy Legend movie I wrote about), and potentially could appeal to audiences who aren’t already invested in that wildly complicated universe. Ultraman: The Next (sometimes simply titled Ultraman) is one of the few, released as part of a confusingly interconnected multimedia strategy that sought to draw in older viewers with a desire for something “grittier”, though that strategy seemingly petered out not long after, and they went right back to their regularly scheduled kids’ TV series. Still, this movie represents one of the times that Tsuburaya Productions has attempted to fully reinterpret the series, taking its familiar elements and putting them in a slightly different context (we’re apparently getting another one this year from the team behind Shin Godzilla.) The Next falls into that realm of “trying to be more real than a wacky cartoon, but not that real”, and while it certainly has far less silliness and more scariness and adult-focused drama to it (including a mildly subversive take on the human/Ultraman relationship), it’s not so far away from the rest of the franchise to feel especially off. If not for those relatively minor changes to the formula, it probably wouldn’t even feel much different at all from the proper spin-off films, which really shouldn’t be surprising given that it was written and directed by Ultra series lifers (the director, Kazuya Konaka, is also the brother of Ultraman Gaia originator Chiaki J. Konaka, who I mainly know as the guy behind the weird third season of Digimon.) So, this comes off less as someone coming to Ultraman from a different perspective, but rather the Ultraman regulars experimenting with tone.

Monster Multimedia: Redman

Of course, the main appeal of most tokusatsu productions are the fight scenes between costumed characters—it’s what everything always leads up to, deliberately paced so that the inevitable clash between suit man and suit monster gets the biggest reaction from the audience, who knows exactly what’s going to happen and when, but loves to see it happen every time. Based on that, the received wisdom from those with less extensive knowledge of the genre would have you think that all the scenes that aren’t costume character fights are extraneous, or boring—not always wrong, but it assumes that the fight scenes would work just as well without any humans talking and explaining things beforehand. That mindset is really put to the test in Redman, a series of short interstitials created by Ultraman producers Tsuburaya Productions, an experiment to see what would happen if you made a tokusatsu series with absolutely no context whatsoever (as well as no money.) Each two-and-half minute segment (originally aired as part of a variety show called Ohayo! Kodomo Show, or “Good Morning Children Show”, of which there is very little information on the English Internet other than that it regularly hosted short tokusatsu content like this) features the titular hero fighting a monster or two (all of which are reused costumes from Ultraman and its successors) in the middle of the woods or in some badlands (which is sometimes dotted with discarded tires), and that’s it. No explanation, no narration or dialogue other than Redman’s tiny assortment of canned catchphrases, just two people in rubber costumes smacking each other around out in the country. I don’t know if it’s just from watching a whole bunch of these a row, but the experience of viewing Redman borders on a fever dream.

Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie (2009)

Many mainstream movies now are made up of references to a vast network of interrelated movies and TV shows and whatever else—having these big universes to prop up stories with signifiers seems to be part of the appeal. That was true when I first saw the subject of this post a few years ago, and is even truer now—but as close as Hollywood genre movies (especially superhero ones) have gotten to matching the overwhelmingly reference-heavy sugar rush of Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie (that title!), there’s a purity to its nonsense that I don’t think they’ve reached. Being a spin-off of a spin-off of the Ultraman series, there are points where it seems like it doesn’t care at all about slowing down for anyone not deeply entrenched in the forty year history of the franchise, breathlessly introducing ideas and characters that could be callbacks or completely brand new, but it can be hard to tell for even someone like me, who has done some deep diving into that history. When I think about something made for fans first and everyone else maybe sixth or seventh, I still think of this—the difference here being that while a modern superhero movie will reference movies that came out within the last ten years, this is bringing in things from TV shows going back decades, including the original actors themselves. That, and it’s also clearly trying to take the franchise in new directions, complicating matters further. What I’m saying is that this movie is very busy.

Ultra Q The Movie: Legend of the Stars (1990)

While Tsuburaya Productions mostly focuses on new variations of Ultraman, the series originator Ultra Q (which I watched in its entirety a few years ago) still holds a vital place in the history of Japanese monster media, and remains highly influential. The series had enough name brand value that they spun off this movie version of it in 1990 (as well as a few new TV series in the mid-two-thousands), although it seems strangely obscure, with little widely available information—so obscure, in fact, that in order to watch it I had to use a version with far from optimal subtitles, but I’m not going to let that hinder me. Apparently Shusuke Kaneko and Kazunori Ito, director and writer of the nineties Gamera trilogy, were originally supposed to work on it (Kaneko ended up including references to Ultra Q in his Godzilla movie), but the director of the final product was Akio Jissoji, who was an Ultra series regular and directed a number of memorable Ultraman episodes. It was made during Tsuburaya’s long wilderness period, where their output became somewhat sporadic—Legend of the Stars was made not long before Ultraman: Towards the Future and The Ultimate Hero, which are all examples of the company trying to keep its franchises in circulation during a down time in the early nineties. For me, what’s interesting is just seeing what an early nineties interpretation of Ultra Q looks like.