Mothra

Mothra (1961)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Here’s a big, wild spectacle of a film, brought to you in widescreen Tohoscope and lurid Eastmancolour. Toho has finally entered its “golden age” of kaiju eiga.

A typhoon wrecks a Japanese ship off the coast of Infant Island, the site of recent nuclear tests. Four crewmen are later recovered from the island but show no signs of radiation sickness. They claim to have been protected by a strange red juice that was given to them by the inhabitants of the island.

The government of Rolisica, the nation responsible for conducting nuclear tests on or near Infant Island, claims they checked thoroughly beforehand and found it uninhabited. (Fair enough, we don't see any islanders until they're summoned by the Shobijin, so possibly they just stayed hidden, but it's a bit of a stretch.) They decide to mount a joint expedition to the island with a team of Japanese scientists, but because the private businessman Clark Nelson finances the expedition he ends up effectively in charge of it.

One of the scientists is Chūjō Shinichi, a linguist with a special interest in Polynesian languages. He's interviewed at home by Nitto Press’ ace reporter Fukuda “Snapping Turtle” Zenichiro and photographer Hanamura Michi. Zen will later stow away on the ship, defying the ban on reporters during the expedition.

Once they get past the barren, rocky shoreline, the scientists find that the interior of Infant Island is lush with greenery. Chūjō wanders off and discovers some large, mutated plants in a forest near a cave. He notices an unusual form of mould on the plants’ leaves and speculates that this might be the source of the famous red juice (although this is never confirmed outright, and this element of the plot is soon forgotten). While copying down an inscription on the wall of the cave, he’s attacked by another variety of mutant plant, a fast-moving vine with apparently carnivorous tendencies. He sets off an alarm in the radiation suit he’s wearing, and its high-pitched sound attracts what seem to be two women, no more than a foot tall, who rescue him from the plant. When Zen hears about this incident, he dubs the tiny rescuers “Shobijin” (“Little Beauties”), which he admits is the sort of thing you’d expect from a tabloid journalist.

By deliberately setting off the alarm in the forest, the members of the expedition are able to lure out the Shobijin. They don’t talk (yet) but communicate by making a high-pitched jangling sound that sounds suspiciously like a treated recording of someone playing the top keys of the Ondes Martenot. Clark Nelson makes a grab for them, with the apparent intention of taking them back to Japan and putting them on the stage. The Shobijin respond by singing a melody in their jangly voices that summons the Infant Islanders en masse. Nelson and his henchmen produce handguns, but between the aggressive stares of the islanders and the objections of the scientists with them, they back down.

(On a side note, isn’t it odd that Nelson is more interested in exploiting the Shobijin as theatrical performers than the Infant Island red mould extract as a commercial treatment for radiation exposure? Then again, we're told he has form in trying to exploit other people for entertainment – specifically, an attempted abduction of women from the Amazon in the 1950s – so perhaps he’s just unpleasantly fixated on making his fortune by treating women as property and is blinded to any other possible way of making money.)

The expedition leaves the island, but Nelson’s gang later return without the scientists to abduct the Shobijin, shooting several islanders as they depart. Nelson soon opens "The Secret Fairies Show" in Tokyo, at which Japanese urbanites can gawp at the tiny twins in a theatrical setting while they sing. The melody of their song is essentially the same as the alarm call they made to summon the islanders earlier. Judging by his later remarks, Nelson has no idea that the words they’re singing have any meaning. (They’re not in Japanese, that’s for certain – Wikizilla suggests the lyrics were written in Indonesian.) While they sing in Tokyo, the islanders back on Infant Island perform a dance to wake up Mothra, a gigantic insect larva that hatches from a blue and yellow egg.

Chūjō, Zen and Michi go to Nelson’s theatre to confront him about his treatment of the Shobijin. Nelson allows the trio to visit the caged performers in their dressing room in the belief that they can't communicate, but the Shobijin privately reveal that they can now speak Japanese thanks to their telepathic powers. (Possibly they learned to sing in Indonesian the same way.) They assert that Mothra will save them, but are sad because of the destruction she'll cause. Mothra apparently has no understanding of good or evil and is driven purely by an instinct to protect the Shobijin. (This is a detail that will soon be forgotten in subsequent films.) Chūjō recognises the name Mothra from a repeated symbol in the inscription he copied from the cave wall.

The Mothra larva swims towards Japan, defying all attempts to stop it. Once it hits land, it ploughs through central Tokyo and starts to climb the Tokyo Tower (a broadcasting tower and prominent landmark that was constructed in 1958). The JSDF bombard the larva and only succeed in breaking the top off the tower. The larva then cocoons itself against the base of the tower. The Rolisicans help the JSDF by bringing in their experimental Atomic Heat Cannons, satellite-dish-like ray weapons mounted on the back of flatbed trucks. (In a rare display of safety consciousness, the assembled military and scientific personnel put on dark goggles before switching on the big atomic weapons.) The cocoon bursts into flames, but just when everyone thinks it’s been roasted, the adult Mothra emerges. (That was an extremely short pupal stage.)

Mothra is, as the name suggests, a moth-like creature. She has a white head, blue compound eyes and a distinctive black, red and yellow pattern on her wings. She’s large enough to blow down buildings by flapping her wings. Scientists quickly discover that they can use an artificial shielding material to block her telepathic link to the Shobijin, but this doesn’t calm her down or stop her rampage – it just allows Nelson to flee back to Rolisica and take the Shobijin with him. However, soon enough contact is re-established and Mothra flies off to devastate the Rolisican capital New Kirk City instead. Public opinion in his home country turns against Nelson and, trying to escape an angry mob, he dies in a shootout with the police.

Chūjō, Zen and Michi have pursued Nelson to Rolisica and recover the Shobijin. Inspired by the sight of the sun behind a Christian church cross and the melody of the church bells (again, strangely similar to the Shobijin’s song), Chūjō is reminded of the Mothra symbol he saw in that cave inscription and devises a plan to defuse the situation. The sound of all the city’s bells ringing together gets Mothra’s attention and a huge painting of her symbol on the runway at the nearby airport draws her to where our heroes are waiting to hand over the Shobijin, safely away from the heavily populated city centre.

There's so much to say about this one.

First, some firsts. It’s the first time the Tokyo Tower has been destroyed in a monster movie, and it’s very, very far from being the last time. Admittedly, the tower was only put up three years earlier, so this is the first movie that could plausibly include such a scene. Genre filmmakers everywhere love to show familiar landmarks being destroyed – government buildings including the Diet (Japan’s seat of government) are popular targets in kaiju eiga, but the big, distinctive, red and white Tokyo Tower is a perennial favourite.

The Rolisicans’ Atomic Heat Cannons are the first step in a chain of similar-looking fantasy weapons that will eventually become the Maser Tank, the JSDF’s standard choice of anti-kaiju armament. Much larger fixed emplacements with a similar dish shape appeared in the pulp sci-fi adventure Battle in Outer Space (1959), set in the distant year of 1965, but this is the first truck-sized mobile version and the first suggestion that something like this might be within the reach of contemporary science. It’s never stated in later films whether the Japanese continue to develop this technology on their own or with assistance from another nation (presumably Rolisica or America), or simply buy the things. Whether they should be embracing such weapons at all is another question, but presumably it’s OK under the terms of Japan’s post-war constitution provided they only ever use them defensively against giant monsters. What the Rolisicans were planning on doing with them is anyone’s guess.

This isn’t Koizumi Hiroshi’s first kaiju movie – he played the hero Tsukioka in Godzilla Raids Again (1955) – but it’s his first appearance as a friendly scientist in the role of Chūjō, and that’s how he’s going to be typecast from now on. This is Frankie Sakai’s first role in a fantasy movie, playing “Snapping Turtle” Fukuda, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a serious role. He was well-known at the time as a comedy actor, and probably better known since as one of the stars of the American TV series Shōgun (1980). Michi, the third of the heroic leads, is played by Kagawa Kyōko who appeared in The Three Treasures (1959) as Princess Miyazu (the one Yamato Takeru nearly marries but leaves behind). And the twins Itō Emi and Yumi, a.k.a. J-pop duo The Peanuts, will reprise their role as the Shobijin in Mothra’s next two film appearances.

For the first time, a daikaiju is named by sticking the suffix “-ra” onto a pre-existing word in obvious homage to Godzilla. The "-ra" suffix doesn't have any significance in itself – Godzilla’s name (more properly in Japanese, “Gojira”) was famously made by combining the words for “gorilla” (“gorira”) and “whale” (“kujira”). The name "Mothra" is a straightforward Japanese rendering of the English word "Moth" with a Godzilla-style "-ra" on the end. There’ll be more where that came from.

Mothra herself is the first kaiju to be described as female. As previously noted, it's possible to script a film like Godzilla (1954) in Japanese without ever gendering the kaiju. Since I can't speak Japanese, I have no idea whether that's the case here, if Mothra is referred to as female in the original dialogue or if that's something added in by the American dub a year later. But what exactly makes Mothra female? Was her protective nature seen as somehow feminine? But in this film she's only protective towards the Shobijin, and indiscriminately destructive in her mission to retrieve them. It's only in later films that we'll see her defending her own offspring or that she'll show greater altruism, eventually (in the 1990s) becoming the guardian of all life on Earth. Is it because her intermediaries, the Shobijin, are presented as female? Do they somehow reflect some aspect of Mothra herself? It can't be her egg making Mothra a mother, because here we only see her hatch from an egg as a larva - it's not until Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) that we see an egg laid by Mothra herself. We'll be introduced to Godzilla's own son soon enough, and in the absence of another adult Godzilla we might fairly assume he's reproduced parthenogenetically, which by most medical accounts would make him female. And yet people stubbornly continue to describe Godzilla as male. Something else specifically makes Mothra female in people's eyes, and I'm damned if I know what.

The parallels between Mothra and King Kong (1933) are obvious. A mysterious creature, worshipped like a god on its home island, is abducted, brought to the big city and made to perform (or at least, its humanoid representatives are). Things get out of hand and the monster trashes the city, although this time the monster gets to go home and the unscrupulous businessman dies. At this point, the world has only seen one Godzilla sequel, and that was pretty much a reflex reaction to the success of the first film. Toho Studios don’t yet have what we’d call a franchise – they’re still trying different things out, seeing what works. So far we’ve had an allegorical monster horror film, a more straightforward action flick with the same monster and, with Rodan (1956), a more American-style creature feature with giant bugs and pterosaurs. Now, at last, here’s Japan’s answer to Kong (except that it’s a feminine moth god).

This film marks a turn away from the iconography of prehistoric creatures and towards a world of stranger, more fabulous monsters. It won’t entirely stick – Godzilla and Rodan are both going to come back a lot, and there are more saurian daikaiju ahead – but we will also see daikaiju that can’t be so easily categorised. More than this, Mothra isn’t a victim of the Bomb like Godzilla, but something nearer divinity, with her own religious worshippers and definite supernatural overtones. The plants on Infant Island might have been mutated by exposure to atomic radiation (might have been – we’re not actually told one way or another), but the cave inscription Chūjō finds is ancient, and the Shobijin certainly can’t be explained away as a side effect of five years of foreign nuclear tests. Later films will blur the lines between physical creature and agent of divine wrath, for Mothra and for other daikaiju, but in her debut she seems entirely impervious to anything so mundane as depth charges or ray guns.

Religious symbolism, and specifically Christian symbolism, plays a significant part in the plot of this film, because it’s the pealing of church bells and the sun shining behind a cross that gives Chūjō the idea to bring Mothra to heel by using the sound and imagery that form part of her own worshippers’ rituals. Two priests actually pray for help from God in this scene and Michi joins them, while Zen makes a slapstick hash of the Catholic sign of the cross.

The physical realisation of Mothra is the usual combination of costume work and puppetry, but with a lot more emphasis on the puppets. Stunt actors control a costume version of the larva in some scenes on land, but it’s pretty obvious when a mechanical prop larva is on the screen. The adult Mothra is all puppet, but large enough to dwarf the miniature city sets. It’s remarkable how well it works on screen – thumbs up to Tsuburaya and Honda for their direction.

Let’s just quickly consider the fictional nation of Rolisica. It’s unclear why the filmmakers should be so coy as to make their villain a citizen of a generic Cold War superpower when there were only two real ones, and we all know which one a) had been conducting extensive nuclear tests in the Pacific and b) had a close if lukewarm relationship with Japan. The name “Rolisica” is meant to suggest an amalgam of Russia and America, but take one look at “New Kirk City”, its rip-off of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the clothes its people are wearing and the fact that they’re all speaking English with American accents and it should be pretty obvious what’s going on. (Although Chūjō, Zen and Michi catch a Pan American flight from Japan to Rolisica, so apparently this is a world in which both Rolisica and America exist. Or the plane should have had "Pan Rolisican" written on the side and no one working on the film noticed the error.)

Perhaps they were treading carefully because Japan had just signed a renegotiated security treaty with America (the 1960 "Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan", replacing the "Security Treaty between the United States and Japan" that had come into effect in 1952). The earlier treaty had officially ended America’s postwar military occupation of Japan, but under conditions that amounted to a continued occupation. Under the new treaty, American forces in Japan would ask permission before mobilising, would not intervene in matters of domestic unrest and would actively defend Japan from attack if asked to do so, although their ongoing presence would de facto prevent Japan from adopting a neutral stance in the burgeoning Cold War between the USA and the USSR. The whole question of the treaty was controversial in Japan, with significant “Anpo protests” erupting in 1959 and 1960. In Mothra we see the Rolisicans come to Japan’s aid as requested when the larva attacks central Tokyo, although they seem to be using the city as a testing ground for experimental atomic weapons, which may suggest some scepticism on the writers’ part. In a possible jab at American capitalism, the Rolisican authorities vigorously defend Clark Nelson’s claim of ownership over the Shobijin until Mothra starts causing trouble on their own territory.

I’ve left it for last, but it’s time to confront an unpalatable truth: kaiju movies can be pretty terrible in how they depict Pacific Islanders. The makers of King Kong had the decency to at least not populate their island with white actors in dodgy make-up. (It's almost exclusively African Americans, although there's a Mexican American actor playing the witch doctor. Hollywood has its own problems around ethnic casting and exoticisation.) Perhaps Toho Studios only had access to Japanese or white American actors, but the upshot is that their Infant Islanders are exclusively played by Japanese actors very obviously blacked up. This sets a tone that will be repeated in numerous films to come. Eventually, the Heisei era movies will bypass the problem by not depicting Mothra's people at all, an act of erasure that poses its own problems.

We might also raise an eyebrow at the choice to primitivise the islanders by naming their home "Infant Island". The fact that the English word is used rather than a Japanese word meaning "infant" might imply that, in the story world, the island was actually named by British explorers, which would cast a bit of shade on another former Imperial nation with a patchy history in the Pacific Islands. But still, though. The primitivising continues in the depiction of Infant Islander culture: we see them trying to scare off Nelson and his armed goons by staring and banging rocks together at them, and we see them waking Mothra up with a spot of faintly sexualised dancing, and that's all we see them doing. None of them gets a single word of dialogue. The juxtaposition of Nelson's highly artificial staging of a blacked-up "native" dance around the Shobijin in his theatre and the actual islanders' dance is striking, because there's practically no difference. Add to this the cod Indonesian lyrics of the Shobijin’s song, a choice that casually exoticises another Asian Pacific culture, and you’ve got a problematic film.

Despite these reservations, I do love the film and Mothra the kaiju in particular. What I think I love about it all is the unashamed weirdness. King Kong is relatable – we’re big apes, he’s an even bigger ape, there’s something in common there – and even Godzilla is bipedal and has a recognisable face. Mothra’s just an enormous bug. How are you going to make that relatable for an audience who’s meant to feel sorry for it? Well, what the filmmakers have done is to add in humanoid intermediaries, so we can empathise with them instead. No, not the islanders, we’re barely supposed to notice them. I’m talking about a pair of telepathic singing pixie twins. And if that doesn’t clear up the weirdness, I don’t know what will.