The Daimajin trilogy

Daimajin, Return of Daimajin, Wrath of Daimajin (all 1966)
Daiei Motion Picture Company
Director: Yasuda Kimiyoshi (Daimajin), Misumi Kenji (Return of Daimajin), Mori Kazuo (Wrath of Daimajin), Kuroda Yoshiyuki (special effects)
Also known as: Well, see below...

Gamera the Giant Monster (1965) and its sequels weren’t Daiei’s only foray into tokusatsu cinema in the mid-1960s. The Gamera movies were heavy on effects, which meant spreading a limited budget quite thinly, sometimes to their detriment. Conversely, Daiei’s earlier Whale God (1962) had concentrated its effects budget into a handful of scenes and spent most of its runtime on human-scale drama, with effective results. Daiei returned to that approach with Daimajin, a movie that would look like one of their regular jidaigeki films for most of its length and only take a turn into full-on giant monster horror in the final reel.

Daimajin is believed to have spun out of a rejected early concept for the first Gamera sequel, which would have seen Gamera saving the world from an invasion of gigantic humanoid aliens. In the event, the first Daimajin film was released on a double bill with the more conventional kaiju-on-kaiju Gamera vs Barugon (1966), of which more next week.

In order to produce three movies in rapid succession for a quick return at the box office, Daiei copied the production method of their hugely successful series of movies about Zatōichi, a blind itinerant masseur and master swordsman. The Zatōichi movies followed a familiar formula and starred the same lead actor but were farmed out to a roster of directors for back-to-back filming, and in this way Daiei were able to release multiple instalments each year. The three Daimajin movies also shared a formula and a special effects director – and the latter two economised by using the same Daimajin costume – but were filmed by three principal directors, each bringing their own style to the production. All three of them were regulars on the Zatōichi series. The three movies were all released in the same year.

The Daimajin movies don’t form a trilogy in the sense of one continuous story in three parts. It could be said, with some justification, that they’re actually the same movie three times. An unjust ruler threatens the peace of a feudal village; the villagers pray to the giant stone statue of their god, but they continue to suffer for most of the film; the ruler finally goes too far when his men attack the statue directly; the statue comes to life and slowly but relentlessly walks all over the bad guys, saving a special, ironic death for the ruler himself; the statue looks set to continue its campaign of destruction indiscriminately, but the grateful tears of an innocent bring it to a halt and it disintegrates.

The details of the plot change but the elements remain the same from film to film. The unjust ruler is a former chamberlain who’s seized power in a coup / a neighbouring warlord who wants the village’s resources / a tyrant in the next valley who has enslaved some of the villagers’ relatives. The statue is in a cave partway up a mountain / in a cave on an island in a lake / embedded in the rock at the summit of a mountain pass. The villain’s men offend the god by driving a chisel into the statue’s forehead / blowing the statue up / shooting down one of the god’s sacred hawks. The statue ironically kills the villain by impaling him on the chisel from its forehead / lashing him to the mast of a burning ship, a bit like the pyre he was planning to burn the heroine on / stabbing him and dumping him into the sulphur pit he’d previously dumped his victims into. The innocent whose tears stop the statue’s rampage is the old ruler’s daughter / again, the old ruler’s daughter / four young boys who’d walked over the mountain in search of their relatives. The third film departs from the formula in focusing on a group of children rather than on the deposed ruler’s adult heirs, but in other respects it falls in line with the other two films.

This interchangeability is probably part of the reason why there’s been some confusion over the English language titles of these films over the years, specifically for the second and third films. The first one’s easy enough because it’s the first one, so it can claim the plain title of Daimajin. The second one’s most commonly known as Return of Daimajin, but the Japanese title literally means “Daimajin Gets Angry”, so unsurprisingly it’s sometimes been referred to as “Wrath of Daimajin”. Wrath of Daimajin, meanwhile, has the opposite problem since its original title translates as “Daimajin Strikes Back”. My preferred solution is to label them according to their most obvious distinguishing feature, the location in which they’re set. This works out fine for “Daimajin on a Lake”, but I admit “Daimajin on a Mountain” could just as easily apply to the first movie. Mixed in with these are bland American alternatives like Majin, the Monster of Terror and Return of Giant Majin.

The headline supernatural being himself is only referred to as “Daimajin” (“giant demon god”) once in the first film. For most of that film, his worshippers call him Arakatsuma (kanji lettering is available for this name, but Google Translate suggests it doesn’t actually mean anything). In the other two movies, he’s generally only referred to as “kami” (“the god”) or addressed directly as “kami-sama”. He’s described as an ancient, violent spirit who was imprisoned in a statue – the villagers aren’t praying to him out of devotion so much as to try to keep him contained. His statue resembles a samurai warrior in thick plate armour with a tall, narrow helmet. It has a blank face with simplified features, but when it comes to life its forearms pass across its face, which transforms into a more lifelike visage. Daimajin’s active face is jade green in colour, with staring, furious eyes and a pronounced scowl.

In the first two movies, he only wakes up when the villains break his stone prison. The situation’s a little different in the third movie, but there’s still a sense that he only takes action when the antagonists violate his boundaries by shedding blood over the place where his statue is. Once active, he shows the ability to magically transport his statue to the main villain’s location, but his standard modus operandi is to walk the statue forward very, very slowly and brutally smash whatever comes within its reach. Its signature sound effect is a loud, echoing footfall. Once justice has been served, the villagers’ main concern is putting Daimajin to sleep again. The implication is that he won’t stop at justice but would, if left unchecked, destroy everything out of sheer pent-up rage. Yet he’s obviously capable of pity, which is what finally stops him in his tracks. He doesn’t go back into his box, though – at the end of each film, his spirit is apparently released and his statue crumbles. There’s no suggestion that the statues seen in the three films are all meant to be the exact same one – they’re in different locations, after all, and they all end up destroyed – so it’s not obvious whether they’re all meant to be animated by the same Daimajin, or if this is some kind of generic thing that happens to wrathful spirits in villages in this fictional world.

Plans for a cinematic revival in the 80s or 90s never came to fruition, but Daimajin was sufficiently well remembered to form the basis of a much later TV series, Daimajin Kanon (2010). This is set in the present day and centres on the perils of a young woman in the big city who finds herself caught up in a supernatural conflict. The key to winning the day is a song that will summon up her home village’s ancient guardian, seen variously as a rock formation next to a waterfall and as a gigantic, muscular humanoid with armoured head and shoulders. This is a significant change to the character of Daimajin, who goes from being an angry Giant Demon God to a more benevolent, protective entity. Characters refer to him throughout as “Bujin” (“war god”) and his backstory is substantially rewritten so that he’s no longer a violent kami trapped in a statue but rather a yōkai. Specifically, he’s the kind of yōkai that forms from very old or well-used objects. He originated in an ancient prayer bell used by the villagers, and his helmet is redesigned to echo this. It’s in this capacity that he appeared in a 2021 continuation of Daiei’s 1960s series of yōkai movies, although with his old, wrathful temperament restored.

These later developments don’t give us much further insight into the original movies. It’s just about impossible to square them with the Daimajin trilogy – which was already hard to squeeze into one single continuity – and they’re probably best thought of as entirely separate stories.

All in all, these films look fantastic. Daiei had a long and successful track record of making jidaigeki, and that shines through in the directing, the acting, the characters and the drama of all three Daimajins. And the great strength of the interchangeability of them is that, if you’re not fussed about investing in a whole trilogy, you can choose the one with the window dressing you prefer and stick with that one. (For the record: “Daimajin on a Lake”.) Focusing the special effects on just a few scenes also works well, each one looking like it’s had the proportionate amount of time and effort spent on it. The shots that juxtapose Daimajin and the human characters all pay off, whether in composite or by filming actors with giant/tiny props. The one composite shot that really doesn’t work is in Return of Daimajin, when the waters of the lake part around Daimajin’s statue as he wades ashore. The walls of water are clearly regular images of water that have been put on an angle and stuck behind the statue in two separate layers, and they just don’t line up. Daimajin himself has perhaps the most extraordinary presence of any cinematic giant monster, completely silent except for his merciless footfall and pinning villains with his bloodshot, unblinking death stare. (And then literally pinning them with something large and pointy.)

It would be easy enough to read more anxiety about nuclear weapons into Daimajin: a vengeful, destructive force that should be kept locked away and, once released, will simply carry on destroying everything unless it’s actively reined in. But I think that jars against the films’ feudal setting. I think perhaps there’s more to be said about Daimajin representing the power of “the old days”, both in the explicit setting and in the statue’s design as a samurai warrior. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to say something about the destructiveness of nostalgia, or about present society displeasing an older generation. Or maybe it’s all just a bit of good old wish-fulfilling revenge fantasy.

Toho Studios might have experimented with kaiju genre crossovers – the farce, the heist, the space opera – but they only dipped their toes into the water of kaiju period drama. Even then, The Three Treasures (1959) (and, much later, Princess from the Moon (1987) and Yamato Takeru (1994)) were only interpreting existing folk tales, not creating new combinations of jidaigeki and kaiju eiga. Daiei outclassed them there. There were tough times ahead for Daiei, but under other circumstances it would have been interesting to see them take this further or try branching out into other genre crossovers.

Invasion of Astro-Monster

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)
Also known as: Monster Zero or Godzilla vs Monster Zero, early American titles given to the film.

It's an unspecified year in the 1960s. Planet X has been discovered just beyond Jupiter – literally right behind it – even though it's apparently too dark to see. It gave itself away by sending out non-human radio signals. It may also have been affecting Earth's magnetic field. (An on-screen caption says it was detected in the year “196X” and the events of the film take place shortly after that. This allows the film to be parallel-contemporary or near-future, whichever you’d prefer.) Two astronauts – one Japanese, Fuji and one American, Glenn – have been sent to investigate the mysterious object. They’re travelling in the P-1 rocket, which represents the World Space Agency but bears Japanese livery. Glenn has the amazing ability to speak Japanese while mouthing English words. (In other words, Toho chose to dub over the actor instead of subtitling him as they did with the US actors in previous films.)

Fuji and Glenn have been sent with a ray gun and a flag to plant on the surface – actually three flags on a pole, the UN flag, Japanese flag and US flag above each other in that order. This seems to suggest they’re laying claim to Planet X, even though they already know it's inhabited because of the radio signals.

The inhabitants of Planet X introduce themselves as “Xiliens”. (Or possibly “Xirians”, but “Xiliens” is the version that’s stuck in Anglo subtitled and dubbed versions, maybe because it continues to echo the word “aliens”.) They wear costumes that include grey bodystockings, black tunics with an orange badge on the chest, huge black collars, fully enclosing black caps with an antenna sticking out the top, black gloves, black boots with pointy curly toes and slim wraparound dark glasses. Their voices sound like they're being relayed through a PA system. The ones we see up front are all male – we discover later that all the female aliens look the same and work as a kind of underclass. It also turns out they’ve rejected emotions and let computers make all their decisions for them. Their ray guns – when used on their own kind, at any rate – produce a photo-negative visual effect and make their victim disappear entirely.

They show the astronauts their problem, Monster Zero, which the astronauts recognise as King Ghidorah. To deal with Ghidorah, the aliens ask for the loan of Monster 01 and Monster 02, which they immediately also name as Godzilla and Rodan. (This begs the question of whether they’ve rated all the Toho daikaiju, and on what basis.) They already know exactly where the monsters can be located. In exchange for taking away the two monsters, they offer a cure for cancer. As it turns out, these diplomatic overtures are a prelude to Planet X establishing a base of operations on Earth – they’re in urgent need of water, and Earth has plenty to spare. A delegation flies back to Earth with Fuji and Glenn to start formal negotiations.

The authorities are keen to accept this offer. It seems that the World Space Agency is actually standing in for the government, as part of a council also including military leaders and one guy in a priest's hat (some kind of religious advisor, for some reason?).

In fact, the people of Planet X have already established a foothold on Earth, under the guise of a toy company. Through this front they've bought up the patent for the Lady Guard, a loud rape alarm invented by Torii Tetsuo, who happens to be the boyfriend of Fuji’s sister. Their intention seems to be to suppress the invention rather than exploit it. They've hidden three flying saucers under the lake in which Godzilla is resting. One of the Xiliens, the female Namikawa, has also been canoodling with Glenn, but this turns out to be on her own initiative, against the commander's orders, and not a devious ploy after all.

They use nuclear technology unknown to humanity to bubble up Godzilla and Rodan in spherical force fields and fly them off to Planet X, taking with them Fuji, Glenn and the astronauts’ boss Dr Sakurai. The kaiju appear to have been innocently sleeping when they were abducted, but they soon wake up when they arrive on Planet X and are confronted by Ghidorah. The duo attack Ghidorah with rocks, then Godzilla takes a spectacular flying jump at Ghidorah. Ghidorah is scared away and Godzilla does a sort of celebratory dance. (This is sometimes called Godzilla’s "Highland fling" by fans, but was apparently a reference to a then-popular manga series.)

Fuji and Glenn wander off inside the alien base on Planet X. They discover that the top floor contains some kind of a temple surrounded by skeletal ashen trees and crystalline outcrops of gold. This is the point at which they discover the truth about the female Xiliens all being played by the same actor. They’re captured, but as the Xiliens are still playing the gracious hosts at this point they give the astronauts a tape containing details of the promised cure for cancer and send them home. The humans have no qualms about abandoning Godzilla and Rodan, who've caused humanity so much trouble in the past.

The tape, of course, only contains the Xiliens' ultimatum to the people of Earth: humanity must welcome their new alien overlords or be exterminated. The news causes riots and anarchy, in the form of an inexpensive montage of monochrome still photographs. Glenn confronts Namikawa in private, only for the pair to be interrupted by an armed party of Xiliens. Namikawa protests to Glenn that she genuinely loves him; the intruders execute her for defying the master computer with her emotions and detain Glenn.

The Xiliens pre-emptively attack Earth’s interplanetary defences and threaten to unleash the three monsters under their control. (Although this time, the aliens are using magnetic rather than nuclear technology. Why should the kaiju respond to magnetic control? Are they naturally migratory?) They generously give humanity 24 hours to surrender. To counter this, the World Space Agency council and the JSDF develop a weapon to cancel out the magnetic beam.

Glenn is thrown into a cell with Tetsuo, who was taken prisoner shortly before the Xilien plan was revealed. They learn, from a note written by Namikawa and slipped to Glenn before her execution, that the aliens are sensitive to certain loud sounds. This would be why they tried to suppress the patent for Tetsuo’s Lady Guard. By an astonishing stroke of luck, Tetsuo has a Lady Guard on his person. The two men overpower their guards, escape and notify the authorities.

The monsters are unleashed and go on an audience-pleasing rampage. Godzilla sets some trees on fire and is shot at by some completely ineffective tanks; Rodan flaps his wings and causes catastrophic winds; Ghidorah just destroys a bunch of stuff. At last the JSDF are ready to strike back. The sound of Tetsuo's alarm is broadcast via the Tokyo Tower and everybody's radios at home, causing the Xiliens to clutch their heads in pain and their UFOs to go haywire. Some mobile military units – the "A-cycle light rays" – that look like chunkier versions of the heat rays previously seen in Mothra (1961) are used to break the aliens' control over the monsters. The three daikaiju convulse on the ground while, overhead, the Xilien UFOs explode. (It’s not entirely clear whether they explode because of interference caused by the transmitted sound, the A-cycle light rays, the Xilien controller hitting something that might conceivably be a master self-destruct switch, or some combination of these factors.) The monsters fight among themselves again. Rodan holds Ghidorah's tail while Godzilla dances about like a boxer, then Rodan lifts Godzilla and slams him into Ghidorah, knocking all three into the sea. Ghidorah resurfaces and flees. As the closing music swells, Glenn mulls over the offer of a job as Earth’s first ambassador to Planet X.

Invasion of Astro-Monster has perhaps the most contrived, by-the-numbers, pulp sci-fi plot of any Godzilla movie. The Xiliens’ one fatal weakness being so clearly signposted so early on is a major flaw, and it doesn’t help that it’s essentially the same plot device parodied by Mars Attacks! (1996) and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978), but let’s also give a shout out to the familiar old what-is-this-thing-you-Earth-people-call-love subplot. And why on Earth would the Xiliens (or the scriptwriters) assume that only Tetsuo’s invention is capable of exploiting the invaders’ weakness and that buying out Tetsuo’s patent and locking him up is all they need to do to safeguard their plan?

What this film doesn’t give us is any more detail on Ghidorah’s origin. The Xiliens don’t claim to have sent him (or rather, the meteorite he hatched from) to Earth in the previous movie. He’s under their control for at least the latter part of the movie, possibly in the earlier scenes as well, but then so are Godzilla and Rodan. For all we know he really did attack Planet X just as the Xiliens claim, only they were able to bring him to heel. Moreover (spoiler alert!) they won’t be the last bunch of aliens in a Shōwa era Godzilla movie to have Ghidorah under their control. He’s not the Xiliens’ creation or their pet – they just seem to be one in a string of manipulators that were lucky enough to have Ghidorah fall into their hands.

It’s notable for bringing elements of science fiction into the Godzilla series that arguably weren’t there before. The daikaiju themselves are more the stuff of fantasy than science fiction; fantasy military hardware is a common enough sight across mainstream cinema; even the suggestion of aliens in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) did little more than riff on contemporary fascination with the paranormal. Here, for the first time, we actually see alien characters and their technology on their planet, and we see human characters visiting that planet as members of a potent international space force. This is the first Godzilla movie – assuming we don’t count the American King Kong vs Godzilla (1963) with its added framing scenes set on board a United Nations space station – that could plausibly occupy the same narrative territory as Toho’s space adventures The Mysterians (1957), Battle in Outer Space (1959) and Gorath (1962). Battle in Outer Space was even set in 1965, the year of this film’s release, although Astro-Monster hedges its bets by being set in 196X. The World Space Agency here, with its use of the United Nations flag, looks like a call back to the UN-led Earth Defence Force in The Mysterians. The actual level of terrestrial technology on show, with humans nosing around the nearer gas giants in pointy rockets, looks remarkably like that in Gorath, although Gorath was set across the late 1970s. One thing Toho’s scriptwriters seem to have lost between Gorath and Astro-Monster is any sense of the time it would take to travel between Earth and Jupiter – we don’t know anything about the Xiliens’ propulsion tech, but there’s no way the P-1 rocket should be able to shuttle back and forth from Planet X like it does.

Why the shift towards space adventure? It might have had something to do with the US/USSR space race, but that had already been underway for a decade by this time. Notable recent milestones were the Americans getting their first close images of the lunar surface in mid-1964 from their seventh automated Ranger probe; the Soviets sending up the first multi-person crewed orbital flight, Voskhod 1, in October 1964, and (just barely) achieving the first spacewalk in March 1965 with Voskhod 2; and the early successes of the American orbital Gemini programme in 1965. I’m not sure if any of these events particularly fired up the Japanese imagination or led to a major step change in how the Japanese public thought about space exploration. Still, the headgear the Xiliens wear – leaving the face clear but covering all the rest of the head – looks very slightly reminiscent of what the real-life astronauts and cosmonauts were wearing inside their helmets.

The effects overall are pretty good, apart from the Xilien UFOs which look very cheap and plastic. The daikaiju look much as they did in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, although Godzilla's mouth is a bit puffier again. The series of shots looking back at Planet X as the crew of the P-1 leave Godzilla and Rodan behind is a nice touch.

As usual, there are some familiar faces among the lead cast. Takarada Akira, starring as the Japanese astronaut Fuji, was most recently seen as the journalist Sakai in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964). He’d also played one of the walk-on princes in The Three Treasures (1959) – Kubo Akira, who plays Tetsuo here, was the other one. This is the first Godzilla film to feature Mizuno Kumi, stealing the show here as the alien Namikawa, although she’d starred in a few other Toho tokosatsu films and we’ll see her again quite soon. Dr Sakurai, Fuji’s boss at the World Space Agency, is played by Tazaki Jun, who’d been Sakai’s editor in Mothra vs Godzilla and the JSDF commander in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962). In the role of the Controller of Planet X is Tsuchiya Yoshio, previously seen as the fighter pilot Tajima in Godzilla Raids Again (1955).

Of great interest is Nick Adams in the co-starring role of Glenn, the American astronaut. His IMDb resumé shows a string of bit parts in cowboy TV shows culminating in the lead role in The Rebel (1959-61), an itinerant-vigilante-fights-injustice series in which Adams played a former Confederate soldier. The decision to present him in the "spaghetti Western" style, with Adams speaking in English and a Japanese voice artist dubbing over him, means Adams can deliver his lines much more naturally, although it also means an obvious disconnect between the shapes his mouth makes and the sounds supposedly coming out of them. I’m not suggesting his performance here is a revelation – what he’s doing is firmly in the mould of B-movie melodrama – but he’s head and shoulders above the stilted performances of some of the American actors seen in King Kong vs Godzilla. He’d already done something similar for Toho in Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965), and we’ll hear more about that (or rather, the follow-on from that) in a few blog posts’ time. I don’t think this indicates some intention at Toho to improve relations between Japan and America by showcasing American actors, more just the opportunistic use of actors who happened to be to hand and were already known in the US. There was a flurry of kaiju eiga around this time that featured American co-stars either dubbed into Japanese or, where competent, speaking Japanese themselves – Robert Dunham had set the bar in Toho’s Dogora (1964), and half of Daiei’s Shōwa era Gamera movies would star American and Japanese child actors side by side.

As far as thematic developments go, Astro-Monster shows a further transition from the daikaiju being generic creatures to being unitary entities. The Xiliens name Godzilla and Rodan as individuals, not as members of a species, even assigning them and King Ghidorah serial numbers as if they were unique. No one seems to doubt that, once the individual Godzilla and Rodan seen here are flown off to Planet X, Earth will be completely free of them. There’s no equivalent of the scene in Godzilla (1954) in which Dr Yamane warns that continued nuclear testing will summon up more Godzillas – as far as everyone’s concerned, the loss of one Godzilla means the loss of all Godzillas.

And once again we’re invited to feel sympathy for Godzilla – and Rodan! – as those heartless astronauts abandon them on the surface of Planet X. The argument given – that they’re more trouble than they’re worth – is pretty close to the grievance expressed by the two kaiju in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. The cinematography and the music in this scene suggest the director wants us to think carefully about how we feel about this.

Gamera the Giant Monster

Gamera the Giant Monster (1965)
Daiei Motion Picture Company
Director: Yuasa Noriaki, Tsukiji Yonesaburo (special effects)
Also known as: Gammera the Invincible (1966) – the title of the US re-edit.

What’s this – a Japanese kaiju movie and it’s not produced by Toho?!

Toho Studios had been enjoying great success with their kaiju eiga, and Daiei wanted a slice of that pie. Daiei weren’t as well known for their tokusatsu (special effects movies) as for their ghost stories and jidaigeki (historical dramas), particularly samurai stories. They’d got in on the 1950s pulp sci-fi craze with Warning from Space (1956), in which Earth is visited by aliens who look like giant one-eyed starfish, and they’d had a go at a kaiju movie with The Whale God (1962), based on a novel that was itself heavily inspired by Moby-Dick. The Whale God had played to Daiei’s strengths with its historical village setting, a character-driven plot and a creature that didn’t require a lot of moving parts, but it hadn’t left them with a money-spinner to rival the Godzilla movie series.

In late 1963, a creative team at Daiei started work on a film for release in early 1964, called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. The titular menace would be a plague of rats (“nezumi” = “rat” or “mouse”, plus the “-ra” suffix borrowed from Godzilla) mutated to gigantic size by an experimental food supplement. In order to make scenes of the Nezura horde running amok in Tokyo both more realistic and cheaper, the team planned to fill their miniature city models with real live sewer rats. (Let’s just say that again with the Caps Lock on – REAL LIVE SEWER RATS!!) Unfortunately, the rodent actors infested the studio with parasitic vermin and public health officials ordered that the production be shut down.

It would be more than a year before Daiei would try again with Gamera.

The exploration vessel Chidori Maru has brought Dr Hidaka and his team to the Arctic Circle, where they want to interview the head of an indigenous settlement about the local folklore. (The locals are described as “Eskimo” in the film... Presumably these people are Aleutian Islanders or Alaskan or Canadian Inuit rather than Siberian Yupik, since the Japanese team are forced to talk to them in English. And yet...) Hidaka specifically wants to ask questions about legends of giant turtles living in Atlantis. (Which seems completely absurd – why would they know anything about the Mediterranean myth of Atlantis? But perhaps this suggests these are Greenlandic Inuit, notwithstanding the English dialogue, since that would at least put them nearer the Atlantic Ocean than the Pacific.)

No sooner have the team arrived at the settlement than four unidentified stealth bombers fly overhead. The officer in charge of a nearby American military base scrambles some fighter jets, and in the ensuing aerial chase one of the bombers is shot down. It crashes into the ice with an explosion that suggests it was carrying nuclear missiles. Even though they’re close enough to the crash site for one of his entourage to take photographs, Hidaka states (rather optimistically) that they’re far enough away to avoid any fallout. A gigantic turtle climbs up from beneath the ice and marches off to the coast, where it destroys the Chidori Maru. Hidaka and co are left to make their own way home somehow (and we’re not told how). As they leave, the head of the settlement gives them a stone engraved with a turtle motif and confirms that the creature they’ve seen is Gamera, “the Devil’s Envoy".

Gamera is reported as being 60 metres tall, walks upright and has tusks. He can breathe fire, which he does when he attacks the Chidori Maru. The name is the Japanese for turtle, “kame”, with the standard “-ra” on the end, but with the K softened to a G so that it doesn’t sound exactly like “camera”.

Some time later, Hidaka appears on American TV with his assistant Kyoko to talk about his experience. He assures the world that, with the amount of radiation Gamera was exposed to, the kaiju is probably already dying at the bottom of the ocean. The attention of the world’s media soon turns to a rash of UFO sightings.

We cut to Hokkaido, where young Sakurai Toshio is forced by his father to release his pet turtle into the wild in the hope that it will shake him out of his turtle mania. No sooner does he do so than Gamera wades ashore. In order to get a better look, Toshio climbs a nearby lighthouse, which Gamera promptly smashes with his forelimb. Much to everyone’s surprise, Gamera pauses to save Toshio from a potentially lethal fall and place him gently on the ground before lumbering further inland. The troublesome child later sneaks back to the beach and, failing to find his pet again, concludes that it must have transformed into Gamera.

As Gamera closes in on a geothermal power plant, the JSDF, advised by Hidaka, try to stop him by electrocuting him with the plant’s entire output and then by bombarding him with conventional artillery. The plant is ruined but Gamera is unharmed. It turns out that not only can he breathe fire, he can suck it in, too, as he absorbs the energy from the burning power plant. We’re later told that he also emits a radio-jamming frequency. The JSDF tries instead to slow him down with an experimental freezing bomb while they dynamite a rocky slope out from underneath him. This works and briefly leaves Gamera floundering on his back, but he now reveals another surprising ability – he can pull his head and limbs into his shell, fire rockets out of the holes and launch himself, spinning, into the sky. Remember those UFO sightings that were mentioned in passing a bit earlier? Apparently, that was Gamera. Hidaka worries that he might seek out nuclear energy sources for his next meal.

Gamera’s presence in Tokyo Bay causes catastrophic harm to local fishing, sudden floods and shipping collisions due to radio interference. At an international summit at the hastily convened Gamera Countermeasures HQ, Hidaka details the “Z Plan”, Japan’s last-ditch but supposedly infallible plan to solve the Gamera problem. It involves luring him to a research facility on Ōshima Island, but he’ll have to be kept busy until the final preparations can be made. The authorities scramble to evacuate Tokyo (the young people in a nightclub who haven’t heard about Gamera refuse to shift and are squashed soon after). Naturally, the Tokyo Tower takes a pasting. To stop him wandering off before the Z Plan team are ready, railcars full of petrol are sent rolling into the blazing wreck of an oil refinery where Gamera is feeding on the fire.

Little Toshio, who believes Gamera is his friend, slips away from his family during the evacuation, somehow gets onto the oil refinery premises and sneaks onto one of the petrol-filled tankers. The refinery chief is obliged to race after him and try to rescue him; the pair are blown out of harm’s way when a tanker ahead of theirs explodes. The chief sends an ungrateful Toshio packing. Undeterred, the little menace somehow manages to hide himself in a shipment of Z Plan materials bound for Ōshima Island. He’s immediately discovered by the team on the island and taken to the temporary HQ where Hidaka and the others are preparing to put their plan into action.

The Z Plan involves dumping oil barrels into Tokyo Bay and setting them on fire to create a path to draw Gamera from Tokyo to Ōshima Island. (This sounds... less than ideal? Depending on exactly where in Tokyo Bay they start from, it’s going to mean at best maybe 20km, at worst as much as 50km of burning oil fouling up the bay. If the local fishing industry weren’t already in trouble, it’d be totally screwed now.) A sudden typhoon puts out the fire and endangers the plan, but an extremely lucky and very short-lived volcanic eruption on the island puts it back on course. More fires lure Gamera further inland to the heart of the facility, where (surprise!) he’s trapped inside a spheroidal capsule on top of a rocket and launched into space. Toshio says he’ll become a scientist so that he can go and visit Gamera on Mars someday.

Gamera the Giant Monster owes an obvious debt to Godzilla (1954). It imitates the superficial features but not the substance of the earlier film – an enormous, ancient creature with fiery breath is woken up by something nuclear, destroys a ship, naps in Tokyo Bay, stomps across the city, chews on a train and is finally defeated by a bit of science-fictional gadgetry. Although the explosion that rouses Gamera is the result of a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers (America and an unspecified Other), it never feels as if the film is about to offer any deeper comment on the Cold War or on atomic weapons. It’s another rocket, in fact, that resolves the plot by sending Gamera off to Mars.

The scene in which Gamera attacks a lighthouse is an interesting one because, although it doesn’t echo any similar scene in Godzilla, it harks back to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) which had itself influenced Godzilla. Funnily enough, the most obvious similarity – the black-and-white cinematography – had nothing to do with imitating Godzilla and everything to do with cutting costs. Money, or rather the lack of it, will be a defining factor in the unfolding tale of Daiei and their Gamera films.

Another way in which Gamera the Giant Monster only accidentally resembles Godzilla is that it, too, was heavily re-edited for the American market. Unlike Godzilla, the Gamera movie actually gained nearly ten minutes in the edit, with the addition of several US-centric scenes starring Brian Donlevy.

As far as the special effects go, Gamera the Giant Monster may be cheap but it’s not too shabby. The kaiju itself is a bit disappointing – Tsukiji Yonesaburo can’t compete with Tsuburaya Eiji’s kaiju suit and puppet work. Gamera‘s design is cruder than Godzilla’s, although he looks better here than he or his adversaries will in many of the subsequent films. His fiery inhalations and exhalations are achieved not through optical effects trickery, but by having an actual flamethrower lodged in Gamera's throat (whether a close-up puppet or, in a couple of shots, the suit with a stunt actor inside). This is a Health and Safety nightmare but effective for the viewer. It also means the scenes of Gamera sucking up fire from the geothermal plant and the oil refinery can be achieved simply and cost-effectively by throwing the earlier close-up shots into reverse. The city and vehicle miniatures are quite impressive, there’s a pretty fair composite shot of people moving through the Z Plan compound interior... all in all, the film acquits itself well.

The plot’s more of a disappointment. It lurches from one set piece to the next in a way that makes it feel very pacy, until you stop to think about the story, and then it just feels choppy. The highly repetitive dialogue might be meant to paper over the cracks and hold everything together, but I don’t think it does the film any favours.

On the acting front, the award-winning actor Funakoshi Eiji is the stand-out as Dr Hidaka, giving a warm and sympathetic performance throughout. (Note: To be clear, he didn’t win his awards for this film.) Sadly, the character wasn’t reprised in any subsequent films and Funakoshi only returned to the series in the minor role of Dr Shiga in Gamera vs Guiron (1969), the fifth Gamera movie. The other Japanese actors give solid but unremarkable performances, and the American actors seen in the USAF base and the New York TV studio are passable – certainly better than any seen in any of the Godzilla movies up to this point. Uchida Yoshiro is memorable for all the worst reasons as Toshio, but then his character is meant to be an appalling little so-and-so, so that’s probably testament to his talent as an actor.

If Gamera the Giant Monster existed in isolation, it would be easy to conclude that Dr Hidaka is the central character and Toshio is a side character whose frequent, annoying intrusions into the story are just there to pad out the runtime. Put him alongside the scene of the oblivious kids in the Tokyo nightclub and you might imagine the filmmakers had a bee in their bonnet about “young people today” and Toshio was just an extended part of that. But in retrospect, it turns out Toshio was the key to this story all along. Who knows, maybe Daiei were hedging their bets at this point – the immediate sequel, Gamera vs Barugon (1966), has an entirely adult cast and no Toshio equivalent, which hints at the path this movie series could have taken. No one’s calling Gamera “the friend of all children” yet. All the Shōwa era Gamera films after that will revolve around child protagonists, with adults often sidelined into comic relief roles. The scene in which Gamera pauses in his rampage of terror to save Toshio’s life, which might at first look like a bizarre aberration, is actually the defining moment of this film.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

The Japanese title for this movie promises "three daikaiju [in] the greatest battle on Earth". To prove this is no idle threat, the title sequence is a spoilerific montage of shots from the fight scenes involving Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah (although it avoids giving away too much about King Ghidorah's appearance). Enjoy this while you can, because – barring a brief hallucinatory shot of the larval Mothra – it'll be most of an hour before any of them appears on screen. Astute readers will have noticed that there are four monsters present, not three – perhaps the Japanese title was meant to imply that we would see three monsters fighting among themselves, while hiding the twist that these three would team up in battle against the fourth.

The story opens with two oddities: a winter heatwave and a worldwide meteor shower. Although one solitary meteorite will play a significant part in the plot, the rest of the meteors and the heatwave aren’t really followed up on. They're just remarked on as examples of the kind of weird things that have been happening lately.

(Sidenote: the recent clash between Godzilla and Mothra is not listed among these weird things. In fact, it’s apparently so unremarkable that Mothra's tiny singing pixies, the Shobijin, can turn up on a family entertainment show on national TV without anyone turning a hair. But more on that shortly.)

Shindo Naoko is the lead reporter for Mystery in the 20th Century, a sensationalist TV show that's being developed to capitalise on all the weird stuff. We see her interviewing a group of UFO watchers who complain, in time-honoured tradition, that she's driving all the UFOs away with her sceptical thoughts. She's well placed to cover the events that unfold over the rest of the film.

She's also, by a lucky coincidence, the sister of the policeman assigned to guard Princess Salno, a visiting dignitary from the kingdom of Selgina. Selgina is supposedly a small Himalayan nation, but everyone who lives there looks Japanese. It boasts a jarring blend of buildings with windows in the Arabian style and costumes that include huge Elizabethan ruffs. The main human villain, an assassin sent to Japan to kill Salno, is obviously the villain because he always wears dark glasses. (If you've ever wondered what the fashion combo of dark glasses and a ruff would look like, now's your chance to find out.)

On its way to Japan, Salno's plane is blown up by agents of the Selginan political opposition. But before that happens, a UFO approaches the plane and shines a green light into Salno's face. (Vindication for the UFO watchers, if they only knew!) Salno appears to slip into a trance and hears a voice telling her to get out of the plane immediately. We find out later that she was rescued from the ocean by a fisherman, traded her royal golden bracelet for some of his old clothes and vanished when they landed ashore. She appears in Japan the very next day, preaching doom in a public square and claiming to be a prophet from Venus.

Meanwhile, the Shobijin guest on the TV show Where Are They Now? to answer the questions of two young boys who wanted to meet Mothra. (See, this is how mundane daikaiju are to the characters in these films now.) They no longer have the fancy hats they wore in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and are dressed much as they were in the original Mothra (1961). They bring the audience up to date on the two larvae last seen in the previous film – one sadly died but the other's doing very well, thank you. They also conjure up a vision of the larval Mothra by singing to the audience. This is a new song, heard only in this film, and the lyrics are actually in Japanese, making it less uncomfortable than the other Mothra songs with their "foreign" lyrics. The Infant Islanders are still wearing brownface make-up, though. Infant Island is only seen in this vision, which will be repeated with the song later on when the Shobijin summon Mothra for real. All we see of the island is the interior of a cave.

The Venusian prophet correctly predicts the reappearance of Rodan at Mt Aso (where the climax of the film Rodan (1956) took place) and trouble at the Kurobe Dam where a strange meteorite has landed. She also persuades the Shobijin not to stay aboard the passenger ship they were planning to take back to Infant Island. And a good thing too, because only a few scenes later that ship is attacked by none other than Godzilla.

Godzilla looks much as he did in Mothra vs Godzilla, but his face is a bit more under control now - the "eyebrows" have gone. After destroying the ship, he heads inland, presumably for a good old-fashioned rampage, but is repeatedly buzzed by Rodan. He appears to be disoriented by the sound Rodan makes in flight as much as by the dive-bombing. As in his debut movie, Rodan looks like a large pterosaur with two horns sprouting from the back of his head. He doesn't appear to have teeth this time, though. The two monsters chase each other to the vicinity of Mt Fuji, where they fight in earnest.

The meteorite, which has strong but intermittent magnetic properties, glows and hatches to release a golden cloud of energy. This energy coalesces into the form of a creature identified by the prophet as King Ghidorah. (The "King" in King Ghidorah's name is clearly meant to evoke King Kong, lending a bit of instant authority and personality to this new daikaiju. "Ghidorah", pronounced "Ghid'rah", suggests "Hydra", the multi-headed serpent of Greek mythology.)

Ghidorah has the scaly skin of a reptile, two legs, two tails, a chunky torso, a pair of leathery wings that allow him to fly, and three long necks. The heads on the ends of these necks strongly resemble those of the classic Japanese dragon - a sort of long-snouted, horned lion's face. He makes a chittering sound and can fire lightning-like destructive beams from his mouths. According to the prophet, he destroyed an advanced civilisation on Venus some 5,000 years ago, and now he's come to do the same on Earth. No details of his origin or motivation are ever given.

It's around this time that the policeman who was assigned to guard Princess Salno takes her (or the Venusian prophet, if you'd rather) to see Dr Tsukamoto, a psychiatrist, in the hope of restoring her memory. Tsukamoto puts her under hypnosis, but she still insists she's a Venusian. There's a bit of water-muddying at this point, as she talks about Venusian refugees coming to Earth 5,000 years ago, interbreeding with the locals and leaving little psychic traces of themselves. (So was the Venusian already waiting inside Salno's mind, or was it implanted by that UFO earlier in the film?) Perturbed, Tsukamoto insists he'll have to try shock therapy. (He's very quick to suggest shock therapy. I'm going to come right out and say it: Tsukamoto is a bad psychiatrist.) He doesn't get the chance, though, as a combination of Selginan assassins and giant monsters drives everyone out of his clinic. The prophet is later seen praying to the universe to spare Earth from King Ghidorah, which apparently achieves nothing except presenting a lovely clear target for the assassin. The bullet grazes her head and finally clears up her amnesia. The assassin then dies in a convenient rockfall.

Aware that Mothra can't defeat King Ghidorah on her own but keen to prevent the destruction of Earth, the Shobijin summon Mothra to negotiate with Godzilla and Rodan and get them to team up against the alien invader. This scene, famous among fans as "the monster summit", sees Mothra firing cocoon material at the other two monsters while they childishly bicker, with the Shobijin giving a running commentary of what the monsters are "saying". (The American dub adds a lovely line for the Shobijin, telling Godzilla off for his foul language.) Godzilla initially refuses to help humanity, for the astonishing reason that he feels victimised by them; Rodan sympathises. But when Mothra faces Ghidorah alone and takes a pasting, the other two relent. They bring Ghidorah to a standstill by having Godzilla hold his tail while Mothra, circling above on Rodan's shoulders, cocoons Ghidorah's three heads. Ghidorah flies off, apparently leaving Earth in peace. We may assume the terrestrial monsters disperse peaceably, but we only see Mothra and the Shobijin leaving Japan.

All the familiar faces turn up again, some of them in roles confusingly similar to those they played in the same year's Mothra vs Godzilla. Hoshi Yuriko, who was a press photographer in the earlier film, plays Shindo Naoko. Her editor is played by Sahara Kenji, the villain in the previous film. Koizumi Hiroshi plays the scientist Professor Murai, who is in no way to be confused with his last role as the scientist Professor Miura. Tajima Yoshifumi, a secondary villain in Mothra vs Godzilla, reverts to type here as the captain of a doomed ship. Omura Senkichi, instantly recognisable, cameos as the man who climbs down into the crater of Mt Aso to retrieve a tourist's hat moments before Rodan bursts onto the scene. Ito Emi and Yumi, of course, reprise their roles as the Shobijin. Rejoining the franchise are Hirata "Dr Serizawa" Akihiko as the chief of police and Shimura "Dr Yamane" Takashi as the psychiatrist Tsukamoto. Wakabayashi Akiko, starring as the Venusian-possessed Princess Salno, had played a supporting role in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and would go on to feature as one of the Japanese secret agents James Bond beds in You Only Live Twice (1967) (she's the one who doesn't make it to the end of the movie).

Although aliens had featured in some of Toho’s earlier films – notably the space adventures The Mysterians (1957) and Battle in Outer Space (1959) and the semi-comedic heist movie Dogora (1964) – this is their first introduction into the Godzilla series. The detail of Princess Salno claiming to speak on behalf of a vanished Venusian civilisation is an interesting one. 1964 is a bit early for Uri Geller, who didn’t start bending spoons in public until the late 60s and first claimed to be a vessel for extraterrestrial powers in the 70s, but there's always Atlantis. People like Madame Blavatsky in the 1870s and 1880s and Edgar Cayce from the mid-1920s to the mid-40s made a career out of revealing the secrets of ancient Atlantis and predicting doom to American audiences. It’s possible these were the model for the character of Princess Salno, Venusian prophet. I haven’t been able to find any record of a similar celebrity in Japan in the early 1960s, although that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. But between this and (spoiler alert!) the mention of a lost civilisation in Daiei’s first Gamera movie, I think it's fair to suppose there was a fashion for these and similar pseudoscientific topics in Japan around this time. Naoko's TV show, Mystery in the 20th Century, might well have been inspired by a real-world precedent.

And just to up the stakes, now that grudge matches and team-ups between terrestrial kaiju are old hat, we get an alien daikaiju as well. After a string of prehistoric monsters and giant but recognisable terrestrial creatures, Ghidorah’s design is a lot more out there. The costume works really well and the fight scenes look spectacular, thanks to several puppeteers working the heads and tails as well as stuntmen inside the body. Toho’s special effects team have come a long way since they pulled off a bodiless eight-headed wyrm in The Three Treasures (1959). The trade-off for this is that we don’t get an adult Mothra as well – we only see Mothra in her larval form. A giant moth flying around those Ghidorah heads would have been one set of strings too many.

The phrase "monster summit", to describe the scene in which Mothra mediates between Godzilla and Rodan, gives a clue to how some fans have interpreted this film. Ghidorah, with his multiple dragon heads, might perhaps represent an expansionist China (and 1964 was, after all, a Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar). He can only be contained if Mothra can persuade the monster superpowers (Godzilla = America, so Rodan must be... the Soviet Union?) to put aside their differences and defend Japan. Some commentators have tried to stretch this geopolitical reading of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster across the rest of the early Shōwa Godzilla series, which I think is too reductive.

In any case, dragons in Japanese art look very much like those in Chinese art, and the animal zodiac that includes the Year of the Dragon is also observed in Japan, so it’s by no means a given that Ghidorah is meant to embody China (although the much less subtle Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) might make us think again). Relations between Japan and China at this time were frosty but not particularly hostile – there was some trade between them, although China derided Japan as a lackey of the USA because of the American troops still stationed there, and Japan might have felt similar reservations over China’s close relationship with the Soviet Union. (That, incidentally, would complicate any reading of this film that sees Rodan as a stand-in for the USSR.) China’s first nuclear weapons test, conducted some distance away in north-western China, might have caused Japan some anxiety, but that had only happened two months before this film’s release and I don’t think it’s likely to have determined its plot or kaiju design.

This kind of interpretation – with daikaiju representing nations of interest to Japan, one for one – is only made easier by the way the kaiju are increasingly presented as named individuals with distinct personalities, their identity consistent across films. They’re becoming less like mindless, destructive creatures and more like kami or yōkai, and an inherent side effect of that is that they gain more potential as symbols. Rodan is now recast in this mould and resurrected at the site of his destruction in 1956 – Mothra’s mystical qualities are rubbing off on him as well as on Godzilla. Ghidorah, of course, has quite literally come from the heavens, and we’ll never get any other explanation of his origin, rational or supernatural.

What I find most interesting about this film is that, for the first time, we're invited to have pity for Godzilla. He's been an existential threat, a destructive nuisance and a buffoon, but we've never previously been asked to consider that he might have feelings. We’ve never really been asked to think about his psychology at all – it’s a bit startling to find he, Rodan and Mothra are capable of enough rational thought to have a “verbal” debate. If there’s much more of this sort of thing, why, we might even be asked to think of him as some kind of hero.

Mothra vs Godzilla

Mothra vs Godzilla (1964)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs The Thing, the title first given to the film in US cinemas.

I suggested that King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) wasn’t what we might think of as “a Godzilla movie”, more like an opportunistic one-off occasioned by Toho acquiring the rights to King Kong. It was, however, a massive commercial success and of course Toho wanted to capitalise on it. Somehow they weren’t able to mount a rematch between Kong and Godzilla – they weren’t done with Kong, as we’ll see in due course, but on this occasion it didn’t work out. But they were willing to take another chance on Godzilla, and they had other kaiju at their disposal, kaiju that they already owned the rights to. Mothra (1961) had been hugely successful too, and so the studio set about blending both films to create their next blockbuster.

An enormous blue and yellow egg washes ashore in Japan after a storm swept it off Infant Island. (We first see it perching on a rocky outcrop and not sitting in the temple we saw in Mothra). It lands in a coastal part of the Chūbu region and is claimed by the officials of the local prefecture. We might recall having seen a very similar egg in Mothra, but none of the Japanese characters in that film saw it, so of course nobody recognises that it’s Mothra’s egg. It’s soon sold to the businessman Kumayama, a shady character whose company, Happy Enterprises, is backed by the financier Torahata. The pair plan to exploit the egg by building an amusement park around it. Kumayama seems to have decided its monetary value by multiplying up the street value of a chicken's egg, with a weirdly precise estimate of how many such eggs the Mothra egg equates to.

Sakai Ichirō, the star reporter of the Maino Times, is working on a story about the floods that followed the storm with photographer Nakanishi Junko when the two are reassigned to investigate the giant egg. They meet Professor Miura, who’s also been called in to look at the egg, but all three are chased off by Kumayama. They adjourn to a nearby hotel to discuss whether they can put any legal pressure on Kumayama, and are surprised when the man himself walks through the lobby – he’s come to talk shop with Torahata. The duo aren’t alone in Torahata’s room – a pair of foot-high female twins have broken in and want a word with them. These are Mothra’s intermediaries, who were named the Shobijin in Mothra, although they don’t call themselves that.

The Shobijin are wearing much fancier costumes than they did in Mothra's solo debut. On top of their yellow dresses they sport fluffy white hats and shawls and have some sort of apron arrangement around their waists. They demand the return of the egg, but Kumayama and Torahata respond by trying to capture the Shobijin so they can put them on the stage and charge people to see them. (That old chestnut again, eh?) The Shobijin escape and, in the woods near the hotel, they accost Sakai, Nakanishi and Miura and explain the situation to them. The trio aren’t any more successful than the twins were in persuading the businessmen to hand over the egg. The Shobijin return empty-handed to Infant Island, flying on the back of the adult Mothra who’s made a rare peaceful visit to Japan to pick them up.

(Assuming this is the same Mothra we’ve seen before and this film isn’t rebooting her story, she’s somehow managed to reproduce within the last three years despite an evident shortage of other adult Mothras. Although three years is an outstanding life expectancy for a moth, it seems low for a kaiju that’s worshipped as a god, and we might imagine that if she reproduces at this rate, Infant Island ought to be crawling with Mothras by now. Then again – spoiler alert – we don’t see the egg hatch until after the current Mothra dies. Maybe each Mothra is expected to lay their successor egg as soon as possible but then leave it lying around, potentially for years, until a new Mothra is needed.)

Miura now begins to examine a piece of odd-looking debris Sakai and Nakanishi had earlier found on the beach and finds that it’s highly radioactive. When the three head back to look for more debris, they see Godzilla bursting up out of a nearby patch of land that’s been earmarked for property development.

(What the hell’s he doing under there? We might suppose he was washed up by the storm, like the egg, but then how did he end up buried? Ah, but I’m assuming the kaiju we see here is the same one we saw in his previous outing. But we know from Godzilla Raids Again (1955) that there’s more than one, so perhaps this is a new, third Godzilla? And then again, the recent American streaming series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023), whose sixth episode features a scene uncannily similar to this one, offers an explanation for the ability of kaiju to evade detection and reappear unexpectedly that we might retroactively apply here.)

Godzilla now has prominent "eyebrows" and a much more puffy, floppy face. He also seems to have been possessed by Mr Blobby – almost as soon as he’s shaken off the sand, he pulls down a tower because he got his tail caught in it, trips over and pratfalls straight into a building. But he’s soon back on the rampage and shrugging off the usual ineffective counterattacks of the JSDF. For want of any better ideas, Sakai, Nakanishi and Miura travel to Infant Island to seek an audience with Mothra.

Infant Island, a lush paradise in Mothra, is now a wasteland except for an Edenic garden at the heart of the islanders' cave network where the Shobijin live. It's still populated by Japanese actors in dodgy brownface make-up, although they actually get to speak for themselves this time, and the Shobijin still sing songs with "foreign" lyrics. (As well as the familiar, cod-Indonesian Mothra song, this film includes a new song for Mothra’s rebirth scene that Wikizilla suggests is in the Filipino language Tagalog.)

The tone of events on Infant Island, like the landscape, is a lot more sombre than in 1961 or in King Kong vs Godzilla – there are no comedic hi-jinks here. The Infant Islanders reject their Japanese visitors’ pleas for help, condemning them for the nuclear tests that have ruined their island. (Readers may recall that the fictional Cold War superpower Rolisica was responsible for the tests in 1961, although no one’s ever going to mention that nation again in these films. Presumably the islanders are just talking about industrialised nations in general, as it’s highly unlikely anyone would have let Japan themselves conduct atomic weapons tests.) Undeterred, Nakanishi and Sakai give impassioned hero speeches about not condemning innocent lives and about everyone needing to pull together to make the world a better place. Despite the misgivings of her people and the Shobijin, Mothra is persuaded to help against the greater existential threat of Godzilla. (Which is interesting when we recall what was said in Mothra about Mothra having no concept of morality.)

Godzilla rampages his way towards the egg. (Is he drawn towards it somehow?) Along the way, he destroys the hotel where Kumayama and Torahata are conducting their dodgy business dealings, which draws a line under their subplot. The adult Mothra turns up to defend her egg and puts up a surprisingly effective defence. She's able to drag Godzilla around by the tail, as well as buffet him with the wind from her wings and attack him with her wing scales (which manifest as a yellow dust and aren't really explained in this film). Godzilla is driven away, but Mothra is fatally wounded and dies draped protectively over her egg.

Not quite done yet, Godzilla wanders off to cause further mayhem elsewhere. The JSDF still think they can contain him by running millions of volts through a line of electricity pylons – they are mistaken. Meanwhile, the Shobijin sing a song of prayer to Mothra, and at last the egg hatches. Much to everyone’s surprise, it contains twin larvae. (The dialogue makes a bit out of Mothra being literally reborn through her offspring, although it’s unclear how this will work when there are two of them.) They head for Iwa Island, where Godzilla has cornered a party of schoolchildren and their teacher. The larvae get Godzilla's attention by attacking his tail and defeat him by cocooning him in their silk. He falls into the sea, just like he did at the end of King Kong vs Godzilla, and the larvae swim back to Infant Island.

This is the film that really establishes the Godzilla franchise. There are much closer ties between it and the couple of films that will follow it than there are between the various other Shōwa era Godzilla films. More than that, this is where the Godzilla vs Monster template really takes hold. King Kong vs Godzilla established the format with a clash of kaiju celebrities as its focus – in its title, even – and a big monster fight at the climax, but now we’ve seen Godzilla paired with another Toho kaiju. Now we have an honest-to-goodness crossover, hinting at the possibility that all Toho’s monsters might inhabit the same narrative world. That’s the way things are going to be from now on.

As part of the world-building for this burgeoning shared universe, we get lovely touches like public announcements warning of an imminent kaiju attack ("Go to your shelters!"). The events of Mothra aren’t discussed – in fact, Mothra vs Godzilla reprises elements of the earlier film but behaves as if they’re new. When the shady businessmen talk about exploiting the Shobijin by putting them on the stage, no one remarks that it’s been tried before, or that it ended badly. No one seems particularly startled by the Shobijin or any of the developments around Mothra, yet no one at any time says "Mothra? You mean like that creature that attacked Japan just three years ago?" It’s assumed that we’ll already know what we need to know about the kaiju, and so the characters implicitly already know it too, even if we’re treating the story as brand new. That’s something else that will become standard in these films.

The other thing that starts to happen here is that Godzilla starts to shift from being a merely physical creature, one of a mostly unseen species, towards being a unitary entity, sole bearer of the name Godzilla and something nearer the supernatural. The inclusion of Mothra is probably a factor – maybe some of her weird god-kaiju energy rubs off on him. Rodan might have been a more obvious opponent for Godzilla since they’re both saurian beasts. We saw more than one Rodan in Rodan (1956) and none of them survived, but as we know (as this point) that Rodan isn’t a one-off, there’s no bar against having another one pop up. Remember that the Godzilla in this film isn’t the same as the first one, after all, and might not be the second one either. Going down that road would have reinforced the idea of these kaiju as straightforwardly physical animals. Instead the creative team went with Mothra, who survived her previous movie appearance, is worshipped as a god and apparently reincarnates as each successive version of the kaiju we see. In order to make more sense of later films, we’re increasingly going to have to assume that something similar applies to other daikaiju.

I meant to dive into this in the King Kong vs Godzilla entry, on the basis that its blandly materialist American re-edit offers a strong point of contrast, but this entry works too. There’s a wide variety of types of supernatural being in Japanese folklore, largely thanks to Japan’s animist Shinto belief system. Rather than spend time defining them all here, I’ll link to a helpful page on the Shinto Sanctuary website that explains some of the terms. “Kaiju” isn’t one of them – it just means “weird beast” and it’s applicable to non-supernatural American creature feature critters as well as Mothra. The two principal terms in play are “kami” and “yōkai”, and while these might broadly be translated as “god” and “monster” or “demon”, the distinction between them isn’t as clearly defined as that. Shinto Sanctuary suggests that the key difference is that if it’s malevolent, it’s a yōkai, but that doesn’t seem to work in all cases either. Another definition I’ve seen online suggests that yōkai exist because of human activity in a way that kami don’t.

Mothra, I think, looks like a kami or at least (in line with what Shinto Sanctuary says on the subject) the animal avatar of a kami. She has protective ties to a specific place and will, over the course of her film appearances, increasingly take on the role of a guardian of the natural world. Based on what little evidence we have, it looks more likely that she predates the human occupation of Infant Island than that she owes her existence to her worshippers (although perhaps the belief of the Infant Islanders has influenced the appearance of the Shobijin).

We might recall that Godzilla was once worshipped by the people of Ōdo Island, or at least by their ancestors, who reportedly used to sacrifice young women to him in return for better fishing. On the other hand, he owes his existence as we know it to human activity and is malevolent (in his first few films, although he’ll soon soften), so perhaps he’s a yōkai. Perhaps he attacks Japan not because he’s been woken up by nuclear tests and is feeling grumpy, but because it’s his job to visit supernatural vengeance upon presumptuous humanity. Perhaps Dr Yamane’s rational explanation of his existence was only ever a thin veneer.

And then again, even if he is some sort of actual dinosaur, we might fairly say he’s either several million years out of time or extremely long-lived. He may not be a “tsukumogami” (a domestic object that’s become a yōkai after a century of existence), but perhaps a similar principle applies – he’s transcended normal biology through sheer longevity. That’s also true in a real-world sense, of course – the more films he’s appeared in and the longer he’s stuck around, the less explicable he’s become.

We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Apart from the freaky way he makes his entrance in this movie, there’s not too much here that hints at Godzilla being more than just a big, angry, celebrity lizard. But this shift I’ve mentioned will happen subtly over the next couple of movies, in little background details, in the way the human characters (and I suppose I really mean the scriptwriters) talk and think about Godzilla. Keep an eye out for that.

This film is well loved by Godzilla fans, and I think that’s largely a matter of familiarity. The shape of the plot is broadly that of King Kong vs Godzilla, with the details of Mothra grafted on top – the exploitative entrepreneur is an element both earlier films had in common, which speaks to the debt Mothra already owed to King Kong (1933). Needless to say, many familiar faces from the Toho repertory company show up here too. Koizumi Hiroshi, who starred as the affable Professor Chūjō in Mothra, here plays Professor Miura, a completely different scientist and not at all to be confused with his earlier role. Takarada Akira, previously the rather wet Prince Wakatarashi in The Three Treasures (1959), is now the heroic journalist Sakai. Tazaki Jun, who played the JSDF General in King Kong vs Godzilla, plays Sakai's editor. Fujiki Yu, one of the two ad men from Pacific Pharma in King Kong vs Godzilla, gives another comic turn here in a secondary role as the egg-obsessed reporter Nakamura. Sahara Kenji, the romantic male lead in Rodan and King Kong vs Godzilla, gives a surprising turn as the villainous financier Torohata. His partner in crime, the unscrupulous businessman Kumayama, is played by Tajima Yoshifumi, most recently seen as the captain of the expeditionary ship in King Kong vs Godzilla and to be found in secondary roles throughout the Shōwa era. Omura Senkichi, the Faro Islander guide Konno in King Kong vs Godzilla, can be briefly seen in a crowd scene of fishermen demanding payment from Kumayama. Hoshi Yuriko, who plays the photographer Nakanishi Junko, is new to the series but will reappear as a completely different journalist in the next Godzilla movie.

In places, it looks like this film isn't just re-running the formula and ending of King Kong vs Godzilla only with two Japanese monsters, but trying to repeat its comedic tone as well. There’s Godzilla’s buffoonery in his first couple of scenes and the way the reporter Nakamura keeps producing and eating boiled eggs while everyone else is talking about Mothra's egg. These attempts at comedy are more laboured than anything in King Kong vs Godzilla. Probably not meant to be funny but also not helping are the kaiju fight scenes. Special effects director Tsuburaya evidently hasn’t yet settled on the idea of overcranking the camera to slow down the action and make the daikaiju look bigger and weightier – here the camera is instead undercranked, which speeds the fight scenes up and makes them look like something in the style of Benny Hill.

The other effects shots are a lot better, particularly the composites involving the kaiju or the Shobijin and human actors. There’s a great miniature storm at the start of the film. The obvious initial painting of Mothra’s egg on the beach (possibly either a matte or a glass shot) gives way to a practical egg in the next shot that matches it perfectly. And the crew certainly know how to work a shot of Godzilla emerging from behind a hill. I get strangely mixed intentions from some shots in which Godzilla appears blurred - to give an impression of distance? - while the models around him appear in crisp focus, but overall, it’s good stuff. What really lets this film down, apart from the farcical fight scenes, is the way plot threads are set up and abandoned or barely developed - the property development story that dominates the opening and the schoolchildren in danger near the end disappear completely from the film's denouement.