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.