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.