Godzilla vs Hedorah

Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)
Toho Studios
Director: Banno Yoshimitsu, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Smog Monster (the US title – technically, Hedorah’s more of a sewage monster, but a title like “Godzilla vs the Crap Monster” wouldn’t have done this film any favours).
Also discussed: Space Amoeba (1970).

Toho gave Godzilla a rest in 1970. The new feature headlining the summer Champion Festival that year was Space Amoeba (1970, a.k.a. Yog, Monster from Space), which can probably best be described as a kaiju exploitation flick. In this, an alien microorganism hijacks an unmanned space probe and rides it to a splashdown on Earth, near one of those classic fictional Pacific islands. There, it somehow inflates a cuttlefish (Gezora), a stone crab (Ganimes) and a matamata turtle (Kamoebas) to daikaiju size and pilots them around the island, terrorising the inhabitants and a visiting Japanese research team as a prelude to somehow conquering the world.

Apart from its own flaws, there are two sad things to note about Space Amoeba. Firstly, the special effects titan Tsuburaya Eiji had died of a heart attack at the start of the year, leaving behind him a hugely successful TV production company. He’d continued to offer advisory or supervisory help on Toho’s tokusatsu movies since going his own way and received an honorary credit on several of them; Space Amoeba was the first Toho kaiju eiga to definitely have no input from Tsuburaya. Secondly, it was the last Toho tokusatsu movie to be made by a dedicated special effects department. To economise, Toho underwent a restructure at this time and the special effects team was folded into a larger and more general visual production department. Most of the same people would provide effects for the Godzilla movies that followed.

In 1971, Toho’s management asked Banno Yoshimitsu to breathe fresh life into the Godzilla franchise. Banno was already on their books as an assistant director, but had just done some eye-catching audio-visual work for Expo ’70, the World’s Fair in Ōsaka. Godzilla vs Hedorah, which he co-wrote and directed, would be no less eye-catching.

I joked above about Hedorah being a “crap monster”, but it’s hard not to think toiletary thoughts when you see the opening shot of Hedorah bobbing up to the surface of a scum-coated body of water. The main title sequence is roughly half documentary footage of polluted waters and half James Bond movie intro, with psychedelic visuals and a woman singing about the natural world having vanished and the need to bring it back.

The film cuts to a much more idyllic scene, a village house near Mt Fuji, the home of the Yano family. Little Ken plays in the garden with his plastic kaiju toys. Godzilla’s his favourite – as he tells his uncle Yukio, he thinks Godzilla’s a real “Superman”. A fisherman pays a visit to show Ken’s father a strange fish he found in Suruga Bay – the only thing he’s caught all morning. Completely inert, it looks like a tadpole the size of Dr Yano’s hand. Later, over dinner, the Yano family watch a news report about two oil tankers that were sunk by a large, unidentified creature that Ken believes is of the same type as the giant tadpole.

Dr Yano takes Ken down to Suruga Bay and goes diving to see what’s happened to the once popular fishing spot. The floor of the bay is carpeted with litter and, as Ken discovers while he waits on the shore for his father, the mussels and crabs in the rock pools are nothing but empty shells. Suddenly Ken sees the monstrous version of the strange tadpole swimming towards him, then launching itself at him. He escapes with nothing worse than a burnt hand, but Dr Yano is cornered by the creature underwater. He's interviewed by journalists later on at his home as he lies in bed, weakened and with half his face horribly scarred. Ken has now named the creature Hedorah (literally “sludge-ra”). The TV news reports that more oil tankers have been attacked by Hedorah.

A disjointed sequence of images follows. First, topping off the news report in the previous scene, we get a brief animated vignette about Hedorah, the first of three that will pop up during the course of this film. Next comes a shot of Godzilla posing against a zoomed-in shot of the rising sun. (He honestly looks as if he’s about to sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”.) This cuts abruptly to images of the sea, matted with dead fish and household waste. Finally, behind a similar scene at night, Godzilla rears up out of the water and blasts the rubbish with his breath, setting it on fire. (Well, that’s not going to help.) Over this last section, we hear – and see printed on the screen – the words of a poem little Ken has apparently written in class, about how Godzilla would be angry and do something about pollution if he could. All of this is revealed to be a dream Ken is having. Ken is convinced his dream is a premonition that Godzilla will come and save everyone from Hedorah.

In his home laboratory, Dr Yano finds that the creature the fisherman brought him has dried out completely and readily crumbles into a charcoal-like powder. Each particle of it can be revived in water, forming its own minuscule tadpole, and it thrives in muddy water. What’s more, the particles are drawn to merge with each other, suggesting that Hedorah is some sort of composite creature whose growth has been accelerated by the pollution of Japan’s coastal waters.

That evening, Yukio hangs out at a youth club where his girlfriend Miki is dancing and singing. She sings the film’s title song while a drunken Yukio hallucinates that everyone around him has the head of a fish. (It’s traditional to insert comments about drug culture here.) Meanwhile, Hedorah hauls itself out of the bay, now in a shambling, vaguely quadrupedal form with large, glowing, red eyes. It latches onto a factory chimney and swells as it inhales the smoke. Suddenly Godzilla arrives on the scene and the two kaiju fight. Two noteworthy things happen during this fight. One is that, when Godzilla grabs Hedorah and whirls it around his head, chunks of it fly off into populated areas of the city. Yukio and his friends at the club are briefly menaced by one of these blobs. They seem to have a will of their own and, like the particles in Dr Yano’s home lab, are drawn back to remerge with the larger Hedorah. The second is that Hedorah attacks Godzilla by firing what can only be described as a poop missile at him, badly burning his shoulder. Godzilla seems to gain the upper hand by repeatedly breathing radioactive fire over Hedorah, but the creature escapes back into the water.

The next day, Dr Yano gathers more samples from the site of the battle and, after further tests, concludes that Hedorah is a mineral organism unlike any other life form on Earth. The active compound in its biology appears to be a carbon-based substance that Ken immediately names “hedrium”, which metabolises waste chemicals into sulphur. Hedorah exudes some of this sulphur as a mist of sulphuric acid which, depending on the scene, instantly skeletonises people and corrodes metal or merely produces an unpleasant smog. Yano theorises that Hedorah is an alien organism that came to Earth in a meteorite.

Hedorah soon reappears in broad daylight in a new form, something like a flying flatfish but with the same sludgy texture and baleful red eyes, held aloft by its own gaseous emissions. It devastates the southern part of Fuji City, killing or injuring thousands and even choking Godzilla when he tries to intervene. Yukio and Miki, who’ve been entertaining Ken at an amusement park, barely escape with their lives when Hedorah swallows their car, while Ken has already fled the scene to warn his parents. Later at the youth club, Yukio declares that it’s impossible to beat Hedorah and announces his plan to replace a million-strong youth protest against pollution with a “go-go” party on the slopes of Mt Fuji.

Spurred on by a suggestion from Ken, Dr Yano experiments with passing an electric current through a Hedorah sample and succeeds in reducing it to a dessicated powder. He passes the idea on to the JSDF. Meanwhile, only 100 people have turned up to Yukio’s party, Ken included, but they enthusiastically rock out around a bonfire anyway. Hedorah is drawn to Mt Fuji and flies directly over the Yano house, its sulphuric mist leaving Dr and Mrs Yano unscathed but (in a scene reminiscent of the Oxygen Destroyer test in Godzilla (1954)) reducing Yano’s large tank of tropical fish to skeletons.

Ken watches as Godzilla confronts Hedorah at Mt Fuji. Hedorah is now huge and bipedal, the crown of its head glowing as red as its eyes. It can also now fire some kind of death ray out of its eyes. It blinds Godzilla’s left eye with one of its poop missiles, then menaces the assembled partygoers. Yukio leads some of them in throwing burning torches at it, but to no effect, and Hedorah kills them with toxic sludge. Godilla punches one of Hedorah’s eyes in retaliation, but only succeeds in coating his forearm with acidic slime. Hedorah attempts to drown Godzilla in a pit of filth, but is distracted by oxygen deployed by a JSDF helicopter.

The JSDF have erected a pair of gigantic electrodes further downhill, 40 metres high, and are trying to herd Hedorah between them. Their plan is to channel three million volts through the electrodes and dessicate Hedorah. To ensure their power supply, they’ve diverted all electricity from the Chūbu and Kantō regions (roughly, the middle part of Honshu island). Unfortunately, Godzilla and Hedorah wreck the power lines in their struggle. The JSDF are unable to repair the power supply in time, but Godzilla is able to charge up the electrodes and bake Hedorah by firing his radioactive breath into one of them. He plunges his claws into the corpse and pulls out two large white spheres, which are given their own special blast of electricity.

(Fans have long speculated about just what these two objects are supposed to be. The clean answer is that they're Hedorah's eyeballs, but they’re the wrong colour for that. Perhaps they're meant to be concentrated pockets of "hedrium", vital digestive organs for Hedorah. Then again, family entertainment in Japan can include testicle humour, as Studio Ghibli’s animated film Pom Poko (1994) shows, so who knows?)

But wait, there’s more! A smaller, flying Hedorah bursts out of the larger husk and flees. In hot pursuit, Godzilla reveals an astonishing new ability when he fires his breath at the ground and lifts off, propelling himself backwards through the air. (He will never be seen to do this again in any film.) Much weaker than before, Hedorah is easily subdued and brought back to the electrodes. The JSDF team have now made their repairs, but tragically blow a fuse when they switch on, so Godzilla’s forced to activate the electrodes again. He spends quite a bit of time tearing Hedorah into small pieces and jumping up and down on them before charging up the electrodes one last time. His triumphant exit is undercut by a reprise of the opening image of Hedorah rising from the mud and a caption suggesting it could all happen again.

Following his metafictional appearance in All Monsters Attack (1969), Godzilla walks the borderline between fiction and in-story “reality” in Godzilla vs Hedorah. He’s effectively summoned into the movie by little Ken, who is seen at the start playing with a couple of plastic Godzilla toys that clearly belong more in our own world than in the world of the earlier Shōwa era movies. In response to early news reports about Hedorah, Ken declares his belief that Godzilla will turn up and sort the beast out. When we get our first sight of Godzilla, it’s Ken’s dream image of him, accompanied by the narrated suggestion that Ken thinks pollution would make Godzilla angry. This is the second Toho kaiju movie in a row, and only the second ever, to feature a dream sequence, and in both cases the dreamer is a young boy calling on Godzilla for help. It’s only after this that Godzilla makes his first “real” appearance to confront Hedorah, just like Ken said he would. Ken even mimics Godzilla’s fighting moves the morning after the fight despite not having been there to see it. And what strangely human fighting moves they are, too – at one point in the later confrontation at Mt Fuji, Godzilla even strikes a pose in imitation of Ultraman, presumably another of Ken’s favourites.

Ken also seems to have some limited power over Hedorah – after all, if Godzilla’s around (whenever Ken says he is), it must mean Hedorah’s nearby too. He’s the one who names Hedorah and the alien mineral hedrium, looking for all the world like the know-it-all child hero of a Gamera movie. It’s as if he’s using the science-fictional conventions of his favourite films as a frame to interpret the news reports about oil spills and his father’s lab work. He has an uncanny knack of being where Hedorah’s about to turn up but escaping unharmed, although his uncle Yukio isn’t so lucky. And Yukio’s girlfriend Miki doesn’t seem to be any more upset about that than Ken, which adds to the sense that it isn’t quite real. I imagine Ken at the dinner table, excitedly telling everyone how this was when the monster ate Uncle Yukio’s car and that was when the monster killed Uncle Yukio, and Yukio grinning sheepishly and humouring him.

I could almost theorise that the movie never left Ken’s dream sequence, but I’ll settle for suggesting that what we’re shown isn’t meant literally, but is rather a kaiju eiga gloss Ken has put on his observation of the mundane facts of toxic chemical burns, acid rain and a sewage-filled harbour.

It’s customary to say two very obvious things about Godzilla vs Hedorah: it’s “the weird one” and it’s “the green one”. We’ll come back to the greenness in a minute. I think the weirdness is connected to what I’ve hinted at above, that this film presents a hyperactive child’s point of view rather than some documentary version of reality. In the interest of coherence, I’ve prepared a summary of the plot that doesn’t do justice to the kaleidoscope of visual non sequiturs that commentators tend to describe as “bizarre” and “surreal”. Barring one final hurrah at the end of the film, these oddities stop just ahead of the denouement on Mt Fuji, perhaps suggesting that part of their purpose is to stave off the viewer’s boredom until the big fight. Remember that Godzilla vs Hedorah debuted as part of a Toho Champion Festival to an audience of kids whose entertainment diet had shifted from the cinematic to the visual fast food of television. I don’t think director Banno was aiming for the art house crowd here. More to the point, the intrusions happen with a regularity that suggests the pattern of commercial breaks interrupting a TV show.

Some of these intrusions look like they’re emulating or commenting on other parts of the entertainment landscape that would be familiar to the kids watching. There are three animated PSAs about pollution starring a cartoon version of Hedorah – very on-the-nose for a feature that would share its Festival billing with three animated shorts. When Dr Yano holds forth on his thoughts about Hedorah’s extra-terrestrial origin and metabolism, we’re treated to flurries of illustrative images (slides of nebulas and animations of atomic reactions) as if he were presenting an educational TV programme. The frequently inserted news bulletins could also be counted as part of this narrative channel-hopping. The last major irruption of weirdness before the climactic showdown is a debate about Hedorah between two pundits in a TV studio that descends into a psychedelic collage of vox pops. Apart from the angry members of the public venting their opinions, the talking heads seem to include a baby buried collar-deep in mud, a floating skull, and Godzilla and Hedorah themselves.

Other moments seem to be just plain strange, although they could be explicable. I’m not going to attempt to reason out the third Hedorah PSA, which leads in a very Terry Gilliam-esque fashion from the silhouettes of the faces of two smog casualties to a shaded area of the same shape on a map of Fuji City in the news report about Hedorah’s attack on the amusement park. The youth club scene in which Yukio hallucinates that everyone around him has the head of a fish is something of a signature moment for this film, but I doubt it’s intended as a comment on 1970s drug culture. It happens while Miki sings about all the fish having died out, so the implication seems to be that we’re next. It presages Yukio’s turn towards fatalism after he loses his car to Hedorah. In a very weird moment, the film comments on Yukio’s Mt Fuji “go-go” party by cutting to half a dozen sombre, dead-eyed representatives of an older generation watching from the sidelines; they don’t look much more impressed when Godzilla shows up. And that final hurrah – Godzilla’s triumph, complete with heroic march music, isn’t undermined only by the question mark ending but by the ironic juxtaposition of a bay full of dead fish and Hokusai’s famous “Great Wave” woodblock print.

On to the question of environmentalism. Godzilla vs Hedorah doesn’t really dig into the “green” theme very deeply. It goes to extreme lengths to emphasise that pollution is bad, but beyond the oil tanker crashes and some animated industrial chimney stacks, it doesn’t go into any great detail about the causes of pollution and how they might be mitigated. On the other hand, the subject was in the air (so to speak) and perhaps Japanese schoolchildren were already well versed on the matter. (Perhaps, like little Ken, they were all writing poems about how angry it would make Godzilla.) International awareness of ecological issues had been growing steadily since the 1950s, with Clean Air Acts to combat urban pollution in Britain (1956) and America (1963) through regulation and the publication of Rachel Carson’s highly influential book Silent Spring (1962) on the impact of synthetic pesticides on the biosphere. In April 1970, the first Earth Day had been held on sites across America, with strong youth involvement – there was a definite overlap between its organisers and the participants of earlier college campus protests against the Vietnam War.

We might expect this film to preach to its child audience by showing its younger protagonists finding a solution to their pollution problem. On the contrary, it gives contemporary youth very short shrift – the only response Yukio and his friends, defiant but defeatist, can mount against Hedorah is to organise a massive, impotent love-in that costs several of them their lives. One might imagine Banno had heard about the inaugural Earth Day and been unimpressed. No, this film has quite another saviour in mind.

Remember when Godzilla used to represent atomic power in the form of the bomb? Here, a heroic Godzilla saves the world from ecological collapse by using his radioactive breath to charge up the gigantic electrodes that fry Hedorah. We’re shown more than once that the JSDF can’t defeat Hedorah until Godzilla steps in and gives them the juice they need. He represents atomic power again, but this time as an energy source.

After some initial wariness, Japan’s first commercial nuclear reactor, at the Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture in the Kantō region, had commenced operations in July 1966. Two more reactors, at the Tsuruga and Mihama Nuclear Power Plants, had opened for business in 1970, the year before this film’s release – both were located in Fukui Prefecture in the Chūbu region. Chūbu and Kantō are the two regions specifically namechecked by the JSDF officer who explains the giant electrode plan to Dr Yano. These had all been built using the expertise and methods of the British nuclear power industry. In March 1971, just four months before the festival debut of Godzilla vs Hedorah, the first reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant began commercial operations. This was the first major collaboration between the Japanese and American nuclear energy industries, so if we wanted to re-establish Godzilla’s links specifically to American atomic power, we might look to Fukushima Daiichi, although it’s in the Tōhoku region to the north-east of the area specified in the film. Construction began on more nuclear plants in 1970 and 1971, in the Chūbu and Kantō regions and further afield, and more reactors would be added to the existing plants in subsequent years.

At its peak, around the turn of the millennium, nuclear power met as much as 40% of Japan’s total energy needs and was hugely popular with the public. It was widely seen as a cleaner alternative to burning fossil fuels and is still touted as such, although nowadays we can cite plenty of examples of how badly it can go wrong. (The disruption of Fukushima Daiichi by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the resulting environmental contamination, for example, which would abruptly turn public opinion in Japan against nuclear power. Godzilla would end up commenting on that, too.) I’m sure there must have been some fanfare around the 1970 launch of the two power plants in the Chūbu region and the 1971 launch of the Fukushima plant. Whether any of these directly influenced Banno’s script is moot, but I think the overall theme is clearly there.

Godzilla vs Hedorah wasn’t well received by the press, and producer Tanaka Tomoyuki wasn’t best pleased with it either, particularly the scene of Godzilla “flying”. Banno wasn’t allowed near Toho’s Godzilla movies again, but on the bright side, he did end up as an executive producer on Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014).