The Return of Godzilla

The Return of Godzilla (1984)
Toho Studios
Director: Hashimoto Kōji, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Just plain Godzilla in Japan; Godzilla 1985 (the US re-edit with added Raymond Burr).


Guess who’s back, back again. After nine years in hibernation, and in defiance of the decline in Japanese cinema attendance, Godzilla was relaunched with great fanfare and with a 1980s makeover. This wasn’t billed as the first new Godzilla film in nine years, but as marking the 30th anniversary of the 1954 original, with the filmmakers wanting to move away from the levity of the more recent movies and back to the darker tone of Godzilla’s first appearance.

In that spirit, The Return of Godzilla breaks entirely with the many threads of the Shōwa era series – the team player and cosmic voyager of Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), the dreamland children’s hero of All Monsters Attack (1969), the tag-team wrestler of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) – and begins its own, new continuity that proceeds directly (with a 30 year hiatus) from Godzilla (1954)...

This is a solid attempt to update the atomic metaphor of Godzilla for the late Cold War era. (The music is certainly very 80s.) It falls victim to an issue that has plagued Godzilla movies since King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), that of American bit part actors giving wooden performances in minor roles. Because this film requires Russian characters but perhaps understandably couldn’t cast real Russians, it presents the double horror of Americans acting badly and delivering lines in excruciatingly poor Russian. The helmsman on the Russian submarine is surprisingly good, while the first officer is stand-out bad – couldn't the director have swapped the actors?

The Return of Godzilla takes care not to favour the American or Russian characters – for the economically strong but militarily exposed Japan of the 1980s, both of them could be a threat. (Notwithstanding that, then and still now, the US armed forces maintain a large post-occupation presence in Japan.) In the script, the diplomatic representatives of both nations are far too quick to advocate using nuclear weapons on Japanese soil against Godzilla, which the Japanese Prime Minister firmly rejects. This might call to mind the middle section of Mothra (1961), in which a fictional Cold War superpower offers to take care of Japan’s kaiju problem by, in effect, using Japan as a testing ground for experimental atomic weaponry. By contrast, in the American version – Godzilla 1985 (1985) – the scene of a damaged computer accidentally triggering a nuclear missile launch is re-edited and re-dubbed so that those diabolical Russians are shown deliberately launching the missile. The American edit’s producer has claimed this was a joke on his part and in no way a reflection of politically reactionary tendencies among senior executives in the US film industry, although I think we might fairly roll our eyes at that.

The fact that the rogue missile and the counter-missile that destroys it are both launched from orbital weapons platforms looks like a reference to contemporary world news, although it’s an extrapolation or two beyond that. US President Ronald Reagan had publicly announced his proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983 – critics and the press soon took to calling it the “Star Wars” programme. The SDI was intended to end the deadlock of the nuclear arms race between the Western and Eastern Cold War blocs with a combination of lasers and kinetic projectiles, deployed in orbit as well as on the ground, that would shoot down missiles launched from the Soviet Union before they could reach their targets. Nothing much came of the project and it was abandoned in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It’s been suggested in the decades since that Russia had similar plans in the 1970s and 80s that failed either because of their cost or because the Soviet space programme simply wasn’t able to follow through on them. Neither superpower placed actual nuclear missiles in space (that we know of, anyway...), in accordance with the United Nations General Assembly’s unanimous 1963 prohibition on the orbital deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and the Outer Space Treaty that formalised that prohibition in 1967.

As far as the cast goes, The Return of Godzilla makes a fairly clean break from the past. Among the lead players, we might recognise Natsuki Yōsuke – who played Detective Shindo, the policeman assigned to guard Princess Salno, in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) – although it’s been 20 years. Here he takes on the role of Professor Hayashida. Rumour has it this was the part Hirata Akihiko would have played, if he’d only been well enough to accept and lived long enough to do it. A couple of stalwart Shōwa-era actors make cameo appearances in the political negotiation and briefing scenes. Koizumi Hiroshi is instantly recognisable as the scientist who explains the blow-up-the-volcano plan to Parliament. (He was Dr Chūjō in Mothra and Professor Miura in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964).) Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of familiar faces to distract us. And this is fitting, because our attention should instead be focused on one of the movie's new faces.

Sawaguchi Yasuko has a somewhat thankless task playing Naoko, the only speaking female role in the movie. She serves a pivotal plot function as the link from Maki to Okumura to Hayashida's lab, and beyond that she's relegated to being Maki's love interest. But this was Sawaguchi's big break as an actor. 1984 was the first year Toho Studios ran the "Toho Cinderella Audition" talent contest to find and sign up a new star actress, and Sawaguchi was the first winner.

The Return of Godzilla was Sawaguchi's second film - her actual debut was in Keiji Monogatari 3 (1984), which Google Translate tells me means “Detective Story 3” but which IMDb tells me is known in Anglo markets as "Karate Cop III: Song of the Sea". I think I can safely say The Return of Godzilla was the bigger deal of the two. I hesitate to describe it as a “prestige production”, but I think the fact that Toho used this film as a vehicle for their new star suggests they thought it might benefit her career, or she might benefit it, or maybe a bit of both. Sawaguchi went on to take leading roles in Princess from the Moon (1987) and Yamato Takeru (1994), both summer blockbusters from Toho based on popular folk tales. If IMDb is any reliable indicator, she's enjoyed the greatest acting success of any of the "Toho Cinderella Audition" winners, with a lengthy filmography that includes the star role in a current TV series that's been running for more than 20 years.

This isn’t the last time the "Toho Cinderella Audition" will play a part in the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise, by the way. But more on that in the next post.

I haven’t said much about the production values of the last few films, beyond the occasional bit of sniping and mention of the increasing reuse of old effects shots. Perhaps there wasn’t that much more to be said. But The Return of Godzilla marks a sea change in the nature – and by extension, the quality – of the “kaiju vs miniature” effects. The reason is straightforward: Japan’s urban skylines had changed quite a bit since 1954 (or even since 1975), with some skyscrapers that would dwarf the 1954 Godzilla were he to show his face in mid-80s Tokyo. In order for him to appear as physically imposing as he did to cinemagoers in the 50s, Toho decided that their returning Godzilla should be scaled up accordingly. But in reality, the Godzilla costume still had to be roughly as tall as the actor inside it, so the model buildings had to be made on a proportionally smaller scale. The miniature cityscape we see here looks good, but it can’t match the level of detail we got in the 60s films, particularly when we’re looking for debris in the scenes of destruction. Probably the clearest example is the moment when Godzilla collapses against a skyscraper, which just doesn’t break apart in the way a building of that size and heft should. These slab-like edifices that are meant to be larger feel a lot lighter than they used to.

Although The Return of Godzilla comes after what’s popularly known as the Shōwa Godzilla series and is generally considered the opening instalment of the Heisei series, it isn’t actually a film of the Heisei era. Hirohito, the Emperor Shōwa, died in January 1989 – four years after its release, a little more than a year after he was first diagnosed with duodenal cancer and eleven months before the release of this movie’s long deferred sequel.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Terror of Mechagodzilla

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also discussed: King Kong (1976), Gamera Super Monster (1980), Star Fleet (1982-83).


The last new Godzilla movie to be released for a decade to come, Terror of Mechagodzilla looks like a late (and, alas, unsuccessful) attempt to recapture some of the series’ early vigour with several of the franchise’s key figures returning behind and in front of the camera. It also proves to be the swansong for a couple of them.

Honda Ishirō, the OG (Original Godzilla) director, has been persuaded back after five years of working in television, as has Ifukube Akira, the OG composer. Honda, whose direction defines this first era of Godzilla, would never work on another film – he lived until 1993, but emerged from a prolonged retirement only to work as an assistant on Kurosawa’s later films. Ifukube’s music was played from stock in Godzilla vs Gigan but he last actually worked on a Toho tokusatsu movie in 1970. He adds what sounds like some interesting bass electronics to his usual orchestral composition here, although strangely it’s in scenes featuring Titanosaurus rather than Mechagodzilla. The bombastic Godzilla fanfare and march he composed for the 1954 movie remain indelibly associated with Godzilla and routinely turn up in even the most recent films in the franchise. Ifukube would return to provide the music for some of the 1990s Godzilla films and died at a ripe age in 2006.

The actor playing Dr Mafune is hardly recognisable for most of the movie, with his "old man" hair and bushy moustache, but the stills montage that plays over the description of his early career and a flashback mid-film reveal the familiar face of Hirata Akihiko. He was, of course, the tragic Dr Serizawa in the 1954 film and many other characters since; it’s sad to see him reduced to the most cliché of mad scientists here. (Not to mention that wig and moustache – anyone who’s seen Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror film The Gorgon (1964) will have some idea of what’s been inflicted on Hirata.) He continued to act but was too unwell to appear in Godzilla’s 1984 comeback and sadly died that year. Representing the new generation of Toho kaiju eiga actors are Sasaki Katsuhiko as the hero Ichinose, who was previously the inventor Gorō in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), and Mutsumi Gorō playing an entirely different alien leader to the one he played in the previous movie. Sahara Kenji appears as a high-ranking JSDF officer in a briefing scene, but blink and you really will miss him.

It's the end of an era, and what a weak note to go out on. Toho’s Champion Festival, already reduced from three events a year to one, would limp on until 1978; absent a new tokusatsu movie, the 1976 festival would consist entirely of animated works and be dominated by Disney imports. There’s not much more to say about Terror of Mechagodzilla, a lazy and underwhelming rehash of the previous year’s offering. (It’s the first movie in the franchise to pit Godzilla solo against multiple antagonists – is that really the most interesting thing about it?) So instead, let’s take a whistle-stop tour of the giant monster milestones of the next decade.


In 1976, Paramount Pictures distributed a remake of King Kong (1933). The American “creature feature” craze had peaked and subsided some 15 years earlier, so it’s not clear why those involved should have thought the time was right for a Kong remake when they mooted the idea in late 1974 and bought the rights from RKO General in early 1975. But it was a prescient choice: the runaway success of Jaws (1975) would prove that an action film with a giant animal antagonist could be a hit. There’s some debate over whether producer Dino De Laurentiis was asked by Paramount to handle this film in particular or whether he’d already had the idea and suggested it to them when they asked him to produce a film for them. If the latter, there must have been something in the air because the other person who’s said to have originated the idea, TV executive Michael Eisner, had mentioned it to Universal Pictures as well as Paramount before Paramount decided to proceed with De Laurentiis as the producer. There was a brief but abortive flurry of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits because Universal had separately approached RKO General for the rights to Kong and, not knowing that Paramount had acquired the rights, essentially assumed that they would get them.

The tone of King Kong (1976) was intentionally different from the original film. De Laurentiis wanted something with a lighter feel, a knowing, winking, humorous edge and more focus on the romantic aspects of the story (specifically between Kong and the female lead) than on the fantastic wildlife of Kong’s island. (Incidentally, the island isn’t named at all in this movie, although “the beach of the skull” is named as a landmark.) The director that De Laurentiis engaged, John Guillermin, had just made the multi-award-winning The Towering Inferno (1974) and brought some of that disaster movie atmosphere to scenes in King Kong that played more as horror in the original. To realise Kong, the plan was to use animatronics including a hyper-ambitious 12-metre-tall full-size mannequin. In other words, the spectacle of the film would come not from stop-motion or composite action sequences but from the sheer material fact of Kong’s presence on screen next to the actors, with an emphasis on wonder rather than uncanny horror. In the event, the giant mannequin didn’t work and Guillermin was obliged to shoot a human scale Kong for later compositing, with special effects make-up artist Rick Baker wearing a Kong costume in a rare instance of an American monster movie using the effects techniques more commonly found in Japanese kaiju eiga. The animatronics were used in a minority of scenes, mainly of Kong emoting or manhandling the female lead, for which only a disembodied head or hand was required.

Of the three lead actors, the biggest name was Jeff Bridges, playing the romantic male lead Jack Prescott. Jack was reimagined from the first mate of a chartered ship (named Jack Driscoll in the 1933 film) to a paleontologist who specialises in primates and has somehow heard about this mysterious, uncharted island with a giant ape living on it. Bridges’ film career had only started in 1970 and he’d already had a couple of starring roles and a couple of Oscar-nominated supporting roles, so his was clearly a name to watch. Charles Grodin was cast in the Carl Denham role, reimagined as Fred Wilson, roving executive of the Petrox Oil Company, who has acquired satellite images of the uncharted island which he plans to prospect and decides instead to exploit Kong as a marketing gimmick when the island turns out not to be sitting on large oil reserves. Grodin was known largely for supporting roles, mostly comedic, although he’d recently been acclaimed in the lead role of The Heartbreak Kid (1972). Debuting as Dwan, the Ann Darrow role of the aspiring young actress, was Jessica Lange, who has since enjoyed a lengthy and successful career.

Changing the unscrupulous entrepreneur character from a filmmaker and impresario to an oil company executive was a good move thematically, updating the film’s concerns from the sharp business practices of the 1930s American film industry to the destructive activities and moral shortcomings of multinational fossil fuel companies. It’s no accident that the makers of this film made this choice in the middle of a decade-long energy crisis and in the wake of the Middle East oil export crisis of 1973-74. Unfortunately, the change means the film has to jump through some plot hoops to get Jack and Dwan on board the Petrox expedition’s ship (he’s stowed away, she’s been shipwrecked by total coincidence in the ship’s path). Relocating Kong’s final showdown from the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, which had only recently opened in 1973, adds the potential for further commentary as the plaza of this monument to capitalism is stained with Kong’s blood, while a terrified Dwan is cornered and ruthlessly objectified by the assembled press. (I imagine, though, that the final reel resonates in a different way with viewers coming to the movie after the 2001 terrorist attack on the famous Twin Towers.)

Sadly, the execution doesn’t do justice to the ideas. I think the leads just about rescue the script, but it’s a near-run thing and they deserve full credit for their efforts. The movie often comes across as cheesy, but hey, that’s a deliberate tonal choice made by the producer before anyone else even started working on it. The massive overreach of a life-size animatronic Kong that had to be covered for by a man in an ape suit tips the whole thing over the edge from ironic indulgence into full-blown camp. Nonetheless, King Kong did fairly well at the box office and some film critics had nice things to say about it. It made enough of a splash to inspire knock-offs like the mid-budgeted Hong Kong imitator The Mighty Peking Man (1977) and the nano-budgeted American-Korean collaboration A*P*E (1976). It even got a very belated sequel, King Kong Lives (1986), once more produced by De Laurentiis and directed by Guillermin, which resurrects Kong alongside a Lady Kong and, eventually, a Baby Kong. The critics weren’t nearly so kind about that one.


The following year, Star Wars (1977, latterly Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) changed the face of cinematic science fiction and raised everyone’s expectations with regard to special effects. One of George Lucas’ admitted inspirations for Star Wars was Kurosawa’s jidaigeki films, and particularly The Hidden Fortress (1958), so it’s only fair that Japanese cinema should have taken something back from it. There were two prompt attempts to cash in on the craze around the American film: Toho’s The War in Space (1977) and Toei’s Message from Space (1978). Apart from the title and the heroes’ orange flight suits, The War in Space doesn’t show much influence from Star Wars – it’s more of a rewrite of Atragon (1963) but set on Venus and with spaceships. Message from Space, on the other hand, looks exactly as if someone who’d seen Star Wars had outlined it to someone else and that person had written up what they imagined it must have been like, then handed the script to a third person to visually design the thing from scratch. Neither of these movies has any daikaiju content, although we will touch on one of them again in a minute.

Star Wars did influence one daikaiju movie, and that was Gamera Super Monster (1980). Daiei Film (the production company set up by Tokuma Shoten, who’d bought the bankrupt Daiei Motion Picture Company’s assets) had decided it was time to exploit that Gamera property that had been gathering dust for most of a decade. Their new movie was a compilation of effects scenes from the seven old movies, reframed by the story of a young boy and his adult friends shot inexpensively in contemporary suburbia.

Little Keiichi is astonished to discover that Kilara, the woman who runs the pet shop round the corner from his home, and her two friends are Superwomen from outer space. They operate out of a campervan on the roof of an apartment block and their Superwoman costumes consist of silver body stockings with red boots, gloves and capes. They work secretly to defend the world from the predations of the spaceship Zanon, whose spy on Earth is a Superwoman defector called Giruge. (You can tell she’s a baddie because her body stocking is black.) The plan of whoever’s in charge of the Zanon (we hear a voice over a radio but never see inside the ship) is to beat humanity into submission with kaiju attacks, all of which are repeated from earlier movies, and they bring Gamera under their control at one point so that footage from the original film can be redeployed. Gamera fights the other kaiju (including Guiron, on his own planet, for reasons) while the Superwomen work behind the scenes to foil the aliens’ schemes, and the day is saved when Gamera flies into orbit and rams the Zanon.

The influence of Star Wars is limited to, but extremely obvious in, the design of the Zanon which is a straightforward knock-off of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The movie also shows the influence of the Christopher Reeve vehicle Superman (1978), not just in the title and the costume of the Superwomen, but in the closing title sequence in which Kilara takes Keiichi “flying” over Tokyo at night. Also present are visual references to the recent anime series Space Battleship Yamato (1974-75), which was enjoying a resurgence in popularity thanks to a spate of TV movie sequels, and the then current Galaxy Express 999 (1978-81): in a mid-film scene of Gamera flying through space, the kaiju costume is gratuitously superimposed on images from the animated series. These weren’t Daiei properties, so presumably Daiei went out of their way to get permission to use the clips, but there’s no coherence, visually or narratively, to these shots. The reason for them is probably the same as for the Hollywood film references – simply to tie Gamera into the pop culture experience of the contemporary viewers, to try to make Gamera look cool by association.

The Superwomen can’t be added into the stock footage, so their involvement in the proceedings is pretty much limited to a showdown with Giruge and a couple of other low-octane plot-related scenes, plus several scenes in which they “monitor” the kaiju fights on a big TV in Kilara’s flat while Keiichi cheers Gamera on. Because its premise is essentially “boy learns life lessons from watching old kaiju eiga”, Gamera Super Monster invites comparisons with All Monsters Attack (1969). But it far outdoes All Monsters Attack in its proportional reuse of footage and its paucity of new special effects material. It boasts a grand total of about two minutes of new monster effects, consisting of shots of Gamera flying through space and one scene of his legs trampling a billboard advertising a kaiju movie called “Dodzilla”, which is a moment of gloating the Gamera franchise really hasn’t earned yet. Gamera Super Monster can’t even claim to offer the kind of social commentary that justified All Monsters Attack. It’s just sort of there.

It’s probably for the best that Gamera sank back into dormancy for another decade and a half.


Finally, an extended sidenote. While Daiei was perpetrating Gamera Super Monster, Fuji Television was producing X-Bomber (1980-81), a science fiction serial that used puppetry instead of live action or animation. It owed much to the works of Gerry Anderson, the British creator of Thunderbirds (1965-66), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) and many, many others. Unlike Anderson’s series, in X-Bomber the puppets were operated with rods from below rather than with strings from above. According to the extras on the English version’s DVD release (but we’ll come to that in a minute), Anderson was persuaded by this series to try rod puppetry on his next serial, Terrahawks (1983-86). Although there was no obvious overlap of personnel, X-Bomber also seems to have been influenced by Toei’s Message from Space, in the distinctive costume of its main villain and in the inclusion of a spaceship that looks like an antique galleon.

X-Bomber is kaiju-adjacent, because alongside its puppetry it employs the familiar tokusatsu technique of stunt actors in costumes playing the outsized characters. The three lead heroes pilot spacecraft that can combine to form a gigantic mecha, Big Dai X, which is portrayed across the series by an actor smashing up miniature landscapes and vehicles, while the Imperial Master who supervises the villains and makes a full appearance in the final episode is also a stuntman in costume being attacked by a puppet.

X-Bomber was exported to the UK, dubbed and broadcast as Star Fleet (1982-83). It was shown in a prime 10am slot on Saturdays between imported episodes of Sesame Street (1969-present) and homegrown children’s magazine programme The Saturday Show (1982-85). Its impact can be judged by the fact that Brian May and Eddie Van Halen released a (commercially unsuccessful) hard rock cover of the theme tune composed by Paul Bliss, largely for the amusement of May’s four-year-old son who was a fan of the show. At a time and in a country short of exposure to kaiju eiga, Star Fleet introduced the British children of the 1980s to the larger-than-life side of Japanese visual fantasy. And friends, I know: I was one of those children.

at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster (the title of the US dub – it was going to be “Godzilla vs the Bionic Monster”, but Universal Pictures thought that sounded too much like their TV series The Bionic Woman (1976-78) and threatened legal action, so the title was changed).


Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla marked 20 years since the release of the original Godzilla (1954), and was even marketed as Godzilla’s 20th anniversary film!

The idea of villains discrediting heroes with robot duplicates dates back nearly as far as the idea of the robot itself. The Maschinenmensch, used by the mad scientist Rotwang to undermine the workers’ hero Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), might be the earliest example. The modern use of the word “robot” to mean an artificial servant dates back to Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R. (1920), although the robots in that play aren’t mechanical, but are more like a genetically engineered underclass. The concept of malevolent robot doubles might also have been familiar to contemporary viewers from the Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1966), which features the plot device used in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla of a double being exposed when metal is revealed beneath its artificial skin. Toho had previously borrowed the character of Mechani-Kong from the animated King Kong Show (1966-67), in which Mechani-Kong is used to discredit the real Kong, for their movie King Kong Escapes (1967), in which it’s just a vaguely Kong-shaped robot. It’s perhaps surprising that it took them this long to come up with Mechagodzilla.

But Mechagodzilla is just a fun gimmick. The real point of interest in this film is its setting: Okinawa. Okinawa is the largest of the Ryūkyū Islands, a chain of small islands stretching between Taiwan and the main body of Japan. This location made the Ryūkyū Islands an ideal trading post for international mariners and consequently a target for invasion. The Ryūkyū Kingdom, unified and centralised on Okinawa in the 15th century and already a Chinese tributary, was made a tributary of Japan as well at the start of the 17th century. In 1879, Japan formally annexed the Ryūkyū Islands and Shō Tai, the last monarch of the Ryūkyūan Shō dynasty, was forced to abdicate and retire to Tokyo while the bulk of his territory was redesignated Okinawa Prefecture under the Meiji Emperor. (The northernmost islands in the chain, grouped as the Ōsumi, Tokara and Amami Islands, were folded into Kagoshima Prefecture instead.) China was made to renounce its interest in the islands in 1895 after the First Sino-Japanese War.

The people of the Ryūkyū Islands had their own culture, their own ethnic identity and their own entire family of languages, related to but distinct from Japanese. All of this was suppressed following annexation because it didn’t fit with Imperial Japan’s narrative about itself, that it had been one nation united by one identity and one language since the dawn of the Yamato dynasty more than a thousand years earlier. In common with many minority languages in colonial and colonised countries in the 19th and 20th centuries (and elsewhere in Japan – the Ainu in the north suffered similar treatment), the Ryūkyūan languages were ruthlessly stamped out in schools to facilitate a standardised education in the language of, and to the obvious benefit of, the governing authorities. When Nami’s grandfather talks about avenging the injustices done to his people, he isn’t talking about ancient history – he’s of an age to have experienced this cultural imperialism directly himself.

After the Second World War, America assumed exclusive authority over many of Japan’s smaller territories, including the Ryūkyū Islands. The US military used Okinawa as a base of operations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and built up a significant presence on the island. The people of Okinawa had several reasons to resent this second occupation of their land, including the predictable behaviour of American GIs stationed overseas, the fear that Maoist China might attack Okinawa in an escalation of the Vietnam War, and related rumours (later proven true) that America was secretly deploying nuclear weapons on the island with the Japanese government’s consent. America held onto the islands of Okinawa Prefecture until 1972, when it formally handed control of them back to Japan. As with its handover of other Japanese territories, this was conditional on America continuing to maintain a military presence; Okinawa still hosts the overwhelming majority of US troops in Japan. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was conceived at least partly as a way of celebrating the 1972 handover of Okinawa.

And so, in addition to the novelty of Mechagodzilla, we get a new kaiju personally tailored for Okinawa. The Okinawan shisa is a guardian statue equivalent to the Chinese shishi or the komainu of mainland Japan, a sort of lion-dog hybrid. They’re usually found in pairs – one male and one female, one with its mouth open and the other closed. One of them’s meant to welcome good luck into a house or keep it in, the other to forbid entry to evil spirits or to chase them away, and opinions differ as to which roles the open-mouthed and closed-mouthed shisas play. But there’s general agreement that the female one is the welcoming one and the male one is the one fighting off evil. This, and the use of the title “King” (see also King Kong and King Ghidorah), indicates that King Caesar falls into line with the majority of cinematic kaiju as being presumptively male. “King Shisa” is his actual name, but because the Japanese language habitually softens the “si” sound to “shi” (...yes, everyone in Godzilla vs Megalon was pronouncing Seatopia as “Shi-topia”...), it’s ended up being perversely rendered in English as “King Caesar”. Toho liked the name and have adopted it as the kaiju’s official Anglo name.

King Caesar is one of the most culturally appropriative things ever to appear in a Godzilla movie. It’s a bit like... Well, imagine if a more powerful nation had taken Northern Ireland from the British after World War Two, then handed it back in 1972, and the British film industry marked the occasion by releasing a James Bond movie in which Bond is sent on a mission to Northern Ireland and teams up with a seductive leprechaun secret agent called Blarney Galore. It’s a little bit like that.

And yet it’s clearly well intended. The world is saved by the revival of something at least vaguely resembling traditional Okinawan culture (in a team-up with Godzilla) and, as silly as he might look to Western eyes, King Caesar isn’t played for laughs. And Nami’s grandfather’s outburst when he wishes Godzilla would give Japan a pasting is a frank admission of how a lot of people in Okinawa felt – and still feel – about the people who spent the first half of the 20th century trying to erase their identity. That’s a bold move for a kids’ film.

(Incidentally, what does Godzilla represent in this movie? Does he still stand in for some aspect of America? Or does Mechagodzilla represent America, being the product of alien invaders with superior technology, and has Godzilla become a fully Japanese hero now? And would the people of Okinawa be any happier to see their kaiju champion playing second fiddle to a symbol of Japan than to the embodiment of American militarism?)

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla doesn’t get everything right – as noted above, the name of the royal family of the Ryūkyū Islands was Shō, not Azumi. Azumi is, however, the name of a completely different ethnic community that lived further north, on the other side of Kyūshū. They’re believed to have had common ancestry with the diverse peoples of the Pacific Islands, dating back to a diaspora from Taiwan some 5000 years ago according to one current theory. Although their culture revolved around the sea and they also traded with China, there’s nothing to suggest that they ever occupied or became monarchs of the Ryūkyū Islands.

Gyokusendō cave, which figures so prominently in this movie, is a real place. It was discovered in 1967 and part of it was opened to the public in 1972, so it was quite a new tourist attraction when Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was released. Its inclusion looks like the sort of thing Daiei used to do to economise on the Gamera movies – I wonder if there was any sponsorship or cross-promotion. Obviously the real cave doesn’t include a section of rock wall that slides away to reveal a secret alien base, although I shudder to think of the movie’s child viewers pestering their parents into taking them on holiday to Okinawa so that they could run around the cave tugging on the stalactites in the hope of finding a hidden door control. It’s now part of Okinawa World, a theme park which was opened in 1996. A commercialised representation of traditional Okinawan culture is at least better than the total denial of it, and if Okinawa World does its part to preserve at least some of one of the old cultures of the Ryūkyū Islands, I guess some good will have come of it.

Speaking of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla not always getting it right... The English language subtitles for this film credit the actress playing Princess Nami as Barbara Lynn. She’s not the American blues singer! She's actually a South Korean actress listed on IMDb as Bellbella Lin. The rest of the cast includes some familiar faces, in what looks like a call back to the “good old days” after the more adventurous casting of the last few movies. Koizumi Hiroshi appears in his last '70s Godzilla film as the sympathetic Professor Wakura – hardly more than a guest appearance, but don’t worry, he’ll be back. Playing the other sympathetic scientist character and the much beefier role, Professor Miyajima, is Akihiko "Dr Serizawa" Hirata. He will be back in the next Godzilla film, and so will Sahara Kenji, who can be briefly seen here as the captain of the Queen Coral handing the shisa statuette in its box back to Keisuke. Mutsumi Gorō is new to the Godzilla franchise, but he’ll be back next week too. Although his character, the alien leader, dies here, Mutsumi will be back in the next film playing a practically identical character.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Godzilla vs Megalon

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)


This film opens with a throwaway reference to a second underground nuclear weapons test in the Aleutian Islands in the early 1970s. There’d already been three such tests by this time, two of them in the 60s, so possibly the intended meaning is a fictional test that would be the second in the 70s but the fourth in total. America had carried out the tests on the volcanic island of Amchitka, notwithstanding the presence of Aleut populations on other islands in the archipelago and the fact that it was a designated wildlife reserve. The site was chosen partly because it was nice and far away from most of mainland America and partly because it was within dick-swinging distance of mainland Russia. Testing in this geologically unstable area also gave the US Atomic Energy Commission some hints on how they might detect other nations’ underground nuclear tests using seismological equipment. The US, the USSR and the UK had signed a treaty banning atmospheric, underwater and orbital nuclear tests in 1963, so underground tests were of great interest to the signatories.

The “Cannikin” test, conducted in November 1971, was America’s largest ever underground nuclear test, forcing the ground up by six metres and registering 7.0 on the Richter scale. Public concern and protests over the test, in the wake of the previous detonation in 1969, had led to the formation of the activist organisation that would eventually become Greenpeace. There was a lot of concern, particularly in Canada, that detonating nuclear weapons under Amchitka might cause further earthquakes and tsunamis across the Pacific. Although these effects were not observed, this is presumably the basis for the seismic devastation of Monster Island at the start of Godzilla vs Megalon.

Not that the movie is particularly interested in this. The nuclear test is merely a contrivance to get Seatopia into the story, and Seatopia only exists as the launchpad for Megalon. Monster Island, which seems to be on the brink of crumbling into the sea in the pre-title scene, appears unscathed later in the movie and no mention is ever made of its partial destruction. The Seatopians have a genuine grievance against the world above them, since underground nuclear tests have reportedly ruined a third of their kingdom (which we don’t see), but they’re immediately presented as antagonists without a shred of nuance. In their few scenes, the Seatopian agents above ground commit some thuggish acts of violence and participate in a couple of car chases, while King Antonio stands around in an underfurnished temple set or an incongruous, computerised control room and barks orders to his underlings. The rest of Seatopian society and culture is represented by that shoehorned-in mo’ai statue, a temple dance that looks like one of those “exotic” Pacific Island scenes of old but performed by women in bikinis and raincoats, and an establishing shot of the kingdom that looks like a piece of first draft concept art. The entire point of the movie is the big monster fight, as evidenced by how drawn out it is and how abruptly the story wraps up once the director judges enough time has elapsed.

In short, this is a bad film. The story sits alongside those of Latitude Zero (1969) and Space Amoeba (1970) as one of Toho’s laziest, nothing but a peg on which to hang an extremely gratuitous kaiju bust-up. It’s a cynical exercise in nothing more than keeping a Champion Festival audience of kids diverted for an hour and a quarter.

The reuse of old footage is becoming more obvious, too. It’s easier to spot when you watch these films in rapid succession, no doubt, but just the change in lighting should clue viewers in to the old shots of JSDF vehicles mustering that have been dropped in here. The scene of seismic activity on Monster Island at the start is illustrated with shots of yellowish gas breaking out across the island, as seen in Destroy All Monsters (1968). There are no prizes for spotting the reused shots of Gigan manifesting in space and clashing with Godzilla in the big fight, particularly when he crashes into a building and a bridge that weren’t there in the wide shots with Megalon. Most outrageously – and I could almost praise the filmmakers for their brazenness here – it’s clear that the heat ray from Megalon’s horn has been made to look like yellow lightning only so that, in the scene of him attacking Tokyo, they can repurpose some old effects shots of buildings being destroyed by King Ghidorah’s death ray.

Let’s cut back to Seatopia’s mo’ai and Gorō and Hiroshi’s conversations about Easter Island. The real mo’ai were carved out of volcanic rock by the people of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) between 500 and 800 years ago (and certainly not the three million years ago that Hiroshi claims). They’re believed to represent the ancestors of Rapa Nui watching over their descendants, and although exactly how they were transported from their quarry and erected on the other side of the island remains unknown, there are some plausible hypotheses about how it could have been done. There’s also a much less plausible hypothesis that it was the work of aliens, popularised by the Swiss author Erich von Däniken. Von Däniken’s oeuvre consists of a combination of alien-inflected reinterpretations of religious and folkloric artefacts and speculations that ancient feats of engineering must have required alien intervention, or at least the use of alien technology and scientific knowhow. Both these elements rest on questionable ethnocentric assumptions: the first, that figurative images of the human form that don’t fit European artistic expectations must represent something else beyond the artist’s comprehension, and the second, that pre-industrial non-European peoples couldn’t have been smart enough to develop their own scientific or mathematic skills. The mo’ai fall into both categories in von Däniken’s musings and were discussed in his 1968 debut, translated into English as Chariots of the Gods?

Von Däniken wasn’t the first pseud to speculate along these lines, but he may have been the most successful. Chariots of the Gods? was a runaway bestseller and, despite contemporary rebuttals and accusations of both plagiarism and fraud, it’s remained in circulation. We know that the paranormal and the pseudoscientific were already popular in Japan from plot elements in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), and I’m sure von Däniken’s ideas, whether translated directly or relayed through local media, would have found an audience there. This could explain the mentions in Godzilla vs Megalon not only of the mo’ai, but of the myths of Lemuria and Mu as well, and consequently for the depiction of the quasi-Atlantean realm of Seatopia and the large (but curiously metallic) mo’ai standing in its main temple. Von Däniken’s juxtaposition of the ancient and the alien might even account for the extraordinary fact that Seatopia has a hotline to the nebula next door and can call in the extraterrestrial kaiju Gigan when it suits them.

More recently, there’s been a craze for imitative “moyai” pumice statues in Japan, but that didn’t start until the end of the 1970s, somewhat too late to be relevant to this film.

Jet Jaguar has an interesting history. It looks like another attempt to win over the kids by imitating Ultraman (original series 1966-67) – as if the kitchen sink cyborg designs of Gigan and now Megalon weren’t tribute enough – and it surely is that, but it started out as a child’s winning entry in a competition. Toho and Tsuburaya Productions had co-sponsored the contest, to design a kaiju to appear in the next Godzilla movie, and the winning creation was “Red Arōn”. This creature had claws, bat-like wings, an inhuman face and a kind of jumpsuit. A prototype was created to be shown off on TV in front of its child designer, and it’s at this point that someone decided to colour in parts of the jumpsuit in an assortment of red, yellow and blue. This recoloured torso is pretty much the only part of that prototype that was retained in the final design of what became Jet Jaguar, now recast as a heroic ally for Godzilla.

In terms of what it does on screen – striking poses during fights, stiffly and artificially “flying”, altering its size in order to fight the kaiju on equal terms – Jet Jaguar unmistakeably mimics Ultraman, but the late switch from kaiju to robot suggests another influence: Mazinger Z. This hugely popular manga series redefined the mecha story genre with a gigantic super robot, still piloted by a human but with a visible personality of its own. Mazinger Z first appeared in print in October 1972, with an animated TV tie-in debuting in December 1972. The timeframe is tight, with Godzilla vs Megalon premiering in March 1973, but I think that’s enough time for the filmmakers to have latched onto the idea that super robots were suddenly popular and for the designers to have incorporated at least one superficial point of similarity into Jet Jaguar’s costume: like Jet Jaguar, the robot Mazinger Z has a grille on its face that looks like a ridiculously cheesy grin. And, since they celebrated manga in the previous year’s Godzilla movie, we might fairly suppose either writer Sekizawa or director Fukuda, or both, had their finger on the pulse of current developments in manga.

Is Godzilla vs Megalon another metafictional Godzilla movie? Everything about Jet Jaguar seems to have been engineered to appeal to contemporary child viewers, but does it hint at a child’s narrative point of view? (Can I somehow argue that this film, too, is a literalisation of a daydream of one of the characters?) This would give us an excuse for the ad hoc nature of much of the plot, most notably the way the initial threat of the nuclear test in the Aleutians is quickly forgotten, the way the Seatopians are just as quickly forgotten later on, Jet Jaguar’s miraculous transformation into a giant superhero and the logic-defying inclusion of Gigan. Let’s not forget, too, that the presence of Monster Island necessarily raises questions about the story’s internal fictionality. Godzilla himself behaves even less like a destructive force of nature and more like the costumed wrestling characters on TV than before. And the dramatic car chases – especially the one featuring an entirely gratuitous motorbike – look like they’ve been imposed on the narrative by someone with a mania for Toei’s tokusatsu series Kamen Rider (original series 1971-73).

The only plausible culprit among the characters is Gorō’s schoolboy brother Roku. (In this scenario, I’d suggest he hero-worships his brother’s friend Hiroshi, given it’s Hiroshi who gets into all the showy chases with his flashy car.) He certainly is quick to recognise Gigan, as unlikely as it is that he should – unless of course he's a Godzilla movie fan dictating the narrative. Roku is played by Kawase Hiroyuki, who previously played little Ken in Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) – what more evidence do you need?

Kawase is almost but not quite the only familiar face in this movie. Playing King Antonio of Seatopia, the disco dictator, is Robert Dunham. This is Dunham’s first appearance in a Godzilla movie, but he can be seen at the church towards the end of Mothra (1961) and he took a starring role in the kaiju comedy heist movie Dogora (1964) as an international insurance agent. Unlike other American actors employed by Toho, such as Nick Adams (Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)) or Russ Tamblyn (The War of the Gargantuas (1966)), Dunham could speak fluent Japanese – he can be heard doing so throughout Dogora. It’s baffling, then, that he should have been filmed here delivering his lines in English, only to be dubbed over by another actor in Japanese and then redubbed by someone else again for the movie’s US release. Not much more baffling than anything else about Godzilla vs Megalon, though.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Godzilla vs Gigan

Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla on Monster Island (the title of the first American release).


Godzilla vs Gigan looks like a return to straightforward slambang monster action after the metafictional antics of the previous two Godzilla movies. There’s no child protagonist, no dream sequences, no peculiar video effects intruding where we wouldn’t expect them to intrude. And yet it prominently features Monster Island, which was introduced by name just two films ago in All Monsters Attack as an explicitly fictional place. (Not to be confused with “Kaiju Land”, as seen in Destroy All Monsters – we’re decades too early for that, according to the timeline laid out in that movie. The montage of kaiju at home on the island that we’re shown the first time Monster Island is mentioned dates back to Destroy All Monsters, but was also used in All Monsters Attack where it became part of the remembered/dreamed fabric of Monster Island.) Even if we have reverted to telling stories within Godzilla’s own world, it looks like it might be the version of Godzilla’s world imagined by Ichirō rather than the pseudo-real world seen in earlier movies.

I say there’s no child protagonist, but there is another possible narrator if we want to look for one: Gengo. He thinks of his girlfriend Tomoko as a nagging mother because of the way she continually encourages him to find work, even using her as the basis for his own imagined kaiju “Mamagon”, which hints at a childlike point of view. Supporting the idea of Gengo as the author within the film, and the only real departure from conventional storytelling, are the two scenes in which Godzilla and Anguirus “talk” to each other. That their dialogue appears in speech balloons strongly suggests that Gengo, a manga artist, is literally putting words into their mouths. Perhaps the movie is his fanciful retelling of an experience with an exploitative employer?

It's interesting that manga should drive the plot of a Godzilla movie – with Gengo using his artistic skills to defeat the alien villains employing him – at a time when the movies were debuting alongside animated works in Toho’s imitation of Toei’s Manga Festival. Manga (literally “whimsical pictures”) has a centuries-long history but went through something of a boom in the 1950s and 60s. The release of Godzilla vs Gigan coincided with a period of revolution in the field of shōjo manga, aimed at younger female readers, with female creators finally taking the lead over male creators. Gengo’s stories, with their focus on kaiju action, would be more likely to fall into the category of shōnen manga, with a primarily young male audience.

I don’t think there’s a lot more to say about this movie, thematically. The topic of industrial pollution is briefly touched on. It’s suggested that the aliens are over-reliant on technology, although without much justification – what we see suggests that their fatal flaw is really a lack of imagination. Some dialogue is shoehorned into the final scene to present these ideas again in the form of simple messages for the audience.

In production terms, it’s a mixed bag. The “anything goes” look of Gigan suggests the designers were trying hard to capture the feel of an Ultraman monster. It’s striking, though. In its first appearance, in the scenes of Gigan and King Ghidorah flying through space and arriving on Earth, it’s painfully obvious that the two kaiju are rigid miniatures. (I would have said toys, but Toho’s visual effects technicians wouldn’t have had access to a Gigan toy before the movie had even been made... would they?) Once we switch to stunt actors in costumes, the level of quality starts to pick up. It also helps that the filmmakers have pulled the old Ifukube incidental music cues out of stock to beef up the action scenes. With a crazy-looking kaiju like Gigan, the peculiar, jazzy music used on Godzilla vs Hedorah would only have made the whole thing feel comedic.

There’s a story that Gigan’s name was a combination of the nickname of a popular singer-actor (Ishihara Yūjirō, who never recorded a film for Toho, was more associated with Nikkatsu and was supposedly known as “Nice Guy”) and “gan”, the Japanese word for “goose”. This sounds very similar to the old tale about Godzilla’s name (“Gojira”, a portmanteau of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”) having been the nickname of a physically large Toho employee, and if anything it sounds less plausible. The “Gojira” yarn was debunked in the 90s by Honda Ishirō’s widow, and I’m calling shenanigans on the “Guy-gan” story. I think it’s more likely to have simply been derived from the English word “gigantic”, but with the initial “G” hardened.

Finally, this is the second movie in a row in which, notably, the main cast have all been new to the Godzilla franchise, and hardly any of them will work on another Godzilla movie. This gives Godzilla vs Gigan a certain freshness, as it did for Godzilla vs Hedorah. Of Gigan’s leads, only Murai Kunio, playing Machiko’s kidnapped brother, will go on to appear in films of interest to this blog, playing authority figures in small roles in the 1980s and 2000s. Hedorah’s exception to the rule was Kawase Hiroyuki, the child actor playing little Ken – we’ll be seeing him again very soon...

at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)