Gamera the Brave

Gamera the Brave (2006)
Kadokawa Herald Pictures, Inc.
Director: Tasaki Ryuta, Kaneko Isao (special effects)
Also known as: The Japanese title seems to suggest “the brave” doesn’t refer to Gamera at all, but rather the child characters. Perhaps a colon in the Anglo title would have helped. Still, Gamera the Brave is what we’ve got.

In 2002, Tokuma Shoten sold their interest in Daiei Film to a rival publishing company, Kadokawa Shoten. Kadokawa’s new film-making subsidiary went through a few mergers and name changes over the years – during the year in which this film was released, it was called Kadokawa Herald Pictures following the parent company’s acquisition of Nippon Herald Films. With kaiju anniversary celebrations in the air, Kadokawa decided to mark Gamera’s 40th birthday (in 2005) with a new film, although the release ended up being delayed until the following year. They dusted off their Daiei assets, found an unused draft storyline for what had become Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and handed it to scriptwriter Tatsui Yukari and director Tasaki Ryuta, who used it as the basis for a child-friendly story more in keeping with the Gamera movies of old.

In 1973, the coastal city of Shima in Mie Prefecture is the site of a nocturnal battle between Gamera and a swarm of Gyaos. (Fans will recognise the giant turtle and the wedge-headed pterosaur-like creatures immediately; everyone else will have to wait 15 minutes for one of the characters to fill in the backstory.) Outnumbered and on the defensive, Gamera blows himself up, destroying the Gyaos at the cost of his own life. The people of Shima rejoice, except for solemn little Aizawa Kosuke.

In 2006, Kosuke is the chef and manager of a diner, with a son of his own, Toru. It’s the first summer since his wife died in a car accident. As they visit the Aizawa family shrine, Kosuke tells Toru his mother is watching over him, but the practically minded Toru believes his mother is simply dead. Walking back to town, Toru sees a flash of red light coming from the nearby island where Gamera died 33 years earlier.

A news report announces that, after years of funding cuts, the government has finally disbanded the special council that was formed to respond to giant monster attacks after the 1973 incident. The JSDF will be authorised to handle such matters, should any arise. The news also reports the unexplained disappearance of a small ship, the latest in a series.

Toru’s neighbour, an older girl called Mai, is a good friend to him. Her father owns a pearl shop which has done great business since local divers discovered a trove of bright red pearls in the water around the island after Gamera’s demise in 1973. The pearls are considered lucky; Mai’s due to have heart surgery the next week, and he plans to give her the last one for good luck.

When he sees the red light again and swims out to the island, Toru finds an egg resting on a glowing red stone the size of his hand. A turtle hatches out of the egg. Toru takes the turtle and the stone home with him. He decides to name the turtle Toto, which is what his mother used to call him. Knowing his father has banned pets from the diner for hygiene reasons, Toru tries to keep Toto a secret, but ends up letting Mai and his friends Ishimaru and Katsuya in on it. Toto grows quickly and soon develops the abilities to fly and to belch fire. Mai tells Toru what she knows about Gamera and suggests Toto might be related to him. Unable to keep Toto hidden when he’s more than a metre across, Toru enlists his friends’ help to relocate Toto to an old fisherman’s hut one night. Despite the evidence, he’s still unwilling to accept that Toto might be a new Gamera. After all, Gamera was a kaiju, and kaiju fight and die, and Toru doesn’t want his friend Toto to die.

The next day, Toru overhears a conversation between Mai and her parents and learns that she’s going to be hospitalised the next day for a potentially life-threatening operation. He gives her Toto’s red stone for good luck. Later that day, he goes to the hut but finds that Toto isn’t there any more.

Shima is suddenly attacked by an enormous, spiny, reptilian creature nearly 100 metres long. It demolishes the local lighthouse and starts hunting and eating the citizens. Toru and his friends are saved in the nick of time by the appearance of a turtle the size of a truck, now walking upright and with small tusks, that barges the creature aside. Kosuke recognises the giant turtle as Gamera, but Toru recognises it as Toto. Toto and the creature fight their way onto the Shima Pearl Bridge (a.k.a. Shima Ohashi, a then-new road bridge and tourist attraction). The creature is unable to reach Toto through the cage of the bridge, but stabs at him with a long, purple, sharply pointed tongue. Toto breathes fire into the creature’s mouth and it falls into the river. Before Toru can intervene, a military detachment arrives on the bridge and takes Toto away on a flatbed truck – alerted by reports of the attack on Shima, the government has desperately turned to their former kaiju experts to find a solution.

Professor Amayima, at the Nagoya University of Science, has spent years working with the disbanded kaiju response council. He’s bought up the red pearls that were found in Shima and extracted from them an energy source that’s vital to Gamera, and has synthesised a liquid form of it in large quantities. The government hopes to force Toto’s growth by injecting him with the liquid energy, so that he can continue to fight the carnivorous monster which they’ve dubbed Zedus.

At an evacuee centre, Kosuke gets a phone call from the hospital in Nagoya and passes it to Toru. Mai’s surgery has been successful and she’s semi-conscious, but she’s clutching the red stone and keeps muttering about Toto. Toru rounds up his two other friends and they head into Nagoya. Zedus also appears in Nagoya, demolishing the university facility in which Toto is being held and smashing a path towards the city centre. Toto erupts from the wreckage and engages Zedus in battle.

Toru, Ishimaru and Katsuya look for Mai at the hospital but find it deserted; in fact, everyone’s been evacuated from the hospital to a shopping mall further away from the kaiju fight. Kosuke catches up with Toru at the hospital and is angry at him for putting himself in danger, but Toru insists that he must help Toto. Restrained by concerned nurses, Mai is prevented from getting up to take the red stone to Toto, but another child agrees to take it from her. Through the streets of Nagoya, as people stampede away from the destruction, a series of children relays the stone in the opposite direction, working together with some kind of unspoken but shared understanding. The stone finds its way into Toru’s hands and Kosuke helps him to get it to Toto, who’s been thrown into an office block by Zedus. As Zedus attacks Toto from outside the building, Toru explains that he’s doing this so that Toto will live, not self-destruct like the previous Gamera, and throws the stone into Toto’s mouth. Restored to the peak of his power, rockets and all, Toto knocks Zedus off the building and destroys him with a huge fireball.

The government wants to recapture the exhausted Toto, but this time they’re prevented from sending soldiers in to collect him by dozens of children who form a wall in front of him. Accepting at last that his friend Toto is Gamera, Toru urges him to escape and waves him off.

You can just about see the common ancestry between Gamera the Brave and Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe. A young protagonist has a special connection to Gamera through a mysterious, glowing stone; as Gamera confronts his kaiju opponent in a climactic fight, the protagonist insists on rushing into the battleground with the stone to offer moral and supernatural support. This is, however, a very different but equally well executed development of that basic premise. One major difference is that here, the Japanese authorities don’t treat Gamera as a threat but are already aware of him from past encounters and want to exploit him in the present crisis. We only see that part of the story glancingly, when it intrudes on Toru’s world. The government official chasing Gamera is depicted as self-important, over-demanding and short-sighted in his decision-making – he’s not meant to be our hero. He’s oblivious to the relationship between Gamera and Toru, but that’s the real story as far as this film is concerned.

Although Gamera the Brave thankfully refrains from assaulting us with the “Gamera March”, it is very much a return to the Shōwa era idea of Gamera as a friend to children. The relay race of children in Nagoya getting the stone to Toru is an uplifting scene, although no explanation is offered. I think the implication is that they all instinctively want to help Gamera and somehow know where to go and what to do to achieve that, but that would be a bit weak and schmaltzy. The alternative, I suppose, is that Gamera’s telepathically directing them somehow, which seems a bit too sinister for this film.

It feels like quite a sharp turn after an hour and a quarter with very little schmaltz in it. The film deals honestly with Toru’s bereavement, as he initially refuses to engage with it then displaces his feelings onto Gamera/Toto as a support animal while his father, whose own emotional struggle is both obvious and largely hidden from us, tries to keep an eye on his son and put on a brave face for his customers. None of this ever comes across as maudlin or melodramatic. Gamera the Brave is a surprisingly effective – and affecting – tale of a child coming to terms with mortality, loss and grief. Gamera/Toto, as the emblem of hope and new life that Toru nurtures, and Zedus, a never-explained source of sudden and arbitrary death, are simple but potent symbols of the forces at work in Toru’s psyche as he grapples with his mother’s passing and the possibility that his friend Mai might die in hospital. The principal actors Tomioka Ryō (Toru), Tsuda Kanji (Kosuke) and Kaho (Mai) all do a tremendous job in bringing this story to life.

Supporting this are some fine special effects, with an accomplished blend of costumes, digital compositing, mattes and miniatures. There are some novelties in the monster fight scenes – the Shima Pearl Bridge is used well in the first confrontation between Gamera and Zedus, while the final showdown includes an athletic Zedus somersaulting off one building to catapult Gamera, who’s been clinging to his tail, into another building. The cinematography’s lovely too – the transition from 1973 to 2006 as Kosuke stares out across the bay is a standout moment.

This is a little gem of a kaiju movie that I think is too easily overshadowed by Kaneko’s 1990s Gamera trilogy, which tends to get all the attention from kaiju fans who prefer their movies to be brash, edgy or both. It meets the brief of simultaneously taking Gamera back to basics and bringing him into the 21st century. It’s a shame this is (at time of writing) the last full-length Gamera film, but it’s a high note to go out on.