Godzilla: The kaiju king makes another comeback

Guillermo del Toro’s kaiju-inspired “Pacific Rim” invaded Chinese has cinemas and raked in record opening ticket sales of $9 million. Meanwhile, news of “Godzilla” redux, set for release next May, is sparking heated chatter online, following an appearance of the film’s director, Gareth Edwards, at Comic-Con in San Diego last month. Speculation over the nature of the two new monsters to surface in the upcoming kaiju flick, among similar concerns, have been egged on by leaked images and trailers, including one of the monster’s behemoth tail released by Warner Brothers.

While Godzilla may be the old-time monster getting the most love these days, a six-metre-tall robotic King Kong puppet can currently be seen and heard bounding about and roaring on stage at Regent Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, in a musical version of the classic 1933 western fantasy tale. It’s worth mentioning that Godzilla and King Kong duke it out in the 1962 Japanese film “King Kong vs. Godzilla.” We won’t give away the victor.

What gives these monsters their staying power? Matthew Alt, a Tokyo-based localiser of Japanese pop culture content and co-founder of AltJapan, as well as author of a book on Japanese monsters titled “Yokai Attack: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide”, is well qualified to answer that question.

“There’s something visceral and shocking about seeing giant monsters wreak havoc on civilisation. We really love giant monsters because they are symbols. They are approachable stand-ins for real terrors our cities face, both natural (such as earthquakes) and manmade (such as nuclear meltdowns or terrorism).”

In addition to fulfilling this psychological function, for Alt, Japanese monster tales pack “a perfect mix of fun, absurdity and cool factor. I still love the designs of those classic films, from Godzilla himself to the spacecraft and weapons humans build to attempt to defeat him”.

For Alt, kaiju had his attention from a young age. “I think every boy goes through a dinosaur phase, and Japan’s monster movies were a straight shot to the brainstem,” he said. “As a kid, hands down, my favourite was Mechagodzilla. The thought of having to build an equally sized robot doppelganger of your enemy obviously deeply influenced the makers of ‘Pacific Rim’ as well.”

As the name suggests, Mechagodzilla was a mechanized version of his flesh-and-blood counterpart. In the 1974 film “Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla”, the colossal automaton is sent to Earth to attack Japan by the Simians – an alien humanoid race of war-mongering, ape-like beings. In place of Godzilla’s scales, Mechagodzilla had metal plates. While Godzilla breathed fire, Mechagodzilla could blast anything in sight with a devastating laser beam.

While the monsters in Japan’s original kaiju movies were played by men in costume laying waste to miniature, painstakingly detailed model cities, the epic action scenes in cutting-edge films like “Pacific Rim” would be impossible to pull off without digital wizardry. While the computer-generated imagery (CGI) seen today is slick and sometimes hard to fathom in its lifelikeness, for Alt something has been lost.

“There’s still something visceral and satisfying and ‘real’ to me about guys in suits smashing models of cities,” he said. “Looking back, it can seem kind of quaint, but a whole lot of time and effort went into making those suits and sets, and I think it really gives the films a humanity that is tough to achieve with CGI.”

Tokusatsu was the art form that gave this human touch to Japan’s original monster flicks. As explored in a recent article by Roland Kelts in The Japan Times, this cinematic technique, which later gave us anime, is dying. As this technique fades into memory, a unique sense of humour goes with it.

In the article, Kelts writes: “Other nations produced sci-fi epics and monster movies, of course, but no one did so with the style, elan and sometimes comic absurdity of Japan.”

Alt echoes this sentiment. “Japanese filmmakers and viewers are willing to suspend disbelief and appreciate monster movies on their own merits,” he said. “It’s about theatricality and pure fun. That’s why those who dismiss monster movies as ‘cheap’ miss the point.”

This isn’t the only point where Japan’s monster pantheon diverges from the West. Acknowledging that Godzilla was inspired in part by monster disaster movies being made in America then, Alt said that Japan “really took the ball and ran with it. The sheer variety of Japanese monsters is amazing … in Japan, nearly anything is fair game to become a giant monster, including plants and bugs and (if you count monsters from kids shows) even inanimate objects from everyday life.”

According to Alt, Japan’s capacity to dream up this vast array of monsters is rooted in the nation’s folklore, populated by creatures called yokai. Just as the yokai mythos is alive in Japan today, Godzilla is ensconced in the West’s own pantheon of monsters.

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. 

“Until he was recently dethroned by Doraemon, Godzilla was the top-grossing movie character of all time in Japan,” Alt said. “Godzilla’s name is known throughout the world. He even added the suffix ‘-zilla’ to the English language. From that standpoint, he’s never truly gone away.”