Kaiju Films

Toho Studios created the first Godzilla film in Japan in 1954, the film was Japan's first international movie success story, and the franchise went on to inspire multiple sequels and dozens of other radioactive Daikaiju films. The Godzilla creature was particularly successful and garnered a huge following around the world. This paper examines the history of this iconic monster and attempts to understand some of the reasons for Godzilla's global popularity. This paper attempts to analyse and explain the multiple ways in which the audience has empathised with each of the different incarnations of Godzilla throughout the franchise's history. This is undertaken with particular reference to the oft-seen parenting roles performed by Godzilla in many of the major franchise films.

Quello di Godzilla è un fenomeno culturale alquanto vasto, che al momento di scrivere conta un totale di ventotto film e varie incarnazioni di diversi media, tra i quali televisione, fumetto e videogioco. Esso è stato, ad oggi, studiato in una pluralità di differenti maniere.

A studi di carattere enciclopedico, che da una parte analizzano le componenti artistiche fondanti dell’oggetto in questione e dall’altra si concentrano sulla raccolta di utili dati statistici su di esso, si affiancano analisi fenomenologico-culturali, che approcciano Godzilla dal punto di vista del suo impatto sulla società.

Tali lavori hanno messo in evidenza le molte sfaccettature di questo enorme oggetto d’analisi, mostrando come per approcciarvisi criticamente sia necessario prima di tutto scegliere un punto di osservazione particolare, a partire dal quale avvicinarsi progressivamente a Godzilla. Al termine di un percorso di analisi di questo tipo potranno essere infine tratte delle considerazioni generali sul fenomeno.

Volendo seguire un sentiero inesplorato, ho perciò scelto di costruire uno studio culturale di Godzilla a partire da un’analisi dei meccanismi seriali della sua saga. Come si vedrà, infatti, di film in film, di decennio in decennio, la produzione di Godzilla ha saputo individuare un linguaggio seriale personale, degno di essere osservato con attenzione e che, come vedremo, mi permetterà di avanzare ipotesi e considerazioni sulla natura culturale del mostro in questione.

Gojira (1954) is a Japanese film with two intertwined plots: 1) a monster plot about a prehistoric beast angered by atomic testing, and 2) a love plot structured around a conflict between traditional arranged marriage and modern marriage by couple’s choice. The film exhibits ring-composition (A B C D C’ D’ A’) as a device linking the two apparently independent plots together. Nationalist sentiment plays an important role in that linkage. the paper ends with a 6-page table detailing the actions in the film from beginning to end.

This paper observes that recent Kaiju cinema produced in Hollywood, including Godzilla (2014), and Godzilla II: King of the Monsters (2019), depict the rise of gigantic monsters as a response to the climate crisis. The violence that these monster perform can thus be read as an accelerated and global form of what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence”, in these films seen as affecting all geographies and social strata. At the same time, these films cast the US military as a final line of defense against this violence, so that the industrialized, nuclear and militarized modernity that has been instrumental in the production of the climate emergency is here perceived as its last best hope. In the case of Godzilla, this is not surprising as this movie was partially funded by the US Department of Defense. With this in mind, this paper notes that the troubling alliance between the US DoD, the Hollywood entertainment and military industrial complex may energize rather than decelerate the climate emergency.

Giant monster movies, far from representing  mere escapist fantasy, constitute a major mode of modern mythology. Born with the development of colonialism, capitalist industry, and cinema, the mythology of giant monsters provides a lens through which to understand the modern world.

The Kaiju (strange monster) film genre has a number of themes that go well beyond the "big monsters stomping on cities" motif. Since the seminal King Kong (1933) and the archetypal Godzilla (1954), kaiju has mined the subject matter of science run amok, militarism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism and pollution. This critical examination of kaiju considers the entirety of the genre--the major franchises, along with less well known films like Kronos (1957), Monsters (2010) and Pacific Rim (2013). The author examines how kaiju has crossed cultures from its original folkloric inspirations in both the U.S. and Japan and how the genre continues to reflect national values to audiences.