Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964): Physicality and the Kaiju Genre
By Kadet Alaks
Mothra will probably not be able to return here again, but Mothra lives forever. New life will be born from the egg.
— The Shobijin from Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) [Classic Media subtitle translation, 2006]
The first Godzilla movie I ever watch, in the summer of 2006, is Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964). The watching in itself is initially unremarkable; my family plopped down in front of a DVD Mom found at Costco. My Dad, my brother Galen and I have had brief experience with kaiju –
Japanese giant monsters – through a Godzilla game on my uncle’s Xbox, and we’re excited to see some familiar creatures in action.
The July heat presses heavily.
I have no idea that 14 years later, kaiju films will be a constant in my life. I have no idea that I will be a regular attendant at G-Fest, the world’s largest Godzilla-themed convention, held in Rosemont, Illinois. I am 10; I am not thinking about themes, I don’t have the context (yet) to unpack what resonates with me about these films, and I can’t imagine how they will impact my experience with the world and my future writing.
I am, however, having a lot of fun.
Mothra vs. Godzilla begins with scenes of a storm. Amid the dramatic notes of an Akira Ifukube
soundtrack, rain pelts down, waves smash against boats and buildings and infrastructure. A cliff face is washed away, revealing a huge, mysterious, many-colored egg. All the destruction happens in miniature — real water against tiny constructed buildings. This is, I will soon realize, a staple of the genre, and a form of special effects that adds physical weight to the scenes of destruction.
Sometimes the effects look cool. Sometimes they also look obviously fake, but it doesn’t matter. The joy I find in these movies does not come from their realism – that ends as soon as you start contemplating how a monster 50 meters high could survive, or what’s with the giant moth. The joy comes from the layers of understanding of how the miniatures were built, and how they were destroyed. Of learning the behind-the-scenes details, and recognizing stock footage from previous movies. Of watching carefully constructed buildings go up in fire, just because it looks dramatic.
At G-Fest, surrounded by fans in brightly colored kaiju t-shirts, skin bristling from too-high air conditioning, I learn a lot of these details. How, in Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla’s wobbly jowls was an accident; they had come loose during filming and Tsuburaya, the special effects director, liked the effect and kept it in. Those jowls add a unique sense of movement to this Godzilla’s face, and are the reason this is one of my favorite Godzilla designs. And G-Fest gave me the opportunity to meet Haruo Nakajima, the man who originally wore the Godzilla suit, and continued to wear it for another eleven films (in addition to other monster suits in unconnected movies). He gives several talks in the hotel conference rooms, which are packed. Every chair is full, as is the floor around the edges of the room, which is where I’m crouched, the rug pressing patterns into my legs. He shares stories of being hired and working on set, including the dangers of doing scenes in a 200+ pound rubber suit. Especially when these scenes involve being chest deep in a pool of water, or being in close proximity to small explosions.
It brings a new perspective to even the most low-budget of the films. The risk and immense amounts of skill involved. The larger story.
Most of the time, I watch kaiju movies with my family, folded onto my couch. When just one guest is added, it becomes a puzzle of fitting people together to make sure everyone has a seat and a view. My house is small and crowded – a “starter house” that became a home. It’s easy to knock into things, it’s hard to find a moment’s privacy.
Each year, G-Fest offers another option. The festival has an arrangement with a local theater and three nights a year are dedicated to screening classic movies. This is an old theater, the type that takes up a whole building instead of being segmented into smaller screens. When I lean back in the plush seats, there is a vast garden-themed mural on the ceiling, full of vines and birds and naked people. The space is huge, often full. Seeing the movies on the Big Screen, with people cheering at their favorite moments, is a rush. It’s an experience outside of time. Driving home in the dark, thinking about monsters and listening to July fireworks, is a feeling impossible to replicate elsewhere.
The difference between locations is somewhat extreme.
Kaiju movies are distinctive for their sense of scale. In Mothra vs. Godzilla, the action shifts from the actions of human characters – reporters and scientists and businessmen – to the actions of institutions such as the military, and of course to the giant monsters which tower over most buildings. In this case, the scale is stretched to the absolute limit as Mothra can be communicated with via her priestesses: twin women who stand about half a foot high. (No, that’s never explained.)
At every level, there are points for empathy and points for fear. Kaiju movies are about human smallness and fragility, about the threat of an enemy so large it is like a natural disaster with intention. At the same time, they’re about humanity’s propensity for great harm, be that via weapons and bombs or environmental destruction.
Of course, I don’t only empathize with the humans. I empathize with the monsters. I mean, they look really cool. They can fly and breathe fire, they have long tails and sharp teeth. They’re strong and powerful and not particularly gendered. My favorite monster, Angirus, has a hard spiked carapace that looks like wish fulfillment. Mothra can fly. And monsters destroy, in ways that are both terrifying and cathartic. As someone who exists in the world, I have been slowly coming to the realization that I will destroy things, and I will cause harm. I will be too big and clumsy for my surroundings, I will get into fights, I will be pushed into confrontation by the state of the world. This isn’t a realization that came from kaiju movies, specifically, but these films did provide a lens for me to look through while trying to understand my own life.
If kaiju movies are about human smallness and capacity for harm, then they are also about monster hugeness, and capacity for success. Success may mean saving or destroying the world, winning a territory brawl, or drawing attention to a global issue such as militarization or pollution, but it is always possible and sometimes inevitable.
Mothra, in the 1964 film, wants to rescue her egg from the capitalists attempting to use it to promote a theme park (with no fear that a giant egg might... hatch). Human greed, as well as the fact that Mothra’s island and its people have been suffering the fallout of nuclear tests, makes her unwilling to help the fight against Godzilla. And you can’t blame her! Eventually, she does join the fight, but not before making her point.
Early in my fan experience, I learned that the kaiju genre began with the 1954 film Gojira. This movie, significantly darker than many kaiju films, originated as a way to talk about the horrors of WWII, especially the cruelty of America bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s important to recognize this, even while having fun with the ridiculous psychedelic monster clashes of the 60s, which is where I spend most of my time. While almost all kaiju films are informed by this context, each takes a different tone, makes a different point. Some discuss environmentalism or capitalist exploitation, some have themes of colonialism and militarism, some seem to have simply tacked a moral on at the end of the important part of the battles.
What the monsters mean in any given context varies from movie to movie, and it’s possible and encouraged to interact with each film on its own terms. Watching Gojira is a very different experience from watching Mothra vs. Godzilla. And it’s not incorrect to enjoy the monsters – rankable, collectable, the focus of books and games and toys and suitmaking – while at the same time recognizing the grim sources from which the genre began.
In films so focused on combat, of course there will be violence. Mothra vs. Godzilla features an abruptly vicious confrontation between two of the main human villains. Someone’s face gets beaten in, gushing scarlet blood. Then he gets crushed by his own hubris and also Godzilla. At 10 years old the scene hits me in the chest, makes me clench my eyes shut and look away, appalled. Another movie makes me cry because the monster fight is particularly cruel. For a while, my dad “screens” movies before Galen or I watch them, to tell us when to look away.
And still I keep coming back for more.
I play the video games, and revel in my ability to deal crushing blows. Galen and I play Godzilla outside, running and shrieking and flying and sweating, modeling our combat after the video game and keeping track of who we’ve unlocked. We don’t play as often as Galen would like; I’m tired, sometimes, or I’m not interested, or I don’t know what to do with my body. Galen has months of notes that “we didn’t play Godzilla today” to prove it.
It’s nothing new to say that horror is a genre about the body. Much of the peril, gore, and suspense in horror films is designed to bring attention to the ways in which we are made of meat and bone and blood, our weaknesses, and our potential for harm. Kaiju films are not quite horror, but they, too, ask us to consider our bodies. Our own fragility, and our resilience.
I’m 10 and I go to G-Fest with my family. I am a child and everything is new.
I’m 12 and I go to G-Fest and I put on a costume and act out a battle with a stranger.
I’m 16 and I go to G-Fest and I’m terrified of the fact that I as a person take up space, and I shrink myself down, and I envy the monsters for being bold in ways I am not.
I am 18 and I am trying to be a tough, independent adult. I don’t know what I’m doing.
I am 22 and I have learned to set boundaries, and I go to G-Fest and I am loudly determined to take up space, to make the decisions I want (though I am also afraid).
I am 23 and I am all of the above. I go to G-Fest and there are parts of me tucked in the corners of the dealer room and the courtyard where we eat lunch outside, the panel rooms and the artist’s alley.
During the course of Mothra vs. Godzilla, Mothra lives through almost every point of her life cycle. The pattern is simple. There is an egg, from which larvae hatch. The larvae are capable of combat, but at some point will find an appropriately aesthetic spot to build a cocoon. From this will emerge an adult Mothra, brightly colored and prepared to defend her people and her planet. Presumably she will lay an egg (this is, for some reason, never shown on screen). At some point, she will die, and the cycle will begin again.
Even beyond Mothra, kaiju movies themselves tend to be predictable in rhythm. Not quite in a cookie-cutter way that leaves you bored, but in a comforting way that makes things feel like they are unfolding as they should.
I write fiction. Sometimes about kaiju. Each kaiju story I’ve written has dealt with genre-based predictability, whether that is by weaponizing the tropes and rules of the genre, or the sense of betrayal that comes from life not following a plot-like path.
To watch a kaiju film is to opt-in to a world with certain narrative truths: the monster can’t be defeated by ordinary (military) means; the monster always has a weakness; little kids come up with the best monster names; whatever leaps of logic the scientists come to, they will probably be right. Some of us will survive the disaster this time, but we need to do better because the next time we might not.
Every year I have survived every disaster thrown at me; every year I aim to do better.
It is the summer of 2020, I am 24 and have been a Godzilla fan for 14 years. G-Fest is cancelled due to Covid-19. The world is unpredictable, or perhaps, too predictable and unpreventable. I live in a body. I have the potential for harm. I try to do good.
This year, I fold up in the same living room I always have, though with different furniture and a new TV, and re-watch some classics with my family, which now includes my partner, Felix. I sat him down in front of Mothra vs. Godzilla a few years ago and he’s been enjoying the genre ever since. As we play some of the classics from the 60s and 70s, I grin as he yells at the screen, baffled by the wild conclusions, horrified and delighted at certain costume choices.
As the music plays, we offer up details over the subtitles. “Look for the stock footage from another movie.” “I recognize that guy from Ultraman!” “Do you know the impact the Tokyo Olympics had on this film? Let me share what I know.”
On-screen, two Mothra larvae spit silk at Godzilla, forcing him into the ocean, settling the score and saving the day. On-screen, everything fits into place as it should.
Offscreen, I, too, fit into place.
And I am having a lot of fun.
Kadet Alaks is currently looking for monstrous augmentations such as horns, spikes, wings, tails, branches, or just a vague aura of menace. They have a BA in Creative Writing, and are halfway through a Master’s degree in Library Science. Kadet enjoys writing short stories that have no plot, walking in the woods, listening to fiction podcasts, losing to their brother at video games, and playing ttrpgs with friends online. Their bedroom is guarded by four glow-in-the-dark kaiju toys, because that’s just awesome.