When I was a kid, Ted Turner’s Superstation WTBS ran this thing practically every week. It became as comforting as an old blanket, as familiar as my own skin.
Eventually, as an adult, I revisited the world of Japanese giant monster movies. I wrote a couple of books, gave some lectures, recorded some audio commentaries, blah blah blah. And along the way I came to recognize this film about a doomed dinosaur is basically a doomed dinosaur itself.
In so many ways it prefigured the future: Rodan boldly leaps into full color, introduces one of Toho Studio’s most enduringly popular monsters and introduces one of the studio’s most enduringly prolific movie stars (Kenji Sahara). But for all it innovates, it’s the last gasp of what was then a dying way of making giant monster flicks. This approach to storytelling was almost instantly rendered obsolete.
To a child, the appeal of Rodan is self-evident and simple: a pair of crimson-colored pteranodons (brother and sister perhaps, maybe lovers) are born out of time into the modern world. They trample a city to smithereens and then die tragically in a volcanic eruption. I dare you to name something better calculated to hold a 7-year-old’s interest.
But this reductionist summary hides the movie’s clever structure. It introduces a wholly different movie, then gradually shifts focus, several times, as it evolves into a giant monster movie. My summary really only describes the final act.
Where it begins is a murder mystery in a mining town. The filmmakers (including writer Takeshi Kimura and director Ishiro Honda) carefully sketch out the contours of this community, struggling with the inherent risks of crawling into underground tunnels to dig out lumps of coal, and the newfangled threats to their existence from modern developments. It’s a tight-knit subculture—until what appears to be a jealousy killing rends that cohesion apart.
It’s then that Kimura and Honda effect the first of their bait-and-switch moves. The investigation into the “murder” uncovers underground caverns full of prehistoric monster insects, evidently released by the mine’s expansion. In an instant, the film pivots from a melodrama about miners to being a SF thriller about giant bugs.
The central gimmick of Rodan however is that each of these mini-movies only lasts a couple of reels before being replaced by the next evolutionary cycle. Just as the characters and the audience are getting used to the giant bugs, the film introduces an even more spectacular menace that literally eats them for breakfast.
The final, and most masterful, pivot occurs after the two Rodans have wreaked havoc across Japan, and the film’s POV shifts subtly to recast them not as antagonists to be feared but as sympathetic figures to be pitied. The finale wrings genuine pathos out of the sight of these two dinosaurs dying in agony, burned alive.
A precedent had been set: perhaps the audience was coming to root for the monsters.
On the heels of Rodan, another screenwriter came along who monetized that discovery and completely changed the direction of Japanese giant monster flicks. His name was Shinichi Sekizawa. I’ve written about him here before, because he’s awesome.
To grasp the significance of Sekizawa’s accomplishment, let’s look closer at Takeshi Kimura’s Rodan. This is just about as good as Kimura would ever get on a giant monster film—he was better suited to more human-sized projects, like Matango – Attack of the Mushroom People or The Human Vapor. (below is a picture of Kimura)
The start of Rodan is busy with the intimate concerns of realistically-drawn people in a realistically-drawn environment. Once the monsters show up, these people have a new set of problems to victimize them. But when the time comes to resolve the monster threat, these characters—previously the focus of the story—inevitably become superfluous.
This was the problem of the old paradigm. By definition, giant monsters exist on a literally epic scale. Any human being capable of interacting meaningfully with the monsters leaves the human scale. A story about a person who stops monsters isn’t a story about a hero, but a superhero. The nature of a giant monster story is such that it excludes the ability to connect with ordinary life.
Or at least it did, until Shinichi Sekizawa came along. He recast the giant monsters as characters in their own right, with their own (monstrous) agendas and motivations. This meant it was possible to find narrative resolutions other than “humans defeat the monsters.” And in turn, that meant it was possible to populate the human cast with all kinds of characters (Sekizawa usually chose weirdos, since they were more fun to write).
Sekizawa unveiled this new approach in Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla, and promptly delivered Toho astronomical hits so massive their success remained the benchmark by which Japanese monster films would be judged even to this day. Just like the one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars changed Hollywood’s business model forever in 1976/1977, Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla changed Toho—the future had arrived, and it looked like Shinichi Sekizawa.
And so when you tune into Rodan tonight (because you will, or else I will use TCM.com’s web analytics to look up where you live, and I’ll come ask you to explain yourselves in person), watch that final scene carefully. You can see the dominance of Japanese giant monsters slouching roughly into existence through those floes of lava.
