All Monsters Attack

Dir. Ishiro Honda

69 Minutes

Japan

1969

Starring: Tomonori Yazaki, Kenji Sahara, Machiko Naka

**1/2/*****

Despite intentions for the "ten kaiju brawl spectacular" Destroy All Monsters to conclude the series, Toho instead took the character in a different direction, heightened its popularity with children in similar ways to the Gamera series, and used much of the material they had for a nice Christmas release for kids. While often cited as the worst Godzilla film in the series, All Monsters Attack has the feeling of Ishirō Honda, long disillusioned at the character being distanced from its terrifying metaphor for Hiroshima towards a more comical and cartoonish entity, attempting to right the ship, while also functioning as a nice bridge towards the final push in the era. Honda widens the scope to use the character to examine the successful kaiji-genre while also considering its effect on children. In this film, Godzilla does not exist as a physical being, but it does exist as an icon on movie screens, and one that has captured the imagination of Ichiro Miki, a young latchkey kid who fills the time in his empty apartment after school with fantasies of joining Godzilla on Monster Island and helping him and Minilla (who can speak in his fantasies) fight other savage beasts. Ichiro's dreams eventually blend with a more dangerous reality as he gets mixed up with a pair of bank robbers who kidnap him before he can identify them.

The film drifts between the contemporary drama of Ichiro, his family, and the criminals, and kaiju action that is lifted and re-edited from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, and King Kong Escapes, with the boy viewing the spectacles with short cuts of him egging Godzilla and Minilla on. It is an odd melding of material that does not always work, but the attempt at self-reflexivity gives the film a little bit of life after the giant merging of monsters in the last entry. And while there is no precedent (or further example) for Godzilla as a fictional character with him returning as a very real threat in the next installment, the foundation being built of exploring the genre within one of the films itself is a nice way of steering the franchise to new waters, even though a bigger budget and new footage would have gone a long way to making this feel less of a "greatest hits" reel and more of a film with its own texture and life. Honda is clearly not particularly interested in the kaiju-violence itself here, and these dream sequences come across more as studio enforced checklists rather than passionately delivered sequences. But Honda, ever the professional, obliged because of Toho’s goals with both character and franchise. As they shift very purposefully towards their children audience, Honda certainly was the right person for the transitory film, attempting to craft a mediation on childhood loneliness and fantasy within the confines of higher powers who essentially had ownership over his character. He continues to be interested in and lays the groundwork for something more “adult” in the chaos of a kids cartoon and while it works in bits and spurts, it is a shame that no other film maker picked up this thread in later entries, instead more inclined towards traditional narratives for the genre.

May 18th, 2020