CPB Writes

Other Shores is a sub-series focusing on Godzilla’s appearances in non-film media. Shigeru Kayama was a prolific genre writer at the height of his career when he was tasked with developing Tanaka Tomoyuki’s pitch for Gojira into a full story outline. He would do the same for its first sequel. More to the point, he would adapt both finished films into novellas that were published in 1955, long before home video made it easy to revisit the films themselves. These novellas have remained in print in Japan ever since, as part of Kayama’s enormous body of work that remains popular in the country to this day. However, In the english-speaking world, these novellas were only made available for the first time in October 2023, via translations by Jeffrey Angles for University of Minnesota Press. Therefore, We Call It Godzilla is proud to be one of the first series retrospectives in the west to feature this important part of Godzilla’s media history: the first two films, filtered through the lens...

  Info Also Known As: Godzilla’s Counterattack (Original Japanese translation); Gigantis: The Fire Monster (U.S. cut); [Just] The Fire Monster (Argentina and Brazil); The Volcano Monsters (Canceled U.S. re-edit) Director: Oda Motoyoshi. Screenplay: Murata Takeo and Hidaka Shigeaki, from a story by Shigeru Kayama. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Sato Masaru. Runtime: 82 minutes (original), 78 minutes ( Gigantis ) Release Date: April 24, 1955 What’s It About? A pilot in a Japanese fishing company is forced to make an emergency crash-landing on a rocky island. When his friend and coworker flies in to rescue him, they discover a pair of giant monsters in a fight to the death: one Godzilla, the other a mutant and inexplicably carnivorous Ankylosaurus named Anguirus. The monsters’ battle takes them into the sea and on a course toward the city of Osaka. Without Dr. Serizawa and the Oxygen Destroyer, does Japan have any hope of protecting itself from not one but two...