"With each step forward, does he not take several steps back?": Godzilla Raids Again

 

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)

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 rampaging beasts? 

Monster Appearances: Godzilla, Anguirus

Atomic Blast Count: Nine in-film, two more seen in stock footage from the first film, for a total of eleven.

Early Memories

I first found a list of all the Godzilla movies around either 2003 or 2004, either in the back pages of Dark Horse Comics’ release of the manga adaptation of 1984’s Return of Godzilla, or on an ancient website (complete with Times New Roman font) that also listed all of the related Toho science fiction films. As such, I know a little about Godzilla Raids Again before I watch it. It’s Anguirus’s first appearance, it’s the only other Godzilla film in black and white, and it was recut for American theaters as Gigantis: the Fire Monster. 

Aunt Boopy gifts me the 1989 Video Treasures VHS tape late enough that it’s past the point where I can pin down a specific point in time, but I believe the year is 2006. Either way, this is one of the original Godzilla films that I see the latest. And I am very dismayed when the tape turns out to be the Gigantis cut, which is horrible. Just horrible. I’m full of resentment at the Hollywood producers who thought a sequel to King of the Monsters wouldn’t sell as well. They give Godzilla - sorry, “Gigantis” - Anguirus’s roar instead of his own. They insert stock footage exposition scenes that serve to sever any continuity from the actual Godzilla series and feature laughably inaccurate information about dinosaurs to boot. I think Gigantis is a dumb name. Alas, my experience of the first ever giant monster fight in the series is rather spoiled by the Americanization of the film.

I don’t see the Japanese version until 2015. By then, I am well out of childhood at two decades old. I am in the midst of two years spent living in Toronto, where I am attending a neuroplastic training program. During my first year there, I attempt to launch an early version of this project off the back of Godzilla’s 60th anniversary in 2014. I wipe out hard on the task, never progressing past the introductory post. But by the next year I’m still taking notes, and to this end I take the opportunity to finally see the Japanese version on the Classic Media DVD release, which I rent from Queen Video’s Spadina Avenue location. Now that I finally get to see the “real” Godzilla Raids Again, I enjoy the first half well enough, but I find that everything following Godzilla’s mid-film defeat of Anguirus drags tediously enough to prevent it from being an entry I rank highly. (Queen Video on Spadina closes later in 2015, to my dismay, though it does force me to switch over to the remaining Bathurst Street location, which turns out to be more convenient to commute to anyway. It was just across the block from Honest Ed’s, the iconic block-sized discount store that folded at the end of 2016, after I moved back to the States. Queen Video itself would endure in the streaming era until it finally went under in 2019. Rest in Peace).

Anyway, all these years later, I think I can admit that there have been far less catchy monster names than Gigantis.

 

Analysis

Godzilla Raids Again poses a unique problem among the Godzilla films: none of the others exist so totally in the shadow of the original. The sequel to Gojira was written, filmed, edited, and released within six months after the first film. That’s a mind-bogglingly short amount of time for a complicated special effects production, even shorter than the gap between the original King Kong and Son of Kong. For various reasons, most of the later Godzilla films are best taken on their own individual terms, even ones that reference the events of previous entries. Raids Again was released before there was such a thing as a Godzilla film, or even another giant monster film by Toho; there was only the original to compare it to. 

There are other unique links between Gojira and its hastily-made younger sibling. Raids Again is the only other Godzilla flick filmed in black-and-white and in the 4:3 “box” aspect ratio, which was the standard screen shape for films before the rise of television prompted the global film industry to pursue widescreen image formats as a way to compete with the new medium. The sequel shares direct plot continuity with Gojira as well, as Shimura Takashi reprises the role of Dr. Yamane for an extended cameo near the beginning, the only time in the original film cycle that a human character from the first film would reappear. And finally, there is the simple matter of immediacy. Raids Again’s close proximity to its predecessor meant that it came out of and released into functionally the same environment. Godzilla’s third screen appearance wouldn’t come about until 1962. The Japan of 1955, not yet ten years removed from the atomic bombings that forced the nation’s surrender, is necessarily a different place than Japan another decade on. Only Raids Again truly emerged from the same proximity to the series’ inspiration as Gojira.

Furthermore, the fact that Raids Again was released as Gigantis internationally has served to muffle its reputation. For most of the world, Raids Again didn’t exist as a Godzilla film at all, effectively as unavailable as the original until the twenty-first century. Whereas the Godzilla entries that followed it were released abroad as such, the second film never had the chance to earn a nostalgic following as part of the series proper. The Gigantis edit itself disappeared from American distribution for around twenty years; even when it eventually became available again in the mid-eighties, viewers in the know would need to squint past the edit to evaluate the underlying film’s qualities as a Godzilla entry. As such, the reputation Raids Again has earned is of the forgotten sequel, a film of note for its trivia-point contributions to the series formula but otherwise an underperformer in terms of exposure and quality.

Let’s puncture some misconceptions, then. Godzilla Raids Again may have been forgotten since its release, but it was anything but a failed sequel at the time. The film made more than five times its budget at the domestic box office, while Honda Ishiro himself noted that contemporary Japanese critics rated Raids Again more highly than the original. Indeed, one of the biggest points of criticism of the film, its straightforwardness and lack of thematic ambition compared to Gojira, was apparently a source of praise for critics who scoffed at the idea of science fiction stories having “ideas or themes” (in Honda’s words). Those sorts of critics were and are ignoramuses, it is clear. Nonetheless, in its home country, Godzilla Raids Again was unambiguously a critical and financial success.

On the other hand, the assessment that Godzilla Raids Again is not as good as Gojira is a criticism I’ll heartily agree with. Even still, that doesn’t help us very much. Plenty of enjoyable or even excellent films aren’t as good as Gojira. And by the standards of rushed sequels made in six months, Godzilla Raids Again acquits itself extremely well, though those standards are perilously low to start with. Indeed, the biggest accomplishment of Raids Again, that it’s pretty good for a film made in that amount of time, is also its biggest limitation. But faint praise is still praise, and it’s worth highlighting the positives of Raids Again. 

As Honda Ishiro was busy on another project, workman Toho director Oda Motoyoshi was brought on to the production; this would be his second major collaboration with Tsuburaya Eiji’s special effects team after the late 1954 film Invisible Man, which featured comparatively low-key effects work compared to the two Godzilla movies. In spite of his lack of critical acclaim, Oda’s work here is solid. His direction of scenes lacks the flair and intensity of Honda’s best material in Gojira, but it always shows a tight control of tone and never feels compromised because of a lack of time or preparation. Similarly, Sato Masaru’s score isn’t as memorable as Ifukube Akira’s themes (it feels more generically indebted to Max Steiner’s score for King Kong), but it adds a solemn tone and a good layer of menace when it needs to. The presence of the score may be more important than its quality; for Sato, in the midst of his first year as a motion picture composer, was unsatisfied with his work here, and indeed he would go on to provide much more memorable scores for three Godzilla films in the sixties and seventies. (In that time, he would also become a regular collaborator with A-list directors such as Kurosawa Akira and Okamoto Kihachi.)

And then we have the aspect of Raids Again that needs no defense: Tsuburaya’s special effects work. Given an incredibly short production schedule, Tsuburaya and his team turned in work close to or on par with the quality of Gojira’s effects. Objectively, the effects here are once again uneven, though at some point one has to throw up their hands and admire the cheek in using large ice cubes to depict chunks of snow and ice falling from a miniature mountain. And in one important way, Tsuburaya’s team tops their work from the previous film by showing us something we haven’t seen done before: a giant monster fight.

Oh, technically Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion projects showed us Kong fighting dinosaurs, dinosaurs fighting each other, or Mighty Joe Young tussling with lions. But - unless I am overlooking something enormous - Raids Again is the first time that two giant creatures that are clearly monsters, rather than large animals, go head to head. Giant monster fights, especially ones set in major cities as this one is set in Osaka, are an essential pillar of the genre. One of the first things I understood about Godzilla, as my babysitter Cindy explained exactly what the big green dinosaur cartoon we were watching on Icelandic TV was, is that he fights other monsters. And this inaugural example of the form doesn’t disappoint, even if the fight sequences in question turned out differently than Tsuburaya had intended. 

Tsuburaya’s crew usually filmed the monster sequences in slow-motion to give the monsters a sense of mass. However, one of the cameras used to record the tussle between Godzilla and Anguirus was set to a low frame-rate rather than the high one required, meaning that the footage looked sped up instead of slowed down when played at regular speed. Tsuburaya liked the vicious, animalistic energy that the fast motion gave to the footage, so the crew filmed the majority of the fight sequences that way. The approach has its drawbacks; that the individual beats of the fight are never lingered on means that Anguirus never gets the chance to develop much of a presence beyond “bloodthirsty monster.” But the fast pace of the fighting gives the sequences a visceral punch and ensures that they never lose steam. And the conflict ends on its most exciting segment, when Godzilla secures the upper hand over Anguirus at the same time that the two monsters demolish Osaka Castle. The entire Osaka fight is very well done, and it is bookended by perhaps the best human material in the film, too. The female lead Hidemi (played by Wakayama Setsuko, a hardline union advocate and one-time thorn in Toho bosses’ side because of it) observes Osaka in flames from the safety of a cliffside house far up the coast. The eerie image of the flames reaching up into an otherwise dark landscape is the closest Godzilla Raids Again comes to channeling the impact of its predecessor.

The problem Godzilla Raids Again runs into is that it effectively resolves its selling point, Godzilla and Anguirus duking it out in Osaka, at the halfway point. The film effectively restarts itself after this, such that Raids Again feels somewhat like two half-films stitched together. What’s most interesting about the approach is that both halves feel like they approach the task of being a sequel to Gojira in a different and not entirely complimentary manner. What’s also inconvenient for the film is that its first half’s approach to the task is by far the odder one.

Godzilla Raids Again starts reasonably enough. We meet the traditionally handsome fishing company pilot Tsukioka (Koizumi Hiroshi, in his first of many roles in Toho’s science fiction films) as he comes to the rescue of his good pal Kobayashi (Chiaki Minoru, another Seven Samurai veteran), who’s less traditionally handsome and more the comic-relief-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype. As we soon find out, Tsukioka has a thing going with Hidemi, the boss’s daughter who works as a radio operator, while Kobayashi has more of a sibling-banter type dynamic with her. Tsukioka flies to bail out Kobayashi when the latter experiences engine trouble and makes an emergency landing on a deserted island. Except it’s not deserted: Godzilla and Anguirus are there, and they’re fighting! 

As the monsters’ struggle leads them back into the ocean, the two pilots make their escape and report their findings. The fishing company is based in Osaka, and the city government calls the pilots in to give information on what they saw. A so-called “scientist” with incredibly suspect facial hair confirms that the new monster they saw was Ankylosaurus or Anguirus. He actually gives far more accurate dates for when the dinosaurs lived than in the last film, but proceeds to ruin the series’ newfound credibility with ludicrously inaccurate information about said dinosaurs. Come on, even at the time, any dinosaur-obsessed kid must have known that Ankylosaurus was a herbivore, not a “vicious carnivore” as claimed here! …Anyway, Dr. Yamane from the first film is also at the meeting to recap the events of the previous Godzilla’s rampage. (Shimura Takashi is close to acting on auto-pilot for what is a pretty uninspiring reprisal as written. Shimura brings a baseline of gravity to Yamane, but he has no space to summon the pathos he brought to the first film, not when his character’s entire purpose here is to deliver exposition. What seems like a flicker of sadness in his eyes when he mentions Dr. Serizawa is all we get.) With the Oxygen Destroyer out of the picture, there’s no way to fight either monster. Instead, Yamane recommends diverting Godzilla’s attention away from the shoreline by putting the city into blackout and luring him away by using flares, as the professor postulates that the monster is “acutely sensitive to light. It sends him into a rage. We suspect it brings back memories of the hydrogen bomb test.”

(This raises the question of Godzilla’s continuity of character. Both this film and Toho’s official stance are that the first Godzilla we saw was killed outright by the Oxygen Destroyer, and that the Godzilla seen in this and subsequent films is a different member of the same species. Which is well and logical, but on an emotional level, I call bullshit. When I was a kid, Godzilla was Godzilla no matter what version or timeline the given story used, and it is incredibly difficult for me to let go of that notion despite the textual assertions to the contrary. Certainly, I’d wager that to the general public, any given take on Godzilla or King Kong or Batman represents the same character regardless of the in-story context. Besides which, later entries reveal that Godzilla has cellular regeneration powers that allow him to heal from injuries, like a much slower-acting version of Wolverine’s healing factor. It’s entirely feasible that a cell or two from the first Godzilla could have survived the Oxygen Destroyer and regrown to become the individual seen here. This Godzilla certainly acts like its predecessor, as you’d expect. Anyway, we’ll have plenty of time in later entries to reevaluate whether the different versions of Godzilla represent the same character or not; I imagine it will come down to whether it makes symbolic sense for this to be the case.)

The Japanese Self-Defense Forces follow Yamane’s advice and make preparations for Godzilla and Anguirus to reach landfall. Sure enough, Godzilla comes to Osaka, disrupting a nice time at a nightclub for Hidemi and Tsukioka. The city is put into blackout, the military fires flares to divert Godzilla, and…it works. Godzilla follows the flares away from the shoreline, seemingly headed back to sea. Maybe there won’t be any urban destruction and mayhem in this monster movie?

Of course, anyone who’s watching can predict what’s going to happen next. That’s not a bad thing in cases like this, where what happens next should be entertaining. We all know that Anguirus is going to arrive and antagonize Godzilla. They’ll be too angry at each other to pay attention to the flares, and the fight will move ashore into Osaka despite the military’s best efforts. It’s the obvious move for what has been a pretty straightforward sequel to Gojira up to this point. Godzilla Raids Again hasn’t matched its predecessor for intensity or atmosphere, but it’s clearly following the same logic and earnest, grounded approach to its subject matter. And now, excitingly, we’re about to see the sequel’s novel aspects put into action after the teaser of the opening island fight. Clearly, everything will go awry when Godzilla and Anguirus meet and prove tragically uncontrollable. 

That’s not what happens. Instead, Godzilla Raids Again turns into a crime thriller.

Almost thirty-one minutes in, we’re introduced to a prison convoy truck full of hard-bitten convicts who look and move like they came out of a silent comedy short from the 1920s. The convicts escape the truck and are chased by the police, who shoot them as they run. Three of the surviving convicts steal a tanker truck and drive off, while their pursuers flag down Tsukioka and Kobayashi’s and have them follow the truck. The convicts drive the truck into an oil refinery, and of course, they end up crashing into an oil tank and sending the whole thing up in a fiery explosion. This is what lures Godzilla back onshore, and only then does Anguirus show up to fight him.

Why Godzilla Raids Again eschews the obvious screenwriting solution to bring the monsters to Osaka in lieu of switching gears to become a deeply low-rent crime film for ten minutes, I cannot say. I suspect that it is the result of screenwriters who knew the film had to be out in six months and also wanted to keep getting work, and so threw story progression ideas in during a mad scramble to have something presentable without having the mental space to stop and consider whether there was a more sensible solution to their story problems. Or maybe Toho wanted a slightly longer running time and wanted the chase sequence added in. Who knows. Either way, the detour breaks the film and the Godzilla series as it has existed to this point. For the first film and the first half-hour of the second one, the unspoken but clear rules of Godzilla have been that these movies take place in a world like ours, but with giant monsters and science five minutes into the future. Even Dr. Serizawa’s mad-science lab in Gojira, clearly inspired by Universal’s Frankenstein films, is treated more as a workplace than a playground for fantastical imagery. But the convicts don’t come from any grounded, sober human reality. They come from other movies, likely a cops-and-robbers programmer playing in the next theater over.

And here I’m torn between examining Godzilla Raids Again on its own terms, or looking at it in the context of where the series goes in the future. Because in 1955, the convicts blowing up the oil refinery is hacky, hacky screenwriting, just as much as giving Godzilla a monster to fight is an obvious and fun wrinkle on the first film’s formula. And yet both elements, monster fights and abrupt genre-shifts, become key to how the later films establish their own identity beyond Gojira. The next few movies to feature Godzilla will make it clear why this was a necessary move. For now, though, we have half a sequel that extends reasonably from the original, introduces a bizarrely convoluted tonal shift that seems completely out of place just to advance the story, and then rallies for a successful climax that showcases what this film has that Gojira doesn’t. 

By contrast, the second half of the film hews closer to Gojira’s template: we have Godzilla on his own, a human love triangle caught in his path, and the death of one of the triangle enabling Godzilla’s defeat. Godzilla and Anguirus’s rampage leaves the fishing company in ruins along with the rest of Osaka, so the employees relocate to an office in Hokkaido in northern Japan. A lengthy interlude follows as the company settles in. Kobayashi begins joking about finding a bride, but he clearly means it, even asking Hidemi for gift advice. While the employees are out for dinner held in the name of “Mr. Groom” (Kobayashi), he and Tsukioka run into a group of fellow pilots who survived the war. As Tsukioka tells his old war buddy Tajima (Tsuchiya Yoshio in his first in a long series of important sci-fi film roles), he didn’t even know the squadron had survived. 

Nineteen-year-old me was not wrong that the film’s pacing slows down massively in this section, but what I don’t remember picking up on at the time was how loaded the social context implicit here is. Not just because the pilots’ reunion is a reminder serving in the war was as common an experience for that generation of Japanese men as it was for those on the winning side, but because it gestures to the normality of how fucked up the Pacific War was even for Japan and the soldiers they sent to be slaughtered in their name. Communication for Japanese soldiers on different fronts and with civilians during the later stages of the war became a clusterfuck. Honda Kimi, Honda Ishiro’s wife, didn’t know that her husband was alive during his time as a POW in China until he turned up on their house’s doorstep one day. Tsukioka and Kobayashi only finding out that their friends survived a decade after the fact feels all too believable.

It turns out that Kobayashi has an undeclared crush on Hidemi, and that it is she whose affection he seeks; Hidemi finds out inadvertently thanks to a photo in the pocketbook Kobayashi leaves behind when he is called away to track down Godzilla. Unlike the first film, the love triangle between the three principal leads never gets the chance to develop. The pilots track Godzilla to a deserted island, where Kobayashi’s plane catches an atomic blast while attempting to prevent the monster from leaving. As with Serizawa, Kobayashi’s death enables Godzilla’s defeat: his plane crash causes an avalanche that partly buries Godzilla. During a pitched battle, Tsukioka, Tajima, and the Air Force and Navy use the same strategy, triggering more avalanches until Godzilla is completely trapped under ice. Thus, Kobayashi is avenged, while Tsukioka and Hidemi are presumably free to conduct their relationship in peace.

The climax is a little slack in its pacing, but is generally a neat solution to the story challenge of defeating Godzilla without killing him. The problem is in the overall picture of the second half of the film, where the parallels with Gojira can’t help but call attention to the ways that Raids Again falls short in comparison. In contrast to Serizawa’s sacrifice, Kobayashi’s death here is an accident that precludes any meaningful reckoning for the love triangle. Tsukioka, and Kobayashi never get the chance to hash out and reconcile their competing feelings, nor does Hidemi ever meaningfully grapple with her own for Kobayashi. “Mr. Groom” never even finds out that Hidemi knows, nor does Tsukioka learn about any of it. The love triangle in Gojira is an essential part of the emotional and - in its grappling with arranged marriage - political thread of that film. Whereas Kobayashi’s secret, and apparently mutual, crush here feels less like a lynchpin of the film and more of an inert attempt to spice up the tragedy of the character’s death.

A more simplistic emotional palette goes hand-in-hand with more simplistic politics, it seems. In place of the thorny moral complexity of Serizawa’s dilemma in Gojira is simple heroism with a faint sense of nationalistic pandering. Kobayashi’s plane crash is tragic, but his unintended sacrifice is not in vain, and his fellow Air Force veterans get to heroically save the day. The unplanned nature of Kobayashi's crash does temper any comparisons to be made with kamikaze pilots, and the political angle is tempered by the fact that the pilots have moved on with their lives since the war. But there is still the air of giving the most domestically maligned branch of the Japanese imperial forces a chance at heroic victory, where the climactic echo of the horrific, murderous plane crashes that resulted from kamikaze ideology instead signifies a sorrowful but ultimately useful strategic advantage. The air force veterans here receive an uncomplicated opportunity to redeem themselves against a threat that wields the same nuclear power that defeated the nation previously. 

 

Whereas the climax of Gojira is troubling, Raids Again’s outcome is ultimately comforting, a piece of wish fulfillment for many in the audience. It’s not that this narrative approach is unworkable. 2023’s Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed period piece Godzilla Minus One, for instance, arguably owes much more to the storyline and themes of Godzilla Raids Again than it does Gojira’s, complete with an ex-pilot protagonist. So there’s obviously something here that resonates for audiences then and now, if not necessarily for entirely good reasons.

Simply put, Godzilla Raids Again is too narratively and stylistically indebted to Gojira to make its more audience-pleasing approach feel anything but hollow in comparison. The sequel would have had to forge a stronger artistic identity of its own to avoid feeling like a pale shadow of the first film. There are elements of the film that gesture in a departure from Gojira, and the monster fight is even successful in doing so. But the presence of Anguirus, the bizarre escaped convicts subplot, the more explicit acknowledgement of its characters’ World War II experiences, and even the last-act change from an urban setting aren’t allowed to shape the story to the extent that the necessary departure is fully achieved.

And so, history repeats itself: a legendary, smash-hit monster movie is followed by a rushed sequel that does things differently, but not enough to emerge from the shadow of the original. But there’s a big difference between Godzilla Raids Again and the ill-fated Son of Kong. Raids Again made bank and proved that there was a market for homegrown kaiju films post-Gojira. Unlike in the case of Hollywood in the years following King Kong, the Japanese branch of the giant monster movie would have room to grow and develop. Even though Godzilla would take a seven year break from the big screen, Tsuburaya and the other key staff of Gojira would continue to make monster and science fiction-themed films that would expand, reexamine, and find new directions for its themes, or explore entirely new ones. And the continued popularity of Gojira/Godzilla as an icon meant that, even though an immediate return wasn’t planned, there would surely be a return engagement for the character down the line.

In that sense, Gojira’s younger sibling did the one thing it needed to do: it ensured that Godzilla would, in fact, raid again.