"The Abominable Snowman": Half Human
Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Murata Takeo, from a story by Shigeru Kayama. Director of Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya. Composer: Sato Masaru.
The Burakumin, aka hamlet or village people, are a portion of the Japanese populace that are descended from the social caste that worked in “unclean” professions, such as butchers, meat-packers, sanitation workers, undertakers, and even executioners. The workers would often live and operate in isolated villages kept away from “polite” society, not unlike leper colonies. Even after the abolishment of the Japanese caste system in 1871, prejudice against descendents of the Burakumin and any those associated with such “lowly” positions has persisted into the modern day in the form of social and economic discrimination. In the twentieth century, employers and well-off families would often pay top dollar for information on the family history of prospective employees or marriage candidates in order to ensure that they did not come from Burakumin bloodlines, remote rural areas of the sort associated with the Burakumin, or simply worked in professions associated with the Burakumin regardless of any genetic link. Even though that discrimination is not strictly legal and has been challenged by human rights groups, the old attitudes are very much present in the twenty-first century; workers in “unclean” professions often attempt to conceal the nature of their jobs in order to avoid social prejudice.
So Half Human’s remote village community - whose members are deformed, whose demeanor is hostile, whose communication style is almost animalistic at times - struck a bad note with rights activists used to seeing such tropes invoked in dehumanizing fashion against the Burakumin. And they’re far from the only group in Japan to be so demeaned; the villagers in the film have also been associated with the Ainu, one of Japan’s indigenous populations, who face similar oppression as the First Peoples in North America. (Guy Tucker engages with the Ainu interpretation in Age of the Gods; in one of the book’s weakest arguments, Tucker makes the oh-so-nineties argument that Half Human “cannot be called a racist film” because it depicts the one conventionally attractive female villager as a heroic character who helps the protagonists out of jams; this is an argument easily refuted from the understanding that bigoted representation is more complicated than whether stereotyped characters are portrayed as good guys or bad guys.)
The controversy flared up following a television broadcast of the film in 1973. In response to the complaints against the broadcast, Toho effectively buried Half Human, allowing its screening only in various theatrical retrospectives and never issuing any proper home video or streaming release. A recut film did in fact see release in the American market in 1958, with framing footage of actor John Carradine added in. However, this version’s only home video releases were on VHS in the early eighties, leaving the film even more obscure in the west than in its home country. There’s certainly discussion to be had about the ethics of Toho effectively blocking access to the film as a way of avoiding criticism, much as western companies such as Warner Brothers and Disney have done with many of their racist films from the early twentieth century (and this isn’t the last time that Toho, or a related company, would pull this move with one of their tokusatsu works - but those are stories for another time). I’d argue that such works should be broadly accessible for academic purposes, at least.
Regardless of the discussions to be had regarding the villagers in the film, and whether they were intended to represent the Burakumin or not, there is one thing that is absolutely certain: they are by far the least generous portrait of a rural, remote corner of Japanese society in any of Honda Ishiro’s films to date. Just compare the villagers here to the Odo Islanders of Gojira, and the lack of humanity granted to the former is striking, certainly for a humanist like Honda. Whatever this says about the attitudes of the filmmakers or the society around them, the reason the villagers are depicted the way they are is quite simple, namely that Half Human is as blatant a variation on King Kong as they come.
With Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again, Toho had riffed on the nuclear monster-on-the-loose template that had been popular at the time. With Godzilla’s outings a big success, the obvious next step for Toho was to produce their own version of the original kaiju film. You have the tropes of a sympathetic mammalian monster with an interest in the heroines, you have the remote tribe that worships the monster and is hostile to the normative protagonists, and you have the businessman attempting to profit off of the monster. For good measure, they even combine the original story with Son of Kong in giving the monster a child, this time allowing them to share the screen and making their familial bond a major source of pathos. On paper, Half Human is a very solid proposition: give the Kong formula to Honda and allow him to bring the same level of care that he brought to Gojira, complete with a tie in to a contemporary trend to heighten audience engagement (interest in supposed evidence of the existence of real abominable snowmen was at a high in the mid-fifties).
And the end result does gesture at the depth that Honda was capable of. The revelation that the Snowman is largely benevolent and will even intervene to save humans from death, at least while it is unprovoked, is an effective one that instantly adds depth to the story. Also effective is the familial dynamic between the adult and junior Snowmen during the short time we see it on screen. The film is helped tremendously here by the adult Snowman costume; the suit looks really good and sports a face that is enormously successful at conveying both emotion and menace, such that the creature comes across as a believable animal rather than a prop (on the other hand, the less said about the Snowchild costume, the better). And in contrast to King Kong, this film recognizes its own animal trafficker from the entertainment industry as a destructive presence, while portraying the sympathetic characters as motivated by scientific curiosity and concern for their friends.
Where Half Human falls short is that, while it shifts around its stock tropes enough to evoke some depth, it rarely transcends the tropes themselves. Gojira took characters who could easily have been portrayed as mad scientists in lesser films, Yamane and Serizawa, and made them into complex, sympathetic human beings. Whereas Half Human’s criminal antagonists are broad caricatures of thugs (complete with one of them having a comedy stutter to denote his lowliness) and its protagonists are as generic as they come. Whatever one thinks of Takarada Akira and Kochi Momoko’s work in Gojira, they had far more room to do well there than in the utterly generic roles of stoic male lead and docile, teary-eyed woman that they are respectively called upon to play here. And of course, however sympathetic the Snowman might be, and however relatively complex in its motivations (loneliness and then bloodlust from the murder of its son), the creature is still ultimately a menace that exists to covet the human women, go on a rampage, and die a tragic death (taking the sympathetic female villager with him, for of course the two are symbolically linked in a way that the “normal” expedition members aren’t). With Half Human so determined to play familiar notes, is it any wonder that the villagers can only recreate the role of the island tribe in the original Kong, complete with the destruction of their home by their enraged animal god?
With its characters rendered as little more than cliches, Half Human’s tragic outcome falls flat. That Gojira would end in tragedy was inevitable and earned by the way that the story was constructed from the ground up, while Godzilla Raids Again’s bittersweet conclusion was a reasonable attempt to match the spirit of the original. But because the junior Snowman’s murderers come across as cartoon characters rather than human beings with depth, the adult Snowman’s rampage, kidnap of the female lead, and eventual demise feels less like a searing indictment of human nature and more like a product of authorial fiat. The film ends tragically because that’s the only way for a monster movie to end, apparently. Or at least, the only way for a King Kong riff to end, though the urban rampage of the original is replaced with a shorter and smaller-scale village-razing here.
There are a lot of reasons why a promising film can fizzle out, but in Half Human’s example, the case may be that looking backward was a dead end for Toho’s kaiju films. Within the previous two years, the scope of what a giant monster movie could be had broadened considerably from King Kong’s template, in part because of Toho’s own work. Going back to the Kong format at so early a juncture doesn’t feel terribly productive. Toho would eventually re-engage with King Kong and his story trappings multiple times in the sixties, in a much more direct manner. But ironically, even though those efforts would reference the original’s set-pieces in a much more direct manner than Half Human does, none of them would be as narratively beholden to the 1933 film.
So what we have here is, in essence, a failed experiment. There’s no reason for Toho to have assumed that “do our own version of the genre’s ur-example” for their next prestige monster film wouldn’t succeed on paper, but it didn’t in practice. And Half Human isn’t alone in that, as its 1955 stablemate Godzilla Raids Again hadn’t quite worked as a film either (though Toho’s bean counters would probably have begged to differ). Finding the next step for the kaiju film after Gojira turned out to be a challenge, but this wasn’t all that big of a cause for alarm; the term “sophomore slump” became popularized for a reason, and plenty of creative ventures have moved past that phase. Ultimately, Toho’s kaiju films needed to find a way forward that didn’t involve repeating the genre’s past successes, be they recent or historic. Perhaps the shift to color, planned for the following year’s giant monster production, would provide the necessary kick up the pants.
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