An Introduction to the (Kaiju) Classics · 10:54pm Feb 1st, 2021
It has come to my attention that Godzilla vs. Kong has acquired a trailer.
…As such, it now has become my solemn duty to introduce newcomers to the wonderful world of Tokusatsu, because while this trailer seems to point to a movie as equally promising or moreso than King of the Monsters, it seems to capture only one side of the Tokusatsu genre, the same action-focused style that has become a focus of Tokusatsu since 1967, & it's a valid style indeed, but it's not the only valid side of Tokusatsu. For example, Pacific Rim was written with the understanding that there can be a very soft, human side to Tokusatsu.
Tokusatsu literally translates from Japanese as “special filming”, which refers to any story that would heavily require special effects, quite often, but not always, to convey giant monsters & heroes who need to be juxtaposed with miniature buildings to destroy in rampages. It’s apparently often tempting to treat Toku as a “rich man’s Power Rangers” for many, but in truth, The Power Rangers are actually the Americanization of an existing Tokusatsu show called Super Sentai. The style & substances of The Power Rangers comes from Tokusatsu, not the other way around.
Except, The Power Rangers is actually far removed in spirit from what Tokusatsu often is as a whole. Now there is nothing wrong with The Power Rangers – it is very much in the spirit of the original Super Sentai, late Heisei Ultraman, & Millennium Godzilla – but it is simply not a good means of judging tokusatsu as a whole.
Toku, as a whole, often encapsulated a mixed bag of the Japanese answers to the work of Ray Bradbury & H.G. Wells, the Japanese answers to Buena Vista movies, recreations of Japanese folk tales, & arthouse films with focuses on serious crises to the fate of the human race.
The tones also varied wildly, & many often had richer plots & characters than the work of Ray Harryhausen, which while masterful in its own right, often relied on ambitious effects more than interesting characters & gripping plots half of the time. In old Toku, there was seldom ever a useless or boring character, the plots were often rich & suspenseful, & the monster & human stories often overlapped.
Perhaps the most important feature to Tokusatsu is that, unable to be realistic, Toku eiga often shot more for imagination & ambition in order to compensate for the simple fact it was often obviously not real. You can’t make the men in suits look like real animals, so you can’t have ambitious effects. Instead you shoot for ambitious stories that take us across the galaxy, hoist monsters up with hundreds of balloons, see whole cities be turned into smoldering hellscapes, & brand-new styles of visual storytelling.
Welcome to the glorious realm of Tokusatsu. A genre that has become so vast, it will require multiple editions of the same post just to explain.
“Multiple Editions?” you may ask. “What do you mean?”
You’ll see~
Enjoy your reading! We’ll get to it slowly, given that we have a book about censorship to cover, an analysis of Kingdom Hearts’ character tropes, an analysis of Halo music, hot takes on how old philosophies impact current politics, & me gushing over Aristotle & a bunch of random things I like!