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HONDA, INOSHIRO (1911–1993). Japanese director.
Honda stands in the tradition of Georges
MELIES, who believed that if you gave an audience fantastic spectacles and
effects, it didn't matter if everything else—plot, characters, theme—was
missing. Méliès's decline into obscurity seems to prove he was wrong; but time
and again, years after his demise, filmmakers have been able to draw people
into theaters by showing them marvels. Science fiction film critics are
discomfited by this: they say things like "Science fiction film isn't, and
shouldn't be, a genre of special effects," and they prove they mean it by going
on to say things like "This is a boring and stupid film, even though it has
good special effects." Yet they will also, without any sense of contradiction,
offer judgments like "This film's thoughtful script and good acting are
undermined by its shoddy special effects," revealing that they retain some
childlike desire to see wonders on the screen and a feeling of betrayal when
the proffered wonders are visibly inadequate. Of course, there is a false
dichotomy here—there is no reason why films cannot have both good special
effects and other virtues—yet if there is a choice to be made, most film
producers, and most audiences, will opt for good special effects.
In the case of Honda, especially his later
career, the films are both shoddy and have shoddy special effects; yet there
remains an undeniable mythic power in watching enormous creatures reduce all
human accomplishments and dreams to rubble. I often watched his films while
growing up, and more recently have been watching them with my son as he grows
up. Showing some rudimentary taste, he became at a young age especially fond of
Mothra, surely Honda's most bizarre and evocative creation: a giant
caterpillar, worshipped by a lost tribe of primitive islanders and inexplicably
devoted to six-inch-tall singing twin women, who transforms, when the need
arises, into a gigantic moth; then, if she falls in battle (as occurs on Godzilla
vs. the Thing), she gives birth to new caterpillars to carry on the
struggle. Here was a truly hallucinogenic vision, suggesting a plethora of
mythological, sexual, and psychological undertones, even if their execution is
less than polished. More recently, my son became obsessed with Godzilla films,
endeavoring to collect all of them on video and happily memorizing the names
and attributes of every giant creature in the Godzilla universe.
If one grows out of childlike fascination with such monsters, and
is disinclined to explore their deeper meanings, there remains the
reaction of laughter, which I do not regard as ignoble or inappropriate.
I recall a college friend telling the charming story of how she and
her rather distant father were somehow drawn closer together when
they stayed up one night to giggle through Attack of the Mushroom
People; in my case, it was Dagora, the Space Monster that
reduced me to unstoppable, hysterical laughter, with its idiotic story
line having something to do with jewel thieves who get mixed up with
a flying, diamond-eating monster. I cannot shake the feeling that
Edward D. WOOD, Jr. would be greatly upset
if he could see people laughing at his films; but Honda wouldn't mind
at all. His goal is simply to entertain, and he does not worry about
how he entertains.
In a way, it is unfortunate that this sort
of film—something to fascinate kids and amuse their parents—became Honda's
specialty; for there are signs of grander ambitions in his earlier films. Thus,
both The Mysterians and Gorath attempt to be serious treatments
of the themes, respectively, of alien invasion and cosmic catastrophe, and Attack
of the Mushroom People might be seen, by a charitable critic willing to
overlook its manifest flaws, as an interesting reaction to Don SIEGEL's Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, exploring people's simultaneous fear of and desire
for a loss of personal identity. But the public wanted giant monsters, and
aided by his partner in special effects, Eiji TSUBURAYA, that is what Honda
gave them, with increasing inattentiveness to the quality of their films. After
Godzilla vs. the Thing, his last halfway decent movie, he seemed to
surrender to total inanity. While he cannot be held responsible for the films
with his monsters that were directed by others, the most insufferable of which
being Jun Fukuda's Son of Godzilla (1967), his own later films are not
much better, like the "All-star" monster movie Destroy All Monsters,
where a plethora of colorful monsters (mostly in reused footage from previous
films) hardly compensates for the absence of a compelling, or even coherent,
narrative. But even the worst of these films may offer oddly evocative moments,
like the scene near the end of Terror of Mechagodzilla where Godzilla
resolutely advances through an explosion-ravaged landscape to confront his
robotic enemy, a creature once cast as a symbol of technology's destructive
powers now cast as a representative of nature opposing that technology (though
later close-ups of monsters applying wrestling holds to each other completely
destroy the atmosphere).
And few filmmakers can claim the lasting
impact of Honda: as he drifted into retirement, his colleagues continued to
make increasingly dire Godzilla movies before an extended pause that ended with
a new cycle of more expensive, and better, films: Godzilla vs. Biollante
(Kazuki Omori 1989), in particular, stands out as a strange, haunting addition
to the canon, with an overlay of feminine sensibilities reminiscent of the
Mothra films. Then, after Hollywood spectacularly stumbled in its attempt to
create a new, improved Godzilla, his old studio produced a new Godzilla movie in the classic tradition.
However, to finally defend Honda as a filmmaker, one must turn to the original
film that introduced his greatest creation, Godzilla, King of the
Monsters—a film that does not provoke laughter as it enacts its
scenario of mass destruction with a grim inexorability that American
predecessors like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene LOURIE
1953) cannot match. While I resist the temptation to see the movie
solely as a parable about the evils of nuclear weapons—as it more
generally comments on the fragility of humanity's hold on the world
and the ever-present possibility of sudden and irreversible tragedy—it
is still a film obviously and effectively informed and deepened by
the experience of a nation that, unlike the United States, actually
experienced grand urban catastrophe. The chance to see Honda's original
version, unmarred by the awkward and superfluous footage of Raymond
BURR added for American audiences, just might inspire some critics
to discuss his work in their books on Japanese cinema.
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