My first film lasts two minutes and was made in iMovie. Hundreds of megabytes in size, the file was compressed and rendered for online viewing when I exported it. In this process, the content of the final frame became unreadable. Here is what I was trying to show:
For more about this project, see the editor’s diary at mixed nerve.
I am enjoying In Godzilla’s Footsteps, Tsutsui & Ito eds., 2006, despite about half the essays being a bit academic. In essay #6, “Mothra’s Giant Egg: Consuming the South Pacific in 1960s Japan,” author Yoshikuni Igarashi quotes the once-famous Nagayama Yasuo’s “Kaijo no michi” (“Passage on the Sea”). In 1992, he was asking, “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in Toho monster films?”
Igarashi moves on to a more focused 2006-type question: “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in 1960s Toho monster films?” In particular he is interested in Mothra and commercialization, versus the Gozilla/war/nuclear-testing theme that belonged originally to the 1950s.
In this context he discusses the return of tropical fruit to Japanese markets, the arrival of Barbie about the same time as the tiny women in Mothra and Mothra versus Godzilla, and the inception of Japanese-Hawaiian tourism and its related themes.
I happened to be reading all this as a spin-off from some allusions in the Mechademia issues. For one thing, I realized that I have never actually seen the original Godzilla—and learned that there was no way I could have, because it was not screened in the U.S. until 2002, and then only in a limited number of art houses. It was released on DVD the same year, in a two-pack along with a remastered re-release of the American (Raymond Burr) edition, also for the first time. I have a copy en route to me, and I am really looking forward to seeing the original, which apparently contains a lot of material edited out in the U.S. release.
In Godzilla’s Footsteps included two other essays I thought were piquant: “Gojira as Japan’s First Postwar Media Event,” by Barak Kushner, which portrays this movie as Japan’s first return to the international stage (several years before the Tokyo Olympics)—and a very appropriate return, if somewhat unexpected in this form; and Eric C. Rath’s “Godzilla Meets Super Kyogen, or How a Dinosaur Saved the World,” which traces Gojira’s ancestry to guys in monster suits (such as a fire-breathing giant toad) in kyogen and kabuki.
There is other neat stuff in In Godzilla’s Footsteps, but this appears to be the cream of the crop.
