Kaiju


Kaiju is a Japanese term that is commonly associated with media involving giant monsters. A subgenre of science-fiction, more precisely monster films, its widespread contemporary use is credited to tokusatsu director Eiji Tsuburaya and filmmaker Ishirō Honda, who popularized the kaiju film genre by creating the Godzilla franchise and its spin-offs. The term can also refer to the monsters themselves, which are usually depicted attacking major cities and battling either the military or other creatures.
The first "giant monster movie" is debatable. The 1921 animated short film The Pet features a giant monster attacking a city, and the 1925 silent feature film [The Lost World (1925 film)|The Lost World] famously features a dinosaur being brought to the streets of London, subsequently inspiring the creators to make the 1933 movie King Kong. The Japanese style of giant monster movies with suitmation starts as early as the 1930s with movies such as Wasei Kingu Kongu, The Great Buddha Arrival, and King Kong That Appeared in Edo">King Kong (1933 film)">King Kong That Appeared in Edo. The first Japanese "kaiju movie" to see international success is the 1954 feature Godzilla. When developing it, creators drew inspiration from the character of King Kong, both in its influential 1933 film and in the conception of a giant monster, establishing it as a pivotal precursor in the evolution of the genre. During their formative years, kaiju movies were generally neglected by Japanese critics, who regarded them as "juvenile gimmick", according to authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski.
Kaiju are often somewhat metaphorical in nature; Godzilla, for example, initially served as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, reflecting the fears of post-war Japan following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. Other notable examples of kaiju include Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Gamera, and King Kong.

Etymology

The Japanese word kaijū originally referred to monsters and creatures from ancient Japanese legends; it earlier appeared in the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas. There are no traditional depictions of kaijū or kaijū-like creatures among the yōkai of Japanese folklore, although it is possible to find megafauna in their mythology. After sakoku ended and Japan was opened to foreign relations in the mid-19th century, the term kaijū came to be used to express concepts from paleontology and legendary creatures from around the world. For example, the extinct Ceratosaurus-like cryptid featured in The Monster of "Partridge Creek" by French writer Georges Dupuy was referred to as kaijū.
It is worthy to note that in the Meiji era, Jules Verne's works were introduced to the Japanese public, achieving great success around 1890.

History

Early history

Genre elements were present at the end of Winsor McCay's 1921 animated short The Pet in which a mysterious giant animal starts destroying the city, until it is countered by a massive airstrike. It was based on a 1905 episode of McCay's comic strip series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.

Prehistoric monster era (1920s–1940s)

The first feature films starring giant movie monsters made their debute during the interwar period. The period is defined by its use of prehistoric creatures that survived to modern times in undiscovered natural areas or through prolonged hibernation, such as natural cryopreservation in caves and icebergs, which then come into contact with troublesome humans and then begin their rampage.
The 1925 film The Lost World, featured many dinosaurs, including a brontosaurus that breaks loose in London and destroys Tower Bridge. The film's layout was revolutionary and laid the foundation for future giant monster films. The film takes place on an unexplored mountain plateau like a deserted island teeming with prehistoric dinosaurs. The dinosaurs of The Lost World were animated by pioneering stop motion techniques by Willis H. O'Brien, who would some years later animate the giant gorilla-like creature breaking loose in New York City in the 1933 film King Kong. The enormous success of King Kong can be seen as the definitive breakthrough of giant monster movies. This influential achievement of King Kong paved the way for the emergence of the giant monster genre, serving as a blueprint for future kaiju productions. Its success reverberated in the film industry, leaving a lasting impact and solidifying the figure of the giant monster as an essential component in genre cinematography.
The 1942 Superman animated short The Arctic Giant features a cryopreserved Tyrannosaurus which thaws out and attacks Metropolis. It is one of pioneering productions to depict a Godzilla-esque character to attack a modern civilization.

First Japanese kaiju movies (1930s)

The Japanese style of making giant monster movies, where the monster is portrayed by actors in monster suits, so called "suitmation", appears in the early 1930s. Early examples includes the 1933 King King spoof Wasei Kingu Kongu, the 1934 feature The Great Buddha Arrival, and 1938 feature and The King Kong That Appeared in Edo. Although all three films became lost during World War II, stills of the films have survived, and are some of the earliest examples of kaiju movies in Japanese cinematic history. The 1934 film presumably influenced the production of the Ultraman franchise.

Mutant and atomic monster era (1950s)

After World War II, the roots of giant movie monsters started to shift from giant prehistoric monsters to monsters stemming from animals which had been exposed to strong radiation and then mutated into gigantic monsters, a result of the fear of nuclear proliferation that spread around the world during the Cold War.
One of the eary prolific examples is Ray Bradbury's short story published in the Saturday Evening Post, June 23, 1951, "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms", which came to serve as the basis for the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, featuring a fictional dinosaur, called a Rhedosaurus, which is released from its frozen, hibernating state by an atomic bomb test within the Arctic Circle. The American movie was released in Japan in 1954 under the title The Atomic Kaiju Appears, marking the first use of the genre's name in a film title. It directly inspired Godzilla, released in 1954, and many more giant monster movies of similar nature, such as Them!, Tarantula, and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, etc.
Godzilla from 1954 is a rather unique example of the era, as it's not simply representing fear of nuclear proliferation, but also reflecting the experience that Japan faced upon the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer for Toho Studios in Tokyo, needed a film to release after his previous project was halted. Seeing how well the Hollywood giant monster movie genre films King Kong and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had done in Japanese box offices, and himself a fan of these films, he set out to make a new movie based on them and created Godzilla. Tanaka aimed to combine Hollywood giant monster movies with the re-emerged Japanese fears of atomic weapons that arose from the Daigo Fukuryū Maru fishing boat incident; and so he put a team together and created the concept of a giant radioactive creature emerging from the depths of the ocean, a creature that would become the monster Godzilla. Godzilla initially had commercial success in Japan, inspiring other kaiju movies.
Following the success of Godzilla's first appearance, Toho followed up the following year with a sequel, called Godzilla Raids Again, which introduced the concept of the "monster fight", in which two Kaiju fights one another. In the movie, Godzilla faces off with another kaiju monster called Anguirus, which is the first monster, aside Godzilla, to be introduced into the Godzilla franchise.

Space Age era (1960s-1970s)

During the 1960s, the Japanese studio Toho started to experiment with having kaiju from different movies fight one another, culminating in RKO Pictures later licensing King Kong to Toho, resulting in the co-productions King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes, both directed by Ishirō Honda.
With the advent of the Space Race and Space Age, themes of giant monsters from outer space and alien invasions started to appear in kaiju movies. Examples include the Godzilla film Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, where the "space dragon" King Ghidorah is introduced for the first time, but also more obscure films such as The X from Outer Space. Giant monsters from outer space are traditionally associated with fictional aliens who bring them to Earth to conquer the planet or similar.
During the 1960s, a rival franchise to Godzilla would also be launched by Japanese studio Daiei Film, introducing the giant monster turtle Gamera, which have come to play a significant role in forming the genre along with the Godzilla franchise and the Ultra Series.

Terminology

''Kaiju''

The term kaijū translates literally as "strange beast". Kaiju can be antagonistic, protagonistic, or a neutral force of nature, but are more specifically preternatural creatures of divine power. They are not merely "big animals". Godzilla, for example, from its first appearance in the initial 1954 entry in the Godzilla franchise, has manifested all of these aspects. Other examples of kaiju include Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Anguirus, King Kong, Gamera, Megalon, The Cloverfield Monster, Gappa, Guilala, and Yonggary.
As a noun, kaijū is an invariant, as both the singular and the plural expressions are identical: "a kaiju" and "several kaiju".

''Daikaiju''

Daikaijū literally translates as "giant kaiju" or "great kaiju". This hyperbolic term was used to denote greatness of the subject kaiju, the prefix dai- emphasizing great size, power, and/or status. The first known appearance of the term daikaiju in the 20th Century was in the publicity materials for the original 1954 release of Godzilla. Specifically, in the subtitle on the original movie poster, Suibaku Daikaiju Eiga,.
Gamera, the Giant Monster, the first film of the Gamera franchise in 1965, also utilized the term, where the Japanese title of the film is Daikaijū Gamera, as did The X from Outer Space from 1967, where the Japanese title is Uchū Daikaijū Girara.

''Mecha kaiju''

Mecha kaiju are mechanical or cybernetic kaiju. Such may be a unique character, like Moguera and Gigan, but also a robot clone of an existing kaiju, such as Mechani-Kong and Mechagodzilla, mainly produced by a foe to fight the real kaiju. Other forms includes cyborg modifications to an existing kaiju to improve its abilities against a stronger kaiju, such as Mecha-King Ghidorah and Modified Gigan.
One of the first mecha kaiju was "Mechani-Kong" in King Kong Escapes, but the most famous example is "Mechagodzilla", introduced in the apply named Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

''Ultra Kaiju''

Ultra-Kaiju is a separate strata of kaijū that specifically refers to kaiju in the long-running Ultra Series franchise.

''Kaijin''

Kaijin refers to distorted human beings or humanoid-like creatures. The origin of kaijin goes back to the early 20th Century Japanese literature, starting with Edogawa Rampo's 1936 novel, The Fiend with Twenty Faces. The story introduced Edogawa's master detective, Kogoro Akechi's arch-nemesis, the eponymous "Fiend", a mysterious master of disguise, whose real face was unknown; the Moriarty to Akechi's Sherlock. Catching the public's imagination, many such literary and movie villains took on the mantle of kaijin. To be clear, kaijin is not an offshoot of kaiju. The first-ever kaijin that appeared on film was The Great Buddha Arrival a lost film, made in 1934. After the Pacific War, the term was modernized when it was adopted to describe the bizarre, genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced evil humanoid spawn conceived for the Kamen Rider Series in 1971. This created a new splinter of the term, which quickly propagated through the popularity of superhero programs produced from the 1970s, forward. These kaijin possess rational thought and the power of speech, as do human beings. A successive kaijin menagerie, in diverse iterations, appeared over numerous series, most notably the Super Sentai programs premiering in 1975.
This created yet another splinter, as the kaijin of Super Sentai have since evolved to feature unique forms and attributes, existing somewhere between kaijin and kaiju.

''Seijin''

Seijin, appears within Japanese words for extraterrestrial aliens, such as Kaseijin, which means "Martian". Aliens can also be called uchūjin which means "spacemen". Among the best known Seijin in the genre can be found in the Ultra Series, such as Alien Baltan from Ultraman, a race of cicada-like aliens who have gone on to become one of the franchise's most enduring and recurring characters other than the Ultras themselves.
Toho has produced a variety of kaiju films over the years, but other Japanese studios contributed to the genre by producing films and shows of their own: Daiei Film, Tsuburaya Productions, and Shochiku and Nikkatsu Studios.

''Monster fight''

Monster fights simply refers to fights in movies were kaiju fights eachother or equivelant, which can be divided further. Monster fights are extremely common in kaiju movies overall, and most Godzilla, King Kong, and Gamera movies, etc, features such.
A common motif in regards to monster fights is when the main kaiju fights the opposing monsters as a defender of mankind. King Kong infamously fought a tyrannosaur to defend the love interest Ann Darrow. Gamera, despite being the bad guy in the first movie, featured elements as a guardian of children, which eventually became his main trait.

''Monster duel''

Monster duels refers to monster fights where two kaiju duels one another, a subgenre of its own, combining the versus movie genre with the kaiju genre. The first monster duels occurred in early dinosaur movies, such as The Lost World and King Kong, especially the latter, where King Kong infamously fights a tyrannosaur. The first movie revolving around a monster duel was Godzilla Raids Again from 1955, featuring Godzilla facing off with another kaiju monster called Anguirus.

''Monster rumble''

Monster rumbles refers to monster fights where several kaiju fights eachother, a subgenre of its own. The first movie to introduce this concept was Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, where Godzilla, Rodan, and King Ghidorah, fight eachother.

Monster techniques

, who was in charge of the special effects for Godzilla, developed a technique to animate the kaiju that became known colloquially as "suitmation". Where Western monster movies often used stop motion to animate the monsters, Tsubaraya decided to attempt to create suits, called "creature suits", for a human to wear and act in. This was combined with the use of miniature models and scaled-down city sets to create the illusion of a giant creature in a city. Due to the extreme stiffness of the latex or rubber suits, filming would often be done at double speed, so that when the film was shown, the monster was smoother and slower than in the original shot.
Kaiju films also used a form of puppetry interwoven between suitmation scenes for shots that were physically impossible for the suit actor to perform. From the 1998 release of Godzilla, American-produced kaiju films strayed from suitmation to computer-generated imagery. In Japan, CGI and stop-motion have been increasingly used for certain special sequences and monsters, but suitmation has been used for an overwhelming majority of kaiju films produced in Japan of all eras.

Selected media

Manga

Novels

Comics

Video games

Board games

Television

Other appearances

  • Steven Spielberg cited Godzilla as an inspiration for Jurassic Park, specifically Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, which he saw in his youth. During its production, Spielberg described Godzilla as "the most masterful of all the dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening." One scene in the second movie, the T-Rex is rampaging through San Diego. One scene shows Japanese businessmen fleeing. One of them states that they left Japan to get away from this, hinting that Godzilla shares the same universe as the Jurassic Park movies. Godzilla also influenced the Spielberg film Jaws.
  • The popular Pokémon media franchise has been inspired by kaiju culture since its inception, and many of its monster designs are based on kaiju.
  • The music video for the Beastie Boys' 1998 song "Intergalactic", directed by band member Adam Yauch and featuring a giant robot battling a giant octopus-headed monster, causing destruction to a city in the process, is inspired by Japanese kaiju films and TV series such as Godzilla and Giant Robo.
  • In the Japanese-language original of the Cardcaptor Sakura List of [Cardcaptor Sakura episodes|anime series], Sakura's brother Toya likes to tease her by regularly calling her "kaiju", relating to her noisily coming down from her room for breakfast every morning.
  • The Polish cartoon TV series Bolek and Lolek makes a reference to the kaiju film industry in the miniseries "Bolek and Lolek's Great Journey" by featuring a robot bird and a saurian monster as part of a Japanese director's monster star repertoire.
  • The Inspector Gadget film had Robo-Gadget attacking San Francisco à la kaiju monsters. In addition, similar to The Lost World, it shows a Japanese man while fleeing from Robo-Gadget declaring in his native tongue that he left Tokyo specifically to get away from this.
  • Alternate versions of several kaiju – Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera, King Ghidorah, and Daimajin – appear in the Usagi Yojimbo "Sumi-e" story arc.
  • In the second season of Star Wars: [The Clone Wars (2008 TV series)|Star Wars: The Clone Wars], there is a story arc composed of two episodes entitled "The Zillo Beast" and "The Zillo Beast Strikes Back", mostly influenced by Godzilla films, in which a huge reptilian beast is transported from its homeworld Malastare to the city-covered planet Coruscant, where it breaks loose and goes on a rampage.
  • In Return of the Jedi, the rancor was originally to be played by an actor in a suit similar to how kaiju films like Godzilla were made. However, the rancor was eventually portrayed by a puppet filmed in high speed.
  • The South Park episode "Mecha-Streisand" features parodies of Mechagodzilla, Gamera, Ultraman, and Mothra.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters features the "Insanoflex", a giant robot exercise machine rampaging downtown.
  • In the 2009 film Crank: High Voltage, there is a sequence parodying kaiju films using the same practical effects techniques used for tokusatsu films such as miniatures and suitmation.
  • The Japanese light novel series Gate makes use of the term kaiju as a term for giant monsters – specifically an ancient Fire Dragon – in the Special Region. Also, one of the Japanese protagonists refers to the JSDF's tradition to fight such monsters in the films, as well as comparing said dragon with King Ghidorah at one point.
  • Godzilla and Gamera had been referenced and appear many times throughout the Dr. Slump series.
  • In Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, there is a dimension that is filled with giant monsters that live on one island where they co-exist with humans that live on a city island.
  • In the "Sorcerous Stabber Orphen" series kaiju are sent as a form of punishment for the breakage of everlasting laws of the world by the Goddesses of Fate.
  • Batholith the Summit Kaiju is a mountain originating from "Summit Kaiju International", an American media company based in Denver, Colorado. Batholith was first introduced to Godzilla fan during G-Fest 2017, which is an annual convention devoted to the Godzilla film franchise. Batholith the Summit Kaiju has appeared in various print media, including Famous Monsters of Filmland "Ack-Ives: Godzilla Magazine, MyKaiju Godzilla Magazine MyKaiju Godzilla Magazine, Summit Kaiju online video series, and other online media related to the Godzilla and kaiju genre.
  • In the Nemesis Saga series of novels, Kaiju, also known as "Gestorumque", are genetic weapons sent by an alien race.
  • Naoki Urasawa's 2013 one-shot manga "Kaiju Kingdom" follows a "kaiju otaku" in a world where kaiju actually exist.
  • In the 2019 Vanillaware video game 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, protagonists battle large mechanized aliens called Kaiju.
  • In John Scalzi's 2022 book The Kaiju Preservation Society, kaiju are a species of gigantic monsters that exist in a parallel earth accessible through radiation sources.
  • In What If...? season 3 episode "What If... the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?", Bruce Banner attempts to cure himself from the Hulk by bombarding himself with Gamma radiation, only to a kaiju-like monster called the "Apex Hulk", which serves as the episode's antagonist.