Episode 102 - Mothra (Ishirō Honda, 1961) (with Alex Davidson)
Mothra (Ishirō Honda, 1961).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Chris and Alex take their first visit to the Japanese kaiju genre for Episode 102 of the podcast thanks to Toho studio’s 1961 feature Mothra (Ishirō Honda, 1961), a film that kickstarted the longstanding Mothra monster movie franchise. Joining them to discuss the history and legacy of Japanese cinema’s famous winged creature is Alex Davidson, cinema curator at the Barbican Theatre who also writes on film for the BFI and beyond, with a specialism is queer cinema and television. To tie in with the Barbican’s screening of Mothra on August 24th 2022 as part of their Outdoor Cinema series, the trio reflect on the genesis of Mothra as a character and its importance to twentieth-century Japanese monster cinema; the codes and conventions of the kaiju film, and connections to Japan’s postwar national trauma following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; distinctions between revenge and rampage that structure Mothra narratives; allegories of modernity that recur across supernatural fables; the fluctuating scales of the film’s practical VFX imagery (from superimpositions and forced perspectives to models and miniatures) all directed by Eiji Tsuburaya; the political stakes of its fictional setting of Rolisica that combines East Asian and European influences; and what director Ishirō Honda has to say about science, finance, technology, and soft economic power through both Mothra’s reign of terror and the character’s desire to ‘protect.’
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Barr, Jason. 2016. The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.
Betz, Mark. 2009. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 2007. “A Clumsy Sublime.” Film Quarterly 60, no. 3: 3.
Tanikawa, Takeshi. 2020. “Kaiju Films as Exportable Content: Reassessing the function of the Japanese Film Export Promotion Association.” In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, eds. Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa, 113-127. London: Routledge.
Rhoads, Sean, and Brooke McCorkle. 2018. Japan's Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.