"Godzilla, king of the monsters" starring Raymond Burr, in this 1956 horror. The scholar noted that an estimated 20 minutes of the original Japanese film, predominantly the politically charged portions, were cut out of the American version. The movie was heavily edited, placing the white actor Raymond Burr at the center of the adaptation. However, American audiences saw a different film when it was brought stateside as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” roughly two years later, Tsutsui said. The ending, while bittersweet, is a hopeful one in which humanity triumphs over evil. People were able to witness Tokyo being destroyed once more while seeing radiation given the physical form of a monster. ![]() “The reality is just this sort of rage that comes from someone, essentially innocent, who is so victimized and scarred by this experience,” the scholar said.įor many Japanese viewers, seeing the movie was a cathartic, validating experience, the scholar said. Tsutsui describes the monster as “innocent as the kids on their playgrounds in Hiroshima.” After an American H-bomb test in the South Pacific, the creature became radiated, hurt and angry. In the original Japanese film, the creature was portrayed as a surviving dinosaur from the Jurassic Period, swimming around the South Pacific. “But when the Japanese had their independence back, and as filmmakers were thinking about giant monsters, people began to think about that connection between monstrosity and the atomic bombing.” And Japanese people, as well, were very reticent about discussing this tragedy, because it was so horrible, and because they felt a sense of guilt and shame about those events,” Tsutsui said. It was a topic that could not be discussed. “Japanese creative artists, filmmakers, novelists and so forth really couldn't talk about the atomic bombings. The screen depicted what many could not explicitly say. The movie served as a strong political statement, representative of the traumas and anxieties of the Japanese people in an era when censorship was extensive in Japan because of the American occupation of the country after the war ended, Tsutsui said. ![]() 6 and Nagasaki three days later, and while many Americans today think of the film as an almost campy relic of its time, it was intended in Japan to be a metaphor for the ills of atomic testing and the use of nuclear weapons, considering what Japan endured after the bombings. This month is the 75th anniversary of the U.S. The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it of its political message before presenting it to American audiences to deflect from the U.S. “Most Americans think if you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” told NBC Asian America. American audiences, however, had the opposite reaction, finding comedic value in what many interpreted as a cheesy monster movie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |