Giant monster enthusiasts don’t get their fancies tickled too often. Unlike those moviegoers with a penchant for zombie movies or alien invasion flicks, it’s not as if every year brings the kaiju aficionado a satisfying entry in the sub-genre of his choice. Each city-shaking film that does arrive is greeted with open arms and ready wallets—those of us with Godzilla fever just want to see some buildings knocked down and a good romper-stomper bout of mammoth fisticuffs before the credits roll.
Last year’s Negadon: The Monster from Mars is computer animated short that acts as a loving homage to the Japanese science fiction films of the 1960s. Created by Jun Awazu, Negadon succeeds in capturing the spirit of movies like Godzilla vs. Monster Zero (1965), and in that respect the film is reason enough for kaiju fans to celebrate. The disappointing narrative and occasionally uneven animation serve as an unfortunate flip side to Negadon’s heartfelt recreation of the look and feel of the films of the era.
In the year 2025 humankind makes strides toward terraforming the planet Mars in response to Earth’s rampant overpopulation. One spaceship, the Izanami, finds a mysterious object beneath the Martian surface and carries it back to Earth. In orbit the Izanami breaks apart and the object it is carrying plummets into the atmosphere and lands outside Buffalo, New York. Just kidding! The object bores into the center of Tokyo, of course. It also reveals itself to be a pod containing a giant monster about 200 feet tall. So for Tokyo, this is really just Tuesday. The flying, beam-throwing monster is dubbed Negadon (presumably by the Japanese Ministry of Monster Naming) and military forces are dispatched to attack the monster by the Ministry of Futile Gestures. In a nice little nod to Godzilla movies, we’re led to believe that in 2025 the JSDF is still using the old F-104 Starfighter jets.
The only hope Japan has is Dr. Narasaki, who used to head the Narasaki Walking Machine Laboratory. (That name isn’t a joke.) Ten years earlier Narasaki lost his daughter in a freak accident involving a giant robot, but as it turns out that even though the good doctor swore off of scientific research, he’s been keeping the giant MI-6 2 “Miroku” prototype fueled and ready to go. He even managed to build a giant underwater launch ramp without anyone noticing. Though the robot was supposedly built to construct a Martian space station, it has a remarkable array of weaponry, lightning-fast combat moves, and alien laser-beam shielding in all the right places. In a relatively efficient twenty-five minutes (all the more remarkable for the fact that at least half that time is spent on rather ineffectual character-building scenes), Narasaki pilots his creation himself to the destruction of the alien invader.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about Negadon, and what will endear it most to kaiju fans, is that even though the short uses pretty close to cutting edge CGI great pains were taken to make all the monsters, robots, and cityscapes to look like models. (Though strangely the tanks are exempt from this rule and there isn’t a maser in sight.) Even the space scenes are done against the dark blue background of Toho sci-fi films rather than the more realistic black we know is actually up there. The entire picture has been “filmed” in subdued color tones and with faux scratchy-film effects to make it feel like a ’60s movie. Though Negadon himself (itself?) is an impressive creature that would have been impossible to create with ’60s rubber suit technology, his (its?) beam weapon has all the cheesy energy of King Ghidorah’s lightning breath.
Sadly, that attention to atmospheric detail is almost all that Negadon has going for it. A short that should have been 90% monster-robot action punctuated by occasional scenes of character motivation has its scales tipped in favor of dialogue scenes that keep the action from starting and stall it out once the monster finally appears. These might be more forgivable in a traditional film where monster scenes are more expensive to shoot than talking heads, but in an all-CG film they are inexcusable. Director Jun Awazu replaces drama with melodrama as when Narasaki’s daughter is killed and we see her empty shoe amongst the explosion debris. The simple visual of the shoe is enough to communicate the point, but Awazu, sensing that not everyone in the audience has quite clued in, dissolves the scene into a closeup of the shoe. Further crucial monster minutes are lost as a pointless young military officer drags Narasaki’s memories over the coals and we see the young girl dance spastically across the screen. (Let’s just say more attention was paid to the monster and robot design than to the naturalistic motions of the human characters.)
Even when Narasaki suits up and begins his battle with Negadon, the results are frustrating. The film is a queer hybrid of Godzilla and Gundam tropes; we see lots of city destruction and lingering shots of beam weapons powering up, but precious little in the way of actual fighting. There is a fetishistic amount of detail in the scenes in which Narasaki and Negadon swing their weapons into position but there can’t be more than a dozen actual punches thrown during the entire fight. Ultraman knew the value of a good wrestling match with the monster before the finishing blow — you’ve got to give the audience its money’s worth in karate chops and tumbling around the landscape — but Awazu almost completely fails in this regard. It’s surprising to see someone who knows so much about a genre of film show so little awareness of what makes it entertaining.
