Considering that this blog now houses reviews of seven Showa Gamera movies, as well as two of the Heisei ones, a maniacal sense of completism persuades me to also write about what is, to date, the last Gamera movie ever made, representing not so much an era but a potential era that was not to be. Gamera the Brave was released seven years after Revenge of Iris concluded Shusuke Kaneko’s trilogy—and not unlike the first movie in that trilogy, coming out just as the Godzilla series was going on hiatus, one that lasted much longer than the previous one. When one kaiju hibernates, another one comes to take its place in Japanese movie theatres—unfortunately, this one evidently did not get the box office necessary to keep it going, and what seemed like a beginning of another series of giant rocket-powered turtle adventures turned into a one-off followed by a decade-and-a-half of silence (except for a 2015 proof-of-concept short, which also went nowhere.) Unlike the hard reboot of the nineties trilogy—with a new continuity and a darker tone—Brave positions itself as a return to the original incarnation, directly tying itself to the classic films and going back to the child-friendly plots. This is a movie that buys wholeheartedly into the thesis I posited at the end of my last NCC post, that the series ultimately became about the deep empathetic connection between optimistic children and a (fantastical) animal, putting the young audience who loved kaiju movies at the centre. But this movie also mines that youthfulness for drama, taking a rather melancholy turn at many points—this is not just pandering to kids, but playing on both their dreams and their anxieties, and in some ways presages the tone of Jellyfish Eyes.
Brave opens by establishing a canonical ending to the Gamera mythology, with the original Gamera fighting one last battle in 1973 (two years after the release of the last “proper” Showa movie), ultimately sacrificing itself to save a group of humans from his old enemy, Gyaos—a scene that rather subtly references Super Monster (the whole self-sacrifice thing) and Revenge of Iris (which ended with Gamera facing off against a group of Gyaos.) The movie then moves to “present day”, where a child who witnessed that event has grown up to have his own son, and while the two of them are still dealing with the death of their wife/mother, the son Toru goes out to an island near his fishing village home and finds a mysterious egg on a glowing stone, which immediately hatches into a baby turtle (it’s clearly a tortoise, but who could possibly care.) As you may have guessed, this turtle, which is named Toto (the nickname Toru’s mother gave him) turns out to be somewhat special—it grows quickly, can fly around, and breathes fire, leading to hide-your-new-pet-from-your-parents antics. Toto grows so large that eventually Toru and his friends need to move it to a clubhouse on the beach, conveniently right before the emergence of a sea monster called Zedus, which had been attacking ships and has now come ashore to wreak havoc. As it turns out, Toto is either the offspring or the reincarnation of Gamera (it’s never really said which), and becomes kaiju-sized just in time to engage the malevolent new monster in battle, although it proves an overpowering opponent until Toru feeds him the glowing rock he found with his egg, after which he can go full Gamera on Zedus’ reptilian keister.
That all sounds simple enough, but we take a real emotional journey on the way there, combining small-scale character drama with somewhat interesting ideas about a world that once had giant monsters, but hasn’t seen any for decades. There’s a lot of stuff that follow the “kid befriends fantasy creature” template pretty thoroughly, including the aforementioned comedy scenes where Toru hides Toto from his father (who runs a small restaurant, and probably knows that turtles spread salmonella), and ones where he shows him off to his best friends—it even includes the old “take animal back to wild, yell at animal to make it stop following you, and then cry about it” scene (which occurs in the middle of the first act, much earlier than most movies) and, when Toto grows gigantic, shows a bit of E.T. Influence as the turtle is forcibly taken by government scientists to a lab so they can figure out how to give him all his old Gamera powers back (making them the least sinister government scientists I’ve seen in a movie like this, although they aren’t exactly portrayed as heroic, either.) The tiny version of Toto, when it’s a real tortoise with some CGI-animated expressiveness grafted on, or a puppet, is almost sickeningly cute, and its scenes are the lightest in the movie—but, from the outset, those are contrasted with how Toru is constantly haunted by the spectre of death. Finding Toto brings some light into his life after the loss of his mother, but is rather quickly tinged with fear as he learns that the neighbour girl he is friends with (both are fans of the manga Sgt. Frog, which, surprise, is published by Kadokawa, the company that owns the movie studio that produced Gamera the Brave) is going in for heart surgery, and then again as he becomes increasingly fearful that Toto will give its life to take down its enemy just like the original Gamera did. Toru comes off as the complete opposite of the heroic boys from the Showa movies, who actively encouraged Gamera to fight—he has raised a kaiju, but doesn’t want it to be a kaiju because he knows that kaiju are constantly getting in life-or-death battles, and he doesn’t want to face another loss. It’s a genuinely interesting take on the genre’s tropes, taking the kid-and-monster relationship story to different places. It also takes that kid-monster connection seriously right to the end, too—part of the climax is taken up by numerous kids passing the magic stone from one to another on the panicked streets of Nagoya, all of them having some innate connection to Toto/Gamera and wanting to help it succeed. Maybe all that stuff can come off as a bit too archly sentimental, especially when combined with all the saccharine piano and accordion music that makes up most of the movie’s soundtrack, but I like that it at least tries to give this kind of movie an emotional core.
While the kid stuff is developed throughout the movie, most of the stuff involving adults (and the government in particular) kind of comes and goes. Early on, we hear on the news that the Japanese government’s “Monster Council”—apparently a remnant from the era when Gamera and the other monsters were still around—has been disbanded, and the current ministers are utterly dismissive when their own biologists suggests that a new monster is behind all the disappearing ships. On the other hand, as soon as Zedus and Toto show up, the government and military are immediately on the ball (although there is no military vehicle action here, which is almost shocking), so shutting the council down really didn’t change much about their response (and they seem to already know that they want to have a Gamera on hand for the future, so they attempt to capture Toto even after it destroys Zedus.) Gamera’s existence has had an impact, as most of the adults (beyond Toru’s father) recognize him, and he even had an impact on local industry, as his death apparently created precious stones that the neighbour girl’s jeweller parents sell. There are plenty of signs that this is meant to take place in a world where giant monsters are part of the history books, even if they haven’t been a factor for thirty years, but the idea is mostly underdeveloped here, maybe because they thought they’d do more with it in future movies.
Then there’s Zedus, which is not the most interesting monster Gamera has ever fought—he’s really just a slightly stylized dinosaur that has a chameleon tongue tipped with a spear, with no origin or motive—but is played as scary throughout, devouring a whole group of people and committing some classically Gamera violence against Toto, which makes it more along the lines of foes like Gyaos and Barugon (which is probably where the long tongue came from.) It’s not a stated idea in Brave, but it’s shown that Zedus comes ashore wherever Toto/Gamera is, implying that these kaiju seem to be innately drawn to each other. Maybe it’s not a super memorable monster on its own, but they play its menace straight enough that it works for the vibe of the movie, even if it also makes you think “hey, remember, when when this movie was about a cute baby turtle flying around and not watching people terrified and killed by a rampaging hellbeast?”
The monster effects in this are pretty good, with terrific-looking suits and good meshing of miniatures and CGI (except for one shot where it looks like the monsters are on top of a JPEG map)—you can sometimes see the 2006-ness of the computer effects, but it’s never particularly distracting. Toto’s design, even in giant monster form, is much friendlier-looking than even the Showa Gamera, with his big, expressive eyes and much less threatening-looking tusks, keeping his characterization intact. Brave was directed by Ryuta Tasaki, who worked (and still works) on tokusatsu shows like Kamen Rider, including their feature film spin-offs, and this definitely has the look of one those shows with an appropriately upped budget. It is also a very beige movie, with the backgrounds bordering on sepia toned—which works pretty well for the cloudy seaside town setting of most of the movie (it’s kinda unique how small town this one is, compared to most kaiju flicks), but also seems to be a choice very much of its era. I’m not the only one who remembers most mid-2000s movies being that desaturated, right?
Gamera the Brave is a generally pretty successful re-envisioning of the series, sitting somewhere between the silly Showa entries and the older-skewing Heisei ones in tone and adding a bit of emotional weight to the proceedings that is thoughtfully derived from the ideas these movies were always playing with. Yes, it can be a bit cutesy and a bit weepy at times, but I respect the way its trying to take the kid/kaiju connection seriously, and plays on the nostalgia of the audience without getting too much into brainless fan service—it captures at least part of the feeling of the franchise, if not the exact way that feeling was executed previously. I have no idea how a potential series would have played out following on this, but I guess it’s a question that will never have a definitive answer—so, as it stands, it was not the beginning of a new generation, but a sincere farewell to one of the genre’s longest-lived icons.
*FINAL POINTLESS OBSERVATIONS I COULDN’T FIT INTO THE MAIN TEXT: This movie was distributed by Shochiku, the company that gave us The X From Outer Space. During the end credits, we see baby Toto crawling on a desk covered in toys—aside from a Kamen Rider or two (a nod from the director, most likely), you can also see figures of Daimon and Kappa from Daiei’s own Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 