MOTHRA (1961)

 

MOTHRA boasts a superior kaiju script in all respects.  Even if the titular monster had been poorly conceived or designed, I'd still find the viewpoint characters charming in their wonder at the monster's strangeness and their moral defense of nonhuman forms in life in the face of economic exploitation.  Even the character who's there to provide comic relief is much more palatable than most such characters.


But Mothra, the true star of the show, is in her original form one of the best creatures from the Golden Age of monster cinema.  Whereas most monsters of this period were "fish out of water," usually prehistoric animals violently translated to the modern era, Mothra is a creature that has been perennially reborn from archaic times to the present-- reborn within its isolated environment, the so-called "Infant Island."  One does not know in this film how the first Mothra came into being, only that the creature begins as a gigantic larva, capable of spinning yards of silk, both in self-defense and for the purpose of creating a cocoon.  After gestating in its cocoon, the larva emerges as a gargantuan moth, who borrows Rodan's routine of whipping up cyclonic winds with its wings (and frankly, doing it much better). The giant moth then lays an egg in which one or more Mothrae will be born once the parent has passed on.

The film also succeeds by taking the kaiju genre in a new direction, rather than simply reiterating the antinuclear critique of GODZILLA.  The film begins with a scientific expedition to Infant Island, underwritten by the corrupt financiers of "Rosilica" (a stand-in for the United States).  The well-meaning Japanese scientists along for the ride are horrified to see the Rosilicans slaughter the islanders in order to kidnap the two priestesses of the Mothra-cult; doll-sized "fairies" whom the Rosilicans wish to place on display to the curious public.  This plot may have been derived in part from the model of KING KONG, where the economic exploiters shanghai not a dangerous beast worshipped by natives. Rather, the kidnappers take the priestesses who are part of that worship-- which nonetheless results in a dangerous beast coming after the transgressors.

MOTHRA is also a film with a great sense of color: though the larva-form of Mothra is a dull brown, the moth-form is a dazzling creation, in vivid contrast to most giant beasties, who tend to be monochromatic.  The creature seems almost too delicate to withstand the cannons of Japan's self-defense forces, or the atomic heat-ray of the "Rosilicians"-- which is a rather "back-door" way of injecting some critique of nuclear power into the film.

True, in the monster-mash films it was sometimes harder to make Mothra's power convincing in the presence of hulking brutes like Godzilla and Rodan.  But the original film maintains its own integrity in this matter, managing to strike a balance between the fairy-tale quality of Mothra's island-existence and the modern technologies which humankind employs against the great creature.  In addition, this is a rare monster-film that emphasizes the hegemony of feminine nature, represented not only by the egg-laying moth but also by the twin priestesses, whose doubled nature makes them more uncanny than a single priestess would have been.  Thus MOTHRA's critique of modern civilization is one of the few monster-films not to display a masculine gender-bias.