Our vision of history is heavily influenced by the imagery we see. This imagery can capture the sentiment of an entire era in a single piece. Nothing works better as a visual metaphor for the anxiety and tension of a post war Japan than Godzilla. Directed by Ishiro Honda, 1954s Gojira was meant to express the anger left behind after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Over time the core message of what made Godzilla so meaningful in Japan was lost. The westernization of the film bastardized everything that originally made Godzilla such an icon in Japan. Gojira was and still is one of the boldest political statements ever put the film. It was a metaphor for the fear and anxiety of Japan following World War II, masquerading as a creature feature. …show more content…
Where the westernized version failed was how it introduced an American perspective to an experience that was so specifically Japanese without understanding it. The film was supposed to be a nuclear allegory, so when it stripped of its message all that's left is a dinosaur stomping on buildings. Despite the criticism, Godzilla found its place in the west in theaters and on tv. The films own popularity in the west caused the original film to become obscured for years. The original version wasn't even available to the west until the remastered version in 2004. This was fifty years after and its original films release. And, over those fifty years, the meaning of Godzilla has shifted from man made disastrous to Kaju battles (strange beast battles). He's embraced his Americanized title as "King of the monsters" becoming Japan's tourist attraction instead of its destroyer. And his change in character because of the American bastardization of the first film. Godzilla as we know him today is as much a creation of America as he is of Japan. He's a product of the Nagasaki , he's a product of Hiroshima, and he's a product of western audiences inability to accept
Brothers’ appeals to ethos when he says “Godzilla is a film that deserves to be taken seriously, but to accept what the movie is saying on its own terms one must understand its subtle anti-American tone and dissertation of destruction” (612). This appeals to ethos by telling us although the American’s caused massive destruction in Japan, it was evident that they did not fully understand the devastation of the Japanese that they had caused. However, the Japanese made subtle remarks at the American’s throughout the Godzilla movie. Remarks about the bombing and how they truly felt about Americans after we caused so much destruction in their country. “While it has been argued that there never would have been a Hiroshima had there never been a Pearl Harbor, what is also true is that without Hiroshima there would have never been a Godzilla” (613). This is also appealing to ethos, because there is so much logic in that one sentence, that sentence is a very true fact from Peter H. Brothers’ perspective on the relationship between the bombing and Godzilla. One of the last appeals he makes is also to ethos. “The terrible irony in all of this is that if Godzilla is indeed the representation of the dangers of man’s tampering with atomic and nuclear power, it has more recently surfaced in such places as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now in Fukushima, where at the time of this writing a possible nuclear-reactor meltdown threatens consequences beyond even the imagination of the men who brought such terrible fiction to life” (619). In this last appeal could maybe appeal to pathos also but it mostly appeals to ethos. Brothers uses logic when talking about how terrible it would be if Godzilla was really a movie based off something as terrible as the bombing in Japan. For someone to base a enjoyable movie off of something so
Much of what is considered modern Japan has been fundamentally shaped by its involvement in various wars throughout history. In particular, the events of World War II led to radical changes in Japanese society, both politically and socially. While much focus has been placed on the broad, overarching impacts of war on Japan, it is through careful inspection of literature and art that we can understand war’s impact on the lives of everyday people. The Go Masters, the first collaborative film between China and Japan post-WWII, and “Turtleback Tombs,” a short story by Okinawan author Oshiro Tatsuhiro, both give insight to how war can fundamentally change how a place is perceived, on both an abstract and concrete level.
For instance take Godzilla, in “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla” author, Peter H Brothers tells us some history behind the making of the monster. “Godzilla was made in Japan less then a decade after atomic bombs devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still reeling from the trauma of atomic annihilation and the subsequent effects of radioactive poisoning, a team of Japanese filmmakers created a monster that embodied the fears and anxieties in Japan resulting from Nuclear Warfare” (51). Godzilla is a prime example of monsters symbolizing a societies fears. “We create monsters as a reaction to the fears we experience and our inability to control the world around us” (Asma 61). Our inability to not have control of our fate and what other people are going to do will never change, but creating Godzilla gave the people of these
watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an
The Tora! Tora! Tora! film had a brilliant ending with Yamamoto's famous quote: I fear that all we did "is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with terrible resolve is sowing the for certain
warnings of intruder planes coming in the area. It talked about how a lot of
After going on for so long, most would say this violence was just a part of life, unchangeable. However, I believe that the creators of this movie saw a glimpse into what could have become a very real apocalypse in the near future of Earth: the development and dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This film, released just six years after the devastation of Japan and the end of World War II, acted as a warning of what the future could hold, if this violent streak
There’s no doubt that the two films were very different in the message that came across along with other plot details. Brothers tends to support Honda and his views on Godzilla using emotionally based reasoning. He discusses in detail the original film’s deeper message of the consequences of nuclear warfare along with his personal opinions of the movie of the brilliance and simplicity of the cinematography and special effects. Brothers feels as though the remake lacks in the emotional intensity and the main message that Honda created the film for. Yoshiko Ikeda of Ritsumeikan University, provides more factual reasons on why the events of the attack were not explicitly displayed to be against the United States in the article “Godzilla and the Japanese after World War II: From a Scapegoat of the Americans to a Savior of the Japanese.” As stated by Ikeda, the Japanese could not directly condemn America’s choice to bomb because, “any reference to the atomic bombing disasters was prohibited and information implying the existence of the army of occupation was also excluded” (49). This piece of knowledge provides more than bitter tensions being the cause of a change in the narrative of the two movies as backed by Brothers, but as an actual legal agreement that had to occur with the two movie capitals of each country. The two articles also differ in how they choose to define
One of the most famous photographs in history was taken by Joe Rosenthal at the Battle of Iwo Jima, during the Second World War. The American people on a whole embraced this photo and saw it as a firm success for the army, so the government knowing that the war needed lots of added funds decided to cease this opportunity and sent the survivors of the flag razing on a propaganda based bond drive for the army. Clint Eastwood in the way he directed the film showed just how different an image of war is compared to a real war. Clint Eastwood allowed the viewer to get an insight to all three survivors of the photo and this gave an insight to how the war on Iwo Jima and the image that gave them a entirely different course in the war. The dissimilarities between battle at Iwo Jima and the bond drive are evident through the ways in which Clint Eastwood showed what all three men were thinking at different times throughout the bond drive of America.
The modern Godzilla now was greatly linked to science and the environment, an area that was increasingly indefinite and devastating. It represented our generations fears of the unknown and what according to Dendle "it means to be human"(Dendle 177). Throughout his essay, Dendle focuses on the changing nature of the Zombie monster as it gradually re-morphs itself upon newer audiences. In a sense, the changing nature of a monster represents the changing nature of humanity overtime. In the twenty-first century English remake of Godzilla by Gareth Edwards, the monster has drastically changed as Godzilla was now a millennial beast representing our own culture moment. Japan and Russia, now strong economic allies of the United States have simmered down tension, and negotiated peace, thus killing the 20th century Toho-produced Godzilla and the American Zilla that represented the terrors of the atomic bomb. This millennial monster now represented the events that cursed the Millennial generation like the spread of HIV/AID, an unheard of deadly disease that plagued Americans especially during its early development as it became a death sentence to those who were infected, the Year 2000 problem (Y2K), and the surge of the supernatural brought out by the imaginations of a well-informed, tech-savvy generation. In the 2014 film of Godzilla, the fears of the generation
Films are necessary in our time period because the human eye can articulate the message intended through sight allowing visual imagination to occur. In the book, world 2 by Max Brooks, he creates a character by the name Roy Elliot who was a former movie director. Roy Elliot manages to make a movie titled “Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges” and some how it goes viral. Similarly, Frank Capra’s film, “Why we Fight” expresses a sense of understanding the meaning of wars. Films do not inevitably portray truth because they display what the film director views as important and beneficial for people to know.
During the sixth chapter, George talks about his encounter with the dentist. When he got there, he was very interested in the pictures on the wall of teeth. He couldn’t stop examining each and every picture. When he finally got back to the examining room, the technician took an X-ray of his mouth. After the X-rays, he met his dentist, Dr. Thomas. The dentist showed George the pictures of his mouth, and thoroughly explained all the information from the picture. George was hooked and asked many questions in which the dentist didn’t mind answering. He learned that he was going to need braces and how braces were put in his mouth. George was very fascinated
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
World War II left a variety of perspectives to people all around the world and it even knocked on the door of the movie industry. Through the five movies shown below, a different story and battle happens which were all connected to the second World War. The first movie we saw was Pearl Harbor, but we only watched the part of the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. From my opinion, the movie captures with great detail the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese since they used the date and showed how all the Americans stationed were caught of surprise. Although in the movie, they show Rafe and Danny, the movie still describes the strategy the Japanese used to bypass the radios without detection because of the
...director did not limit the film to its historical context but extended the same to romance and fantasy. From a different angle of view, the director made use of the theme to communicate with the viewers and the fictional characters can be considered as his tools. Besides, ample importance is given to historical and fictional characters. In short, the amalgamation of history, fantasy and romance constituted much to the film’s importance as a historical/fictional masterpiece.