All Monsters Attack

#16 in my ranking of Ishiro Honda’s filmography.

#9 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films.

The Godzilla franchise had been trending towards kiddie for a few films, but this is the first in the series to actually be made explicitly for children. Released as part of the Toho Champion Matsuri, a festival program for children, All Monsters Attack was made very cheaply, very quickly, and reused a fair amount of footage from previous entries in the series, mostly Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. It’s easy to see how the Godzilla faithful would turn against this film. It’s barely a Godzilla film at all. However, what it is has its own qualities as a life-lesson dramatic-comedy around a boy learning to stand up to bullies. I actually enjoyed it on that level a fair bit.

Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki) is a latchkey kid who loves Godzilla (it’s unclear if Godzilla is real in this film or if Ichiro is just a fan of the movies), hearing Godzilla’s son, Minilla, in the honking of horns as he walks home with his little friend. He’s also the target of a group of bullies, led by a red-shirted kid he calls Gabara (Junichi Ito). When his parents are out working, his father on a rail line and his mother at a hotel, he goes home to do his homework and get looked after by his neighbor, the toymaker Shinpei (Hideyo Amamoto). During a nap, though, he transports himself to Monster Island where he befriends Minilla who is human sized can suddenly speak. I get it, this breaks Godzilla lore, but it’s a dream. It’s silly by nature, but the whole Son of Godzilla thing was silly in and of itself. I don’t see this as some sort of massive break with what came before either in terms of lore or tone.

Anyway, the dreams come in a series, one after the other, interspersed between sections in the real world while Ichiro is awake. There does develop a plot around two bank robbers who stole fifty million yen and are hiding out, supposedly, in the area. Of course, this is going to intersect with Ichiro because why else bring it up? Okay, many of the little subplots haven’t come together all that well in previous Honda monster mashes, but it does here. Ichiro hides out in an abandoned three-story warehouse because it’s a play area where the bully won’t go, the robbers hide out there as well, Ichiro picks up one of their driver’s licenses, and they need to clean up that mess. This all happens while the dreams Ichiro has back on Monster Island escalate from hanging out with Minilla watching Godzilla recreate the events of Ebirah to Minilla being terrorized by a new, green monster called Gabara (it’s for kids, can’t be too subtle, I guess).

The events escalate in both stories with Minilla fighting Gabara himself (getting much bigger when he fights the monster while retreating back to kid size when he goes back to talk to Ichiro) and Ichiro getting kidnapped by the robbers. It’s a tale of two young children learning how to stick up for themselves and fight back. One more reason, I suppose, that this film isn’t well regarded is how it treats bullies. You see, Godzilla pushes Minilla to fight Gabara himself, and this teaches Ichiro to fight back against his own bullies on his own. You see, that’s not a modern sensibility. Instead, bullies just should not bully, and if they do, you should go to an authority figure. Instead, Ichiro learns that to deal with bullies, one should bite them on the arm and ram them in the stomach, get them to fall back, and stop fighting you. He’s essentially Ender without going quite so far as kicking them while they’re down. Honestly, I don’t disapprove.

So, it’s simple (perhaps simplistic). It heavily uses footage from previous films (though, thankfully, it relies on Ebirah which might have been Tsuburaya’s best work), the new footage isn’t as good (Honda took complete control and did a solid job with a limited budget and no time, it’s just that the footage from Ebirah is that much better), and it leans more fully towards silliness than even the sillier previous entries like Son of Godzilla did. However, the story itself of a boy learning to stick up for himself is integrated well into the two halves of the film. It’s straightforward and potentially simplistic. The ending also goes too far into Ichiro becoming the anti-bully, so he becomes a bully himself which it then tries to pull back immediately afterwards, which is weird. However, it mostly works.

So, I don’t quite think it’s good. It’s too silly, too reliant on old stuff, and the ending is a weird bit of whiplash around the central point. However, it does have a central point that it explores surprisingly well. I mean, this isn’t the worst Godzilla movie by a mile. It’s okay.

Rating: 2.5/4