There’s an argument to be had about how you define a cinematic universe, and by extension another argument what the first movie universe was. Beyond just “a movie and a lot of sequels,” a universe seems like it must have multiple characters supporting stand-alone films, who then come together in later movies. If so, perhaps the first cinematic universe was the world of Universal horror, which had individual monsters come together in movies like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. But after that, one of the earliest has to be Toho Studio’s kaiju universe of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
After making the 1954 Godzilla film, director Ishiro Honda made several other science-fiction and giant-monster movies, such as Rodan in 1956 and Mothra in 1961. After Toho started making Godzilla sequels, many of those monsters ended up meeting and fighting Honda’s atomic lizard. That’s a cinematic universe, and it crystallized in 1964 with Mothra vs. Godzilla.
From Toho’s perspective, making the movie wasn’t a ground-breaking idea. Mothra was a hit; King Kong vs. Godzilla was a hit, and revived Godzilla as a viable character; why not put the two monsters together? So they did.
The script was by Shinichi Sekizawa, who’d written both Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla. He knew his business here, and the script started as a direct sequel to Mothra. It was changed a little by Honda, but you can see the similarity: both movies center around human protagonists who include a male scientist, a male reporter, and a female photographer. In Mothra, the humans investigate a mysterious island near Japan, Infant Island, and find twin foot-tall priestesses of a mysterious deity called Mothra; a bad guy abducts the telepathic priestesses, and Mothra comes to their aid, first as a giant caterpillar and then a giant moth.
Everything ended happily, but as Mothra vs. Godzilla starts a giant egg comes drifting in to the coast of Japan. A sinister businessman decides to exploit it by building an amusement park around it, but it gets complicated when the priestesses turn up and say it’s Mothra’s egg. The businessmen stand on their legal rights, the sad priestesses return to Infant Island, but then Godzilla rises. Humanity’s forced to beg the help of Mothra, and despite having suffered from human greed, Mothra agrees to fight on the principle that it’s right to try to make a better world.
In addition to Honda and Sekizawa, returning from the earlier films are special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and Emi and Yumi Ito as the priestesses of Mothra. Cinematographer Hajime Koizumi worked on both Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla, and like those films the movie looks nice in its real-world scenes, with bright colors and dramatic lighting.
It’s an approach that works well with the movie’s strong, if flat, thematic sense. An actor has recalled Honda saying that Toho was responding to TV’s rise in popularity by targeting kids, and the movie accordingly had to be something younger viewers would find interesting. At the same time, Honda went on, “kids are more mature than we think.” So in addition to giant monsters we have evil capitalists, an anti-nuclear warning, and a heartfelt if simple story about trying to do what’s right even if other people do wrong.
That social conscience runs right into the loopy logic of Mothra’s island, with its fairy priestesses and red-painted natives. There’s a surrealism to the film at its best moments that comes from the movie taking itself absolutely seriously, and it’s possibly the only way it could’ve been watchable. The film never doubts itself, and insists on taking us along on the story it means to tell. By the end there’s a legitimate touch of epic to the tale.
That’s despite the fact that the giant monsters are slow to show up. And despite the fact that the plot’s smoothed out in the way kids’ movies smooth out their plots; the reporters hang out with the scientist for no reason but the convenience of keeping all the main characters in one place, for instance. Godzilla arrives out of the blue. No one has any obvious sexual or romantic feelings. And while Godzilla’s devastation causes lots of crowds to run dramatically through the foregrounds of lots of shots, there’s nothing like the stark aftermath of the original Godzilla with scenes of the wounded and dying. There’s a completely different emotional tone here.
Yet the movie succeeds on its own terms. Because it takes itself so seriously it opens a door into a world in which the things it shows can be taken seriously. It gives the audience a mostly-coherent dream-world of giant monsters and telepathic priestesses. If you’ve seen the previous films, other monsters and other concepts exist subtextually in the background, broadening what else might be out there. And in that way this movie really is a part of a larger universe; there’s a larger world of fantasy, of which we catch a glimpse.
Mothra vs. Godzilla is not necessarily a good movie, as such. The story hangs together through coincidence. Godzilla endangering a bunch of school kids at the end comes out of nowhere. None of the characters show any more than two dimensions at the most, or change in any notable way. But the film’s weirdly effective.
There’s a good strangeness that carries it. Its mix of surreal fantasy imagery and didactic social conscience recalls the best of Victorian children’s literature. That is, I think, how to read it, as a naive but highly-crafted fairy tale. It’s not Godzilla in Wonderland. But Mothra’s priestesses do dwell in a hidden oasis, a secret garden. Perhaps Infant Island is, after all, somewhere in the vicinity of Treasure Island and Neverland; or somewhere at the back of the North Wind; or somewhere not so far from Oz.