In 1956 Toho unveiled a brand new monster in its first colour kaiju movie. Direction by Ishiro Honda and special effects are peak Toho, but devoid of social allegory, the script struggles to carry the sombre tone of the film. 6/10

Rodan. 1956, Japan. Directed by Ishiro Honda. Written by Ken Kuronuma, Takeshi Kimura, Takeo Murata. Starring: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Akihiko Hirata, Akio Kobori, Yasuko Nakada, Minosuke Yamada, Yoshifume Tajima, Haruo Nakajima. Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka. IMDb: 6.2/10. Rotten Tomatoes: 5.9/10. Metacritic: N/A.

In a small mining village on the Japanese island of Kyutsu, two workers go missing in the mines during an unexplained flooding. One of them turns up dead, apparently from a wound inflicted by some sharp object. Suspicion falls on the other disappeared man, Goro, with whom the dead man had been fighting earlier. Goro is good friends with the mining company’s safety engineer Shigeru (Kenji Sahara), who is the boyfriend of Goro’s sister Kiyo (Yumi Shirakawa), who both refuse to believe Goro could have killed his colleague. When a search party also ends up dead with similar wounds, Shigeru is sure that something else lies behind the killings. The same evening he and Kiyo are attacked in their home by a giant, armoured larvae. The larvae kills two police officers before escaping into the mines, and the wounds match those found on the other dead men.

From a photo, biology professor Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata) is able to identify the larvae as that of Meganuron, a giant firefly that inhabited the Earth some 300 million years ago. He hypothesises that recent hydrogen bomb tests may have raised the temperature of the Earth and caused a tectonic shift that has made eggs buried underground for millions of years hatch. Shigeru, along with police and the army, sets off into the mines to investigate and hopefully find his friend alive. He finds Goro, dead, and is cut off from the rest of the group by a cave-in.

Some time later, the Japanese air force investigates a strange UFO sighting, of a flying object doing loops and tricks at impossible speed. The unidentified “craft” downs three military airplanes and soon reports come in from China and the Philippines of a similar objects causing damage and wreaking havoc. It’s decided that there are two strange flying objects in the vicinity. Meanwhile, a strange Earthquake near the volcanic Mount Aso occurs, and from the rubble Shigeru appears, wounded and with complete amnesia. He is taken to a hospital where Kyio, his colleagues and medical experts try to make him recover his memory. Finally an incident of seeing a bird’s egg hatch, snaps him out of his amnesia, and he remembers that while trapped underground he came upon a large cave with hundreds of larvae and a gigantic egg, which hatched an enormous bird-like creature which started feeding on the larvae. At the same time a newlywed couple is killed near Mount Aso, but before his death, the husband manages to take a snapshot of the “flying saucer”. Professor Kashiwagi identifies it as a prehistoric flying creature, a Pteranodon, which he names Rodan for short (or actually Radon in the original Japanese version). Soon after, one of the Rodans lay waste to the town of Fukuoka, after being chased by the Japanese air force, and returns to its base in the volcanic crater of Mount Aso. Professor Kashiwagi proposes bombing the volcano might cause it to erupt, destroying the beasts, which leads up to the dramatic climax of the film.

Yes, we’re looking at Rodan (空の大怪獣 ラドン, Sora no Daikaijū Radon, literally “Giant Monster of the Sky, Radon”), Toho Studio’s 1956 follow-up to their smash hits Gojira (1954, review) and Godzilla Raids Again (1955, review). Seeing how popular Gojira/Godzilla was with Japanese audiences, and with a growing intrerest abroad as well, what with the 1956 US dub of the original movie, a question that comes naturally is: “why not a third Godzilla movie?” Well, there are probably several reasons, but the main one is that the legendary director of the original Gojira, Ishiro Honda, didn’t think that Godzilla should be resurrected. That’s probably one of the reasons he bowed out of directing the first sequel. However, Honda had nothing against directing a film about another kaiju, or giant monster, and is now back in the director’s chair, with his old colleagues from the first movie: producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, composer Akira Ifukube and not least suit actor Haruo Nakajima.

The script is written by Japanese mystery and SF author and translator Ken Kuronuma, who was inspired by the story of a US Air Force pilot who crashed in Kentucky in 1948 while allegedly chasing a UFO. The story was turned into a script by Takeshi Kimura and Takeo Murata, the latter of whom also worked on the original Gojira script, as well as that for Godzilla Raids Again. Apart from the fact that it features new monsters, what sets Rodan apart from the two previous movies is, of course, that it is filmed in colour.

Toho made four kaiju films between 1954 and 1956 — even if Ishiro Honda’s yeti movie Half Human (1955, review) isn’t generally counted among the kaiju canon. These four films varied significantly in their tone from the ones that came later, starting with The Mysterians in 1957. Before geek culture became a mainstream phenomenon, most people outside Japan had mainly come in contact with Japanese kaiju through the US re-edits, and the latter Godzilla films, in which Godzilla has become a child-friendly hero, jumping around in his rubber suit and doing kung-fu moves while battling some equally comical rubber monster. However, today, most film geeks know that the original Gojira movie was a stark, serious disaster movie dealing with Japan’s often unspoken trauma after WWII. The sombre tone is still prevalent in Rodan, even if it feels as if there’s very little theme-wise to back this up.

What does in this film is the action, and especially Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects, which are quite on par with the original movie. The miniature work of cities being destroyed, planes, tanks and volcanic eruptions are all magnificent, even more so now in lush colour photography — granted that some of the tanks in particular look decidedly miniaturey. Overall, Isamu Ashida’s colour photography is gorgeous, from softly lit nighttime streets to murky mine shafts and colourful miniature battles. The script also wisely keeps the titular menace a mystery long into the movie, throwing in the well-realised larvae as stand-in antagonists for the heroes to battle. The larvae were realised partly as puppets, but also as full-size suits, with apparently four men inside. Meanwhile Rodan is mostly seen as a small silhouette in the sky, or shown through the reactions of people encountering it. Too fast to be seen long enough to describe, Rodan strikes and disappears. When it is finally revealed as a bird/lizard hybrid, it is rather well crafted and animated, unlike in some later films.

What does in this film is the action, and especially Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects, which are quite on par with the original movie. The miniature work of cities being destroyed, planes, tanks and volcanic eruptions are all magnificent, even more so now in lush colour photography — granted that some of the tanks in particular look decidedly miniaturey. Overall, Isamu Ashida’s colour photography is gorgeous, from softly lit nighttime streets to murky mine shafts and colourful miniature battles. The script also wisely keeps the titular menace a mystery long into the movie, throwing in the well-realised larvae as stand-in antagonists for the heroes to battle. The larvae were realised partly as puppets, but also as full-size suits, with apparently four men inside. Meanwhile Rodan is mostly seen as a small silhouette in the sky, or shown through the reactions of people encountering it. Too fast to be seen long enough to describe, Rodan strikes and disappears. When it is finally revealed as a bird/lizard hybrid, it is rather well crafted and animated, unlike in some later films.

Around 60 percent of the film’s budget of 200 yen went into special effects and miniatures. Sometimes the filmmakers went to extraordinary lengths to get things right. For example, when the team under assistant art director Yasuyuki Inoue wanted to create the miniature set of Hakata, one of parts of Fukuoka that Rodan destroys, the town officials didn’t want to provide blueprints because of security concerns. Instead Inoue and his team spemnt four days on the streets of the city, measuring things like the height of the steps of a staircase and the length of paving stones. At the time, the historical mall of Iwataya was undergoing slight renovations and had scaffolding around it. The two artists working on the miniature of the well-known mall thought it wasn’t necessary to include the scaffolding, but Inoue insisted that Iwataya should be reproduced exactly as people knew it at the moment. It took 43 days just to complete the miniature of the mall. As an insude joke, one of the workers put a condom advertisment in one of the windows that was not going to be on camera in a close-up, but suddenly Eiji Tsuburaya changed the shooting plan, and the offensive advertisment had to be hastily removed.

The models of missiles and airplanes flying rival the best of Hollywood at the time, and Tsuburaya prided himself on not having miniature sets wobbling planes flying erratically, so he went to great lengths to secure everything tightly with piano wire. The effects of Roban huffing and puffing down buildings and sending cars flying from the gusts from his wings were created using a special fan modidfied from an airplane engine. For the final scenes of the volcano, Tsuburaya was able to borrow an actual steel furnace, and used molten iron as lava, resulting in numerous dangerous mishaps in the studio. The most dangerous mishap, however, happened when the actor playing Rodan, Haruo Nakajima, was suspended in the suit 25 feet above a water tank, and the piano wire holding him in the air snapped. The padded suit and the water saved him from serious injury, but getting the actor in the heavy suit out of the water was difficult and Nakajima suffered serious risk of drowning.

What works less well is everything that doesn’t include the monsters. The achilles heel of all kaiju films after the first two Godzilla movies is the weak characterisation of the people involved in the plots, as far as they are involved in the plot to begin with. This is especially prevalent in the later movies, where a giant monster threatens the world, and much of the films are basically padding between the beginning and the final fight between the new monster and Godzilla. But even in Rodan, where it is the humans that take care of business in the end, our protagonists are strangely univovlved in the proceedings. Even if much of the film does follow Shigeru in his search for Goro, his disappearance and his amnesia, his only real function, plot-wise, is to reveal to the authorities, and the audience, what Rodan is. Once Shigeru’s memory returns, his role in the movie is over, and he and Kiyo are simply bystanders in the finale. Much effort is put into the initial story of Goro, and how the suspicions of him murdering his colleagues affect his sister Kiyo and her relationship to the people of the mining town. However, this parallel plot fails to connect to the main plot at any time in the movie, and about halfway through, it is completely abandonded.

Another peculiarity concerning many of the kaiju movies is that they almost all tend to have ensemble casts, often built upon the model from the original two films: a main couple and third man, either a love rival, a best friend or a brother, a scientist father figure, a journalist or other comedic sidekick, and in later films often also a kid. Focus is often divided quite evenly between the characters, making it difficult for the script to find time to delve deeper into any one of the character stories or arcs.

As stated, the tone of Rodan is closer to that of Gojira, it is serious and sombre and treats its titular menace with real, existential dread. However, unlike in Gojira, this pathos doesn’t feel anchored anywhere in Rodan. Whereas Gojira was an analogy to WWII, the Tokyo blitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rodan is simply a monster movie through and through. Yes, there is a solemn moment where Professor Kashiwagi suggests that Rodan is the result of hydrogen bomb testing, but this feels more like a tacked-on explanation and a sign of the times, than like anything resembling a deeper theme or analogy.

As an aside, there is an interesting piece of dialogue in the beginning of the film, which I don’t know whether it has survived to the English dub or not. I’m quoting from memory now:
Shigeru: “Oh, another scoarching day!”
Scientist: “Yes, we may see more of these days in the future.”
Shigeru: “Are you referring to the theory of global warming?”
Scientist: “Yes, if the polar caps melt, the sea level will rise all over the world.”
Shigeru: “Oh, that doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

I knew global warming was a topic among scientists as far back as the 60’s, but I certainly hadn’t expected to see an off-hand reference to it in a kaiju movie from 1956. Once again, a sign that “we didn’t know” is not a valid excuse for all the decades of inaction.

By the end of 1956, the American public had been introduced to Japanese kaiju through the release of Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956, review), a re-edited version of Gojira with new American footage centered around Raymond Burr’s reporter. The film was a surprise hit, becoming only the fourth Japanese film to earn over a million dollars at the box office. However, the collaboration between Toho and its importer Transnational Corp. did not continue. Instead Rodan was imported by the King Brothers Productions, owned by brothers Maurice and Herman Kozinsky, later King. The King brothers decided not to shoot new footage, but simply dub the original movie, and add an explanatory narration. The movie was trimmed down from 82 to around 70 minutes and an English script was written from a translation of the original by David Duncan, who went on to write several other SF movies. The narration in the US version is absent from the original, and written as if delivered by Shigeru.

I have not seen the American dub, but apparently it follows the original movie rather faithfully. Many commentators have claimed to have appreciated the narration, especially the final one, which waxes poetically about how one of the Rodans sacrifices itself and dives into the volcano — it would rather die with its mate than live on alone as the last of its species in the world. The narration was done by Keye Luke, on of the busiest Asian actors in Hollywood in the 40’s and 50’s. According to Star Trek actor George Takei, all the dubbing was done by four actors reading eight or nine roles: Luke, Takei, Paul Frees and a female voice actor who, like in the case of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, has remained anonymous. I have found no definitive explanation for the change of the monster’s name from Radon to Rodan. In the Japanese original, the name is derived from its species, Pteranodon. Several explanations for the English name change have been given; that the distributors wanted to avoid confusion with the element Radon, that a British company had a doll on the US market called Radon, and that there was a US soap brand called Radon. But as far as I know, the answer may be one, all or none of the above. Toho eventually copyrighted the name Rodan, making it the kaiju’s official English name. However, the name Radon has been sporadically used in English as well.

Radon or Rodan seemed to make little difference: the film was a success both in Japan and the US. It was the first Japanese movie to get a wide distribution on the US west coast, and was backed up by a substantial marketing campaign. It had its TV premiere in 1959, receiving the largest TV advertising campaign given to a film up to that date on New York’s NBC flagship station WRCA-TV. Despite this, it was given few reviews in trade papers — I can’t even find one in Variety. The only one I can find is from the Motion Picture Daily, which gave a favourable review: “The Japanese cast has little to do beyond assumption of shocked and disbelieving looks. The bird — and the special effects department has done right handsomely here — measures up admirably to other screen concoctions; the market for which the film is obviously geared will readily accept situations as they occur.”

Going through newspaper articles, it is difficult to discern which are actual reviews and which are simply rehashed publicity blurbs. However, one who has actually seen the film is Fred Cox at The Los Angeles Mirror, who rightly notes that Honda does his best to imitate Hollywood monster movies such as King Kong (1933, review). However, writes Cox, this should not discourage audiences who like this sort of thing, as “the color photography, trick and process shots, and sets are first rate. The Nipponese can do it”. M.L.A. writes for the Boston Globe that “it is not an especially distinguished film, except for the trick photography, which equals that of top Hollywood experts.” The critic continues: “the adoloscents in the audience, between pop corn and candy, can thrill with delicious fear and excitement.” And Hortense Morton at the San Francisco Examiner writes: “As a science film — this is the greatest and most fun.”

As of writing, Rodan has a decent 6.2/10 rating on IMDb, based on over 5,000 audience votes and a 5.9/10 Fresh rating on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes. AllMovie has a perhaps surprisingly low rating of 2/5 stars, with Craig Butler writing: “The opening sequence […] is tense and exciting […] And the final climactic sequence is similarly packed with action and even a bit of heavy-handed emotional drama. These two bookends make Rodan well worth watching, as do a number of smaller sequences in the middle of the film. But that middle also includes a lot of the ‘time killing’ sequences that are the bane of the genre.”

In his 1986 book The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, Phil Hardy writes: “The special effects are impressive, especially the volcanic eruption and the death of the monsters in the gushing lava.” And in his 1970 book Science Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter writes of the first kaiju movies, including Rodan, that they were “transparently simple but often technically impressive”.

At DVDSavant Glenn Erickson calls Rodan “a simple monster story realized on a spectacular scale”, “Eiji Tsuburaya’s expert special effects are the entire show.” He concudes; “Although far from perfect, Rodan ranks as one of the best Kaiju movies out therhas the innocence and wonder of early 50s Sci-Fi”. Andrew Skeates at Far East Film calls it “one of the best Kaiju movies out there”, with a whopping 4.5/5 star review. Conversely, Stephen Miller, or The Kaijuologist, writes: “There is no doubt that Rodan is among one of the top fan favorite monsters in the Godzilla series. While his own movie, Rodan, is considered a classic by many it is not all that memorable. […] The movie tries to imitate a similar emotional ending [as in] Gojira, but it sort of falls flat in that regard.” And Dave Sindelar concurs; “The two Rodans aren’t the most engaging of Toho’s giant monsters, and a good deal of this movie is a fairly average example of this type of genre”. Mark David Welsh sums it up as “a much better picture than the Toho Studio’s later monster smackdowns but, of course, it’s not nearly so much fun”.

I am no superfan of kaiju movies in general, and I don’t think I had seen an entire kaiju film before I started this blog. Thus, I was familiar with Godzilla as a concept and only vaguely aware of the other monsters in the genre. My image of Japanese monster movies was coloured by clips from the later films, and thought of it as rather cheap entertainment for children. Thus, I was extremely impressed by the quality of the writing, production and cinematography when I finally saw the original Gojira. Its follow-up was, in my opinion, considerably weaker, but not without its merits. The same goes for Rodan. It’s a transitional movie between the two sombre Godzilla films of the mid-50’s and the colourful, plastic entertainment that the genre became in the 60’s. It has a little bit of both worlds, and the beautiful colour photography and the brilliant miniature photography by Eiji Tsuburaya puts it even a rung above Motoyoshi Oda’s Godzilla Raids Again.

I’ve written extensively about director Honda, producer Tanaka, special effects creator Tsuburaya, composer Ifukube and suit actor Nakajima in my reviews of Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again, so if you are interested in learning more about them, please check out my earlier articles.

Rodan also contains several other faces that will be familiar to kaiju fans. Kenji Sahara, who had a couple of bit parts in Gojira, here takes over the role of the soft-cheeked romantic hero. He became one of the most recognisable faces in Toho’s science fiction films in the decades to come, playing both heroes and villains. His final Godzilla appearance came in 2004, in Godzilla: Final Wars. In 1966 Sahara played the lead in the first Ultraman series, Ultraman Q, and appeared in numerous subsequent Ultraman series. In 2008 he had cameo in Superior Ultraman 8 Brothers. As of April, 2023, Sahara is still in the books of the living, although now retired from acting.

Rodan was one of the very first on-screen appearances of 19-year-old Yumi Shirakawa, and her role as the ingenue in the film catapulted her to stardom, earning her the nickname “the Japanese Grace Kelly“. She became one of Ishiro Honda’s favourite actresses, and he cast her both in his tokusatsu (special effects) films and in drama movies. She played leads in The Mysterians (1957), The H-Man (1958), The Secret of the Telegian (1960) and Gorath (1962). Her best known role outside science fiction is in Yasujiro Ozu’s lauded drama The End of Summer (1961). She took a hiatus from screen acting in 1970, but made a successful comeback in 1981, mainly in TV, a career that lasted until 2014. Shirakawa passed away in 2016.

Akihiko Hirata is another instantly recognisable kaiju actor, with his sharp features, and keen, dark eyes. Hirata played the brooding anti-hero of the original Gojira movie, and in Rodan he plays the stern professor character. Hirata appeared in close to 30 SF films in his career, playing both heroes and villains. Outside of the usual kaiju fare, he can also be seen in The H-Man, The Secret of the Telegian, Atragon (1963), The Killing Bottle (1967), Latitude Zero (1969), Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974), The War in Space (1977) and Sayonara Jupiter (1984). He also appeared on the Ultraman TV series and a handful of other genre shows.

Kaiju fans will also recognise Yoshifumi Tajima, playing the redundant reporter in Rodan. This was Tajima’s debut for Toho, and his colourful acting made him a fixture character actor in the kaiju movies. He is perhaps best known for his turn as villain in Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964). Ichiro Chiba will be familiar for friends of Akira Kurosawa, and other Toho stock actors turning up are Saburo Iketani and Minosuke Yamada, who also appear in numerous kaiju fare. Katsumi Tezuka, Haruo Nakajima’s Godzilla stand-in, appears in a small cameo, and possibly donned the Rodan suit at some point.

Of course, one should not forget the contribution of composer Akira Ifukube to Rodan. Standing proudest in his career is of course the fantastic original score for Gojira, which was nominated for an award for best re-release or re-recording of an existing score by the International Film Music Critics in 2017. But his orchestral score for Rodan is also suberb, switching effortlessly between bombastic drama, and soft, emotional moments. The music does much to sell the tragic fate of the two monsters at the end of the film.

This was also the kaiju debut of Ishiro Honda’s assistant director Jun Fukuda. In 1960 he proced his own tokusatsu chops, when he directed The Secret of the Telegian. In the 60’s Fukuda became the go-to director for Toho’s kaiju Godzilla movies, when Ishiro Honda bowed out. Fukuda’s forte was in comedies and youth films, and he brought his comedic sensibilities to the Godzilla films as well, even if he hated making them. Fukuda personally thought that there never should have been a single sequel to Gojira, and often lambasted his own work with the films. His stance softened somewhat in later years, when he realised how loved beloved his films was with fans around the world.

Janne Wass

Rodan. 1956, Japan. Directed by Ishiro Honda. Written by Ken Kuronuma, Takeshi Kimura, Takeo Murata. Starring: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Akihiko Hirata, Akio Kobori, Yasuko Nakada, Minosuke Yamada, Yoshifume Tajima, Kiyoharu Onaka, Ichiro Chiba, Katsumi Tezuka, Haruo Nakajima. Music: Akira Ifukube. Cinematography: Isamu Ashida. Editing: Koichi Iwashita. Production design: Tatsuo Kita. Sound recordist: Masanobu Miyasaki. Special effects: Eiji Tsuburaya. Kaimai Eizo, Akira Watanabe. Visual effects: Sadao Iizuka. Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka for Toho.