Joe's Gamera Film Ranking, Worst to Best - Gamera Day Nov. 27, 2024

 

By Joe Gibson

Very suddenly, the anniversary of the original 1965 Gamera film, November 27th, 2024 (otherwise called Gamera Day) is close upon us. Now, here at Plan9Crunch, I, Joe Gibson, have been working my way through specifically the Showa Gamera series (1965-1980) out of order, and I eventually intend to have reviews up here for all of the Showa Gamera films + Gamera The Brave and Gamera Rebirth (if you are interested in essays on the Gamera Heisei trilogy, let us know). However, Gamera Day comes only once a year, and this ranking can serve as a preview for those later thoughts and a concise summary of earlier articles (links interspersed throughout). If you disagree, share your own rankings below.

13. Gamera vs Zigra 1971 (Link here to a Plan9Crunch review: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/07/gamera-vs-zigra-turning-53-years-old.html)

As I have already expressed, Gamera vs Zigra is constrained by such lack of budget that Director Noriaki Yuasa's creativity is unable to realize in any substantive charm. The film, set almost entirely in Kamogawa Sea World has to contrive reasons to stay at the setting without destroying it and proves unable to use the setting to ground any main characters' arcs and actions (outside of a superfluous aquarium worker that somehow contributes more than the children do). The plot comes off as a retread of Gamera vs Viras, and the intention and powers of Zigra and those under his thrall as well as the stakes are very inconsistent without many creative fight scenes to offset that. As I will discuss in the following sections, most Showa Gamera movies are a mix of high highs and low lows; this film is just the same bland tripe throughout where the contrivances in Zigra's paralysis working differently for different people leads into the contrivance of the main cast's ultimate survival, but the more clever choreography and aquarium juxtaposition taper off into nothing by the end of the film.

12. Gamera 1965

Being the first Gamera movie ever made and one of the most influential kaiju films (at the very least, Yongary seems to have copied this film's tonal inconsistency of designating the title monster as  terrible destroyer as well as friend to a child), it is surprising I have not discussed this in its own dedicated review yet. Personally, I find it quite hard to watch with its very abrupt storytelling and confusing character motivations of Toshio and his family, but it places here on the list because the image of Gamera catching Toshio from the lighthouse (as well as other scenes that support Yuasa and writer Nisan Takahashi's intent for Gamera as an icon to children) touched upon something that would go on to fuel the childlike whimsy of this franchise. Gamera 1965 is a movie at war with itself, with the studio Daiei wanting a darker Godzilla ripoff and Yuasa wanting to emphasize his childlike creativity; Gamera vs Barugon 1966 shows us Daiei's vision more fully realized, and Gamera vs Gyaos 1967 is the earliest film where Yuasa can show off what he wants to do unopposed. Both are much higher on this list so stay posted for my thoughts on those.

11. Gamera vs Viras 1968 (link here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-best-of-scenes-and-worst-of-scenes.html)

In my review of Gamera vs Viras, I emphasized the growing pains of the transition from early to late Showa Gamera with the decreasing role of series mainstay Kojiro Hongo and introduction of an American child alongside a Japanese one per AIP's dictates, and, consequently, this very uneven film is the best of the Showa series...and also the worst. It averages out to merely decent (there are more things done well here than in the original Gamera). Whenever I get to reviewing Gamera Rebirth, I will have to compare Viras' utilization there to his original film, so while I do not have much new to say on this movie now, it will get its time for fresh thoughts.

10. Gamera Super Monster 1980

Having Gamera Super Monster this high is an insane hot take; I understand that. Hear me out. While I enjoy the common joke that Gamera Super Monster, as a trashy clip show, makes the worst Godzilla films look like Shakespeare, that just is not true according to the way I am watching these movies. The two films before this on this list are intensely inconsistent, detrimentally affecting their value as stories and art to relay a theme, emotion or internally consistent script. Do I enjoy any of the component parts of Gamera vs Viras less than watching a dorky child try to impress three good spacewomen and an evil one? No, obviously not since I haven't talked about this one and only intend to reference it as scarcely as necessary, but this movie is consistently about Keiichi seeking an older sister influence, said arc justifying his interactions with the three good spacewomen and his naivety that redeems the evil spacewoman. Add in the genuinely good transitions into the stock footage segments and a great soundtrack, and it is better than several Godzilla films (but I should probably stop that train of thought before I incite a mob against me). If you want some literature to give you a newfound appreciation for Gamera Super Monster, pick up Constantine Furman's "The Unoffical Tokusatsu Fan's Handbook For Gamera Super Monster" (link here: https://www.amazon.com/Unofficial-Tokusatsu-Handbook-GAMERA-MONSTER/dp/B097VBGYTL).

9. Gamera vs Jiger 1970

I feel kind of bad having this film this low since, though I have not yet had the opportunity to talk about it, I genuinely think this is one of the best Showa Gamera films and a darn fine Showa kaiju film in general. Because I mentioned that Vs Viras is an awkward intermediary stage between early and late Showa Gamera, I should probably expound on how I would characterize both halves of this era. Just like with Showa Godzilla (where I would argue Ghidorah The Three Headed Monster 1964 exemplifies grounded but absurd early Showa with Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla 1974 carrying with it the tropes of goofy late Showa and Godzilla's Revenge being the awkward middle step where priorities reframed to children), the trajectory changed, and this film pays off the influence of Yuasa the best in AIP era Gamera. Yuasa's childlike creativity is best epitomized by the treatment of Jiger, a triceratops with an absurd amount of long range weaponry I can't even summarize efficiently that has been locked away  for a long time. But Yuasa tackles this daunting premise in a way only he can. So Jiger escapes her captivity, right? Immediately, she goes to take a long drink of water. It's so simple (this is the way a child thinks) but it helps to not only characterize the villain monster but also set the creative and whimsical tone. Throughout the movie, Jiger cycles through her absurd arsenal believably and efficiently, again in a childlike cycle: Jiger lands her attack, Gamera recovers, Gamera learns how to counter the attack, and then Jiger moves on to the next weapon because the other one stopped working. It is a simple formula, but this series' creativity thrives in simplicity.

8. Gamera vs Gyaos 1967

Though I am placing this film this low, I can understand and would defend any placement above this point; everything just genuinely comes together extraordinarily well: Kojiro Hongo is a very engaging hero, there is enough social commentary to keep the intersecting subplots and archetypes purposeful, and the influence of child character Eiichi on this plot helps to keep the sci-fi aspects simple and creative. Gyaos gets its name from Eiichi imitating the cry it makes (meaning the pronunciation regardless of how you spell it is probably meant to be Gy--oww-ssss as one syllable), and the explanation of Gyaos' head stiffness is a unique way to account for the limitations of suitmation. All in all, this is just a great example of Showa kaiju eiga and proves what Noriaki Yuasa and Nisan Takahashi can do when Daiei appoints a producer Hidemasa Nagata that agrees with their child marketing enough to write children's songs for them.

7. Gamera vs Guiron 1969 (read Doug Gibson's review here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2023/04/gamera-versus-guiron-was-fun-fare-for.html)

You may be thinking that this film has no valid reason to be this high, that it messes up incredibly easy dumb things like Akio and Tom's mothers not remembering that aliens literally invaded last film when they say that there is nothing left to be discovered in space. You would be kind of right. You may also say this a morbid trainwreck of a fairy tale, but I'd contest the label fairy tale when portal fantasy is much closer philosophically and by counting common tropes. Technically speaking, I am evaluating this film's placement with different rules than the previous ones, but that is because no one else seems to have considered the portal fantasy connections or the ones I can draw between this film and the teachings of Carl Jung (see my Jungian Analysis of Gamera vs Guiron here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-jungian-exploration-of-gamera-vs.html). Most speakers on this movie have some knowledge on how Noriaki Yuasa's psychology made it into these films, but the literary criticism stops there for some reason. All art is art, and, if any art deserves deeper in depth analysis, all art does. If we were just focusing on the craft and internal consistency, this film's placement would slip, but I also will point to the possibly unintentional way that this film transforms Gamera's stock footage into a very effective Jungian Answer to Job Christ figure. If the pendulum ever swings to favor this film intellectually, I will be more critical of it; as of now, I have the most fun being its most stalwart defender. If you want to hear a more dynamic presentation of this argument, you can visit our YouTube page, watch this podcast episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsnr2cNOm2c) and comment your thoughts.

6. Gamera Rebirth 2023

Despite poor viewership, I honestly think Gamera Rebirth was one of the best shows of 2023 (far better than the Skull Island cartoon anyway). It has the unique and unfortunate position as the revival for Gamera while kaiju reintrepretations are at an all time high in supply and Gamera's popularity is high among fans but low generally. As a kaiju/tokusatsu fan entering 2023, distributions of Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider were on the horizon as well as Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla x Kong, etc, and Gamera Rebirth pretty provably fell out of attention. But it somehow managed to thread together Showa and Heisei sensibitilies to be a love letter to this series, the Shin Gamera that no one seems to want to make. The 6 episodes each give Gamera a different opponent (Gyaos, Jiger, Zigra, Guiron, Viras and a really big mutated Gyaos called S-Gyaos) mostly in retrospect to each kaiju's film (the Jiger episode brings up the subplot from that movie of the military not trusting Gamera, and the Guiron episode is when the characters realize they cannot necessarily trust the adults, which is a major idea in that film as well). As such, I really will need to have fleshed out reviews for all the relevant movies to point to when I end up reviewing this show. Broadly, I can say this series builds up its characters really well because the templates of Toru (from Gamera the Brave), Asagi (from the Heisei trilogy) and Akio and Tom (from Gamera vs Guiron) exist and can be revised and shaken up for Boco, Joe, Junichi and Brody. The last episode is, by far, the worst one (something this show has in common with Johnny Sokko) because, given the explanation provided, S-Gyaos really should not exist (if Viras can absorb dead kaiju parts while they are enclosed in a box, how did it fail to assimilate living tissue that had no plastic protection from his body?), and Joe, Junichi and Brody have barely any relevance during the final battle.

5. Gamera vs Barugon 1966

While I am mainly a fan of Noriaki Yuasa's Gamera vision, I cannot deny that Gamera vs Barugon 1966, the only Showa Gamera film not to feature Yuasa as director is really really good. It focuses on human greed and the collateral damage that causes as dastardly villain Onodera murders his friends and sics a kaiju on Japan because of his self serving greed. This is Kojiro Hongo's first Gamera role as the brooding protagonist Keisuke Hirata who deconstructs his own blame for these events and selfishness throughout the runtime. This film otherwise will probably assault the senses in a marathon: it is dark and edgy with bloody human fights that outshine the monster ones, the only child character is newborn monster Barugon, who Gamera drowns, and for some unknown reason, there is a shot that simulates oral sex when Karen licks Keisuke's blood from his arm at an odd angle. In retrospect, does this make sense as part of this series? No. But is it a great blockbuster achievement for Daiei? Yes.

4. Gamera 2. Advent of Legion 1996

For the 30th anniversary of Gamera, Daiei allowed Shusuke Kaneko and Kazunori Ito to reboot Gamera, and the ensuing 90s trilogy that places these next three spots on the list was born. There was some executive meddling in keeping Gamera's cuddly and childlike nature around and only incrementally letting Kaneko and Ito bring in their darker ideas, but, like an ouroboros, that meddling ended up clarifying how they wrote their story (i.e. building up Gamera as an obvious hero and then casting that in doubt as the stakes, building dread by showing Gamera getting scarier and scarier but still being on our side...for now). As the middle chapter in this story, Advent of Legion has to build the stakes from the previous film and provide something new and interesting. The worldbuilding of the Legion alien army is spectacular, being somewhat feasible pneumatic aliens that spread through pods. As I mentioned in the third part of my Godzilla x Kong review (https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/07/part-three-nuanced-deconstruction-of.html), I do take issue with a major contrivance toward the end that goes unexplained, namely how Gamera does defeat Legion. It is debatable if it actually ruins the cause and effect of the climax, but I do not like having to make inferences for a movie even if it has definitely earned that.

3. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe 1995

Talking about the Heisei trilogy comes far less naturally to me, but again I have nothing but praise for how this movie interprets its monsters, especially the villains where Gyaos returns for a sleek redesign involving better fleshed out science fiction and fantasy by delving into the origins for Gyaos (and Gamera), something that has only really ever had lip service paid. (For what it is worth, the plot point of the Gyaos turning on their creators comes directly from Gamera vs Guiron, if you wanted another reason to reevaluate any negative opinions on it.) To be concise, GOTU, AoL and RoI all have a different focus; this first part is a streamlined kaiju format that balances its plot and character complexities, Advent of Legion was very plot heavy, and Revenge of Iris will be so vague in the plot just to prop up its characters and themes more. What approach you prefer depends on your preference, but I will argue that RoI is superb enough to place above this, and Advent of Legion is flawed enough to deserve placement beneath this.

2. Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris 1999

I suspect later honest inquiry will find this to be the best Gamera movie of all time because Ayana's arc perfectly develops the moral ambiguity, revisionist ambiguity and mythological ambiguity that not only the trilogy up to this point but especially this film is building to in its climax . If you are unaware who Ayana is, I ended up going on a tangent about her in my Godzilla vs Kong review that is a better summary than I can give here (https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2023/06/review-godzilla-versus-kong-2021-remake.html). This movie, as I mentioned in my later Godzilla x Kong review manages to redeem the Deus ex Machina of Gamera's final attack on Legion in G2, and it uses the mythology of Atlantis, Gamera, Gyaos and now Mana (what allowed Gamera to kill Legion but seemingly also creates Gyaos if Gamera uses too much in any single dose) to tie together this trilogy's storytelling in a very satisfying way. The storytellling, fight scenes and character progression of Ayana as well as returning characters Nagamine and Osako are genuiney top tier, so there was never any question in my mind that this would be top 2. So what can be better than this?

1. Gamera The Brave 2006

Despite heavy ambivalence, I have chosen Gamera The Brave (original title The Little Braves, Gamera) to be at the top of this list rather than Revenge of Iris. In my defense, this is a close matchup. The debate for best human character in this franchise is always going to be Toru or Ayana, and, ultimately, which one you choose is going to depend on if you prioritize deconstructing the Showa formula or reconstructing it to be stronger in the modern era. (Like the Showa era, this film is about Gamera helping the development and survival of a young boy Toru, caring for him after his mom dies and while his neighbor is about to undergo a surgery, while Revenge of Iris was about a young girl trying to cope with her loss by destroying a very destructive Gamera.) The effects are impressive in both GtB and RoI (surpassed by both GOTU and AoL), and I think both scripts are near perfect. It will be a challenge to find a victor just focusing on either film because the strengths of each film are firmly rooted in retrospect (the flagship scene of this movie involves all the children passing off a magic rock to give to Gamera, which plays off of the series trope that Gamera is the Friend to All Children, while one of the most impactful scenes in Revenge of Iris features Gamera saving a random child seemingly accidentally, deconstructing the purpose that we apply to Gamera or gods in general in our relationship with him). But if you prefer slice of life character development to dramatic philosophizing, you may see what I see in Gamera the Brave that makes it the very best this franchise has to offer.

Hope you enjoyed this ranking and that you enjoy Gamera Day by watching some of the above films and show. Gamera Rebirth is on Netflix, and you can stream all the other Gamera films on Amazon Prime Video. Tubi, Pluto and YouTube should also have listings to stream for most of these films.

Plan9Crunch Review: The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

According to David Kalat’s film commentary on the Arrow release of The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, this film melds together the genre conventions of Japanese horror throughout the century (from the Classic ghost tales to middle of the century monster horror), but the most important genre influence comes from manga artist Kazuo Umezu, who wrote the source material for this film: Reptilia. While Kalat argues that this is not a children’s film due to the dark subject matter and frequent scares but instead a slipstream horror that only appears childish because it stars one and was made by childish director Noriaki Yuasa, I would argue that books/films such as Coraline prove first that children’s media can carry dark subject matter and second that subgenre classification is usually still possible for those works. Because it draws so much from Umezu’s works in the manga medium, this film corresponds to the tropes of Shojo horror. (And this extends to Kalat’s reasoning for his classifications since Snake Women are frequent in Classical Japanese horror but also in Umezu’s shojo horror…).

 

If you are unaware of the different types of manga, the simplest way I can explain is that intended audience often is the name of each genre (Shonen manga is intended for young boys, seinen for older boys). Shojo manga is manga directed towards young girls, and Shojo horror would be a subset of that.  As Elliot Michel Weber’s thesis defense from the Florida State University Libraries (https://repository.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:854133/datastream/PDF/view) argues, Shojo manga mostly utilizes themes pertaining to the life and development of women, with the horror reflecting body dysmorphia during puberty and the influences that mothers have on their children. The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, starring two young girls whose rivalry begins from developmental beauty and ugliness while also contrasting two different types of mother figures, is a near perfect fit for this. (Coincidentally, Coraline, a portal fantasy story, also stars a young girl figuring out her place and role in society while encountering two different types of mother figures, and the difference in end result is something I would attribute to cultural differences between the creatives.  This is also why I resist the recent pop culture push to classify any culture's Other World stories under the similarly vague Japanese term Isekai, since neither shojo nor portal fantasy seemed to cross the sea in popular discourse.)

 

Disclaimer

 

I have an ulterior motive for discussing this particular fine example of Japanese Shojo horror: it has the potential to be the missing piece in my ongoing Jungian analysis of Gamera vs Guiron (Link here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-jungian-exploration-of-gamera-vs.html).  Indeed, from what sources analyzing it I could cite when I wrote that previous article, this seemed to interplay uniquely with the pieces of my argument, but I still could prove no outright connection between Noriaki Yuasa, Christianity, Jung or portal fantasy (despite the textual analysis of Gamera vs Guiron that seemed to imply such connection).  Much of this review will be devoted to furthering that connection.  However, this film is so unique (to my Western sensibilities where a film like Coraline is designated as portal fantasy not Shojo horror), surprising, etc. that this review will also have to go over the film on its own merits.

 

The Film (on its own merits)

 

This is a very well-directed film, to start. Noriaki Yuasa is seen as a lesser director of a lesser series compared to Ishiro Honda and Godzilla, but the major issues that affected the directorial quality of Yuasa's first Gamera film were inexperience and creative differences with Daiei over if the film should be more adult or more childlike.  By the third Gamera film onward, Yuasa and his team crafted a consistent tone and consistent acting until the budgets ran out.  The Snake Girl and The Silver Haired Witch shows us Yuasa adapting a more serious subject matter focused on horror, so the acting is less comedic.  The atmosphere needs to be just as meticulously Gothic as it previously was goofy, so from the opening scene casting Tamami's murder of the house servant in darkness, this film is noticeably effective in building suspense.

 

Tamami is, of course, the titular Snake Girl, mostly masked through dream sequences or obscured by scenery at the beginning of the film, with some snakelike characteristics.

 

The film is unclear and contradictory on a few key details, namely if Tamami is actually a snake woman outside of the dream sequences, if the silver haired witch is actually magic and capable of turning invisible and what age relationship Sayuri, the lead, has with Tamami.  The ambiguity is effective because your reading of the film and its themes will be different depending on what you pay attention to.  Most importantly for right now, Tamami has a facial deformity directly proportional to the evil in her heart, and some of the most interesting imagery of this film is the idea of her skin mask being just a very thin veneer to hide her monstrousness (though the degree of her affliction depends on the focus of the scene).

 

Ultimately, the main point of this story is to contrast lead Sayuri Nanjo, a paragon of good spirit with the unfair world around her, best exemplified through Tamami, the Snake Girl, the Silver Haired Witch, unfair housekeeper Ms. Shige and inconsistent mother Yuko Nanjo.  None of this would work if Yachie Matsui could not adequately sell Sayuri’s good nature as she gains the family she had wanted for so long being within a Catholic orphanage and then loses it piece by piece (first, her father is called away for his snake research, and then Sayuri loses the attentiveness of her mother when Tamami starts her plan, loses the support of secondary guardian of Ms Shige and even loses her bedroom to Tamami, having to sleep in the attic where the witch and some animals accost her).  Once Sayuri first sees her room in the Nanjo household, she says, “God, if this happiness is all a dream, please don’t ever let me wake up!” and from that point on, the film proceeds as a warped dream, where scenes connect more through the feeling and tone than strict cause and effect (a clever metatextual layer to put on a horror film, since that is the point of the direction of the genre).  There are very many dream sequences in this film, distinct for their swirling imagery and more overt supernatural happenings, but some of these dream sequences occur during the day in the middle of scenes.  Let us put a pin in what the supernatural ambiguity means for the themes of the film.

 

Before we proceed, it may be important to clarify what separates a paragon from a simple one-dimensional character, so that we all view this movie in the best possible faith interpretation.  One-dimensional characters (for whatever reason two-dimensional characters are described the same way even though I feel there should be a gradient between one and three dimensions) are generally flat characters that do not undergo growth or development.  I would submit that if we are following the name, one-dimensional characters, as they lack complexity, we should regard as a straight line, acting based only on one or so impulse, theme, trait, etc. at any given moment.  (From this, a two-dimensional character would actually be a 100 percent improvement, hence my ire at conflating them.)  This is necessary for many tertiary characters that only exist to fill the world or unsubtly foreshadow a theme, but it is a challenge to make that work for a more important character.  Characters need not be active to circumvent this; the more personality and context a character has, the more complex they are.  Static characters are one example of this (where an unchanging character proves the theme to the world around them the way only that particular can), and paragons are the epitome of whatever single trait defines them, framed often through conflict with the world around them.  Sayuri’s character works because we see her outlook challenged constantly and she has to draw on whatever strength she can from whatever sources she can to not only survive but remain optimistic about it.  

 

Tatsuya Hayashia is one such source, an older male from the orphanage appointed to help ease Sayuri’s transition to living with the Nanjos and attending school.  He trusts her, does everything he can to help her, and gives her a doll that briefly helps Sayuri conquer her fears about Tamami.  When Tamami’s animosity escalates (and again when The Silver Haired Witch actively tries to kill Sayuri), he makes a distinct effort to help her and figure out what is happening.  It is through his character’s growth (of accepting the pseudoscience of Tamami’s inner ugliness causing her condition) that we first understand the movie’s theme, and Tatsuya is the only consistently dependable character for Sayuri in this story, raising the stakes when he is separated from her in the climax.

 

In case you still disbelieve that this film’s trials are enough to make Sayuri a compelling character via her resilience, the Silver Haired Witch tries to kill her by making her fall from a high place twice (stopping short of total defenestration to be more of a Mufasa in the Lion King situation).  Sayuri survives both attempts, but upon the latter one, the witch beats her hands, drawing a lot of blood.  As I already mentioned, the supernatural is only debatably real in this film, and it is important to note that much of the horror of the original source material by Kazuo Umezu was from the villain being a warped maternal character, so the film’s ultimate twist, that Ms Shige is the Silver Haired Witch trying to inherit the family’s money in a Scooby Doo-type scheme, works as a marriage of the realistic horror and the fantastical.  The Silver Haired Witch is the greatest danger within the house: some mysterious grownup with authority over Tamami and the animals that can turn invisible to spy on and torment Sayuri.  Compare this to Ms Shige: the totally innocuous housekeeper that can carry out her evil plans unnoticed and, even after witnessing Tamami order Yuko around to persecute Sayuri, can still justify mistreating Sayuri.  I think the stakes of the Real and Other map well onto each other in this film, which is a compliment to the film’s storytelling.

 

Ahead of this Halloween season, I recommend you watch this movie.  Even respecting Noriaki Yuasa as I do, this film still surprised me with its quality.

 

Symbolism 

 

From our discussion with Andi Brooks on Japanese folk horror (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGGPJlevPXg), we know that the Buddhist monk as a villain is a common trope, and I find it very interesting that the Catholics in this story are all good guys in honest action and with clear sight, while Buddhist ritual masks the secret of The Snake Girl (the participants involved being either misguided or evil).  However, this is ultimately a film that values different perspectives, since Sayuri is not only aware of traditional Buddhist rituals (even if she disbelieves early on) but attributes her mastery of the film’s theme of inner vs outer beauty to Tamami and not Tatsuya at the end.  (This is significant because it is Tatsuya that spells out said theme in conversation with Tamami near the end, so, it is possible to attribute the lesson to either individual.)  

 

Hair is usually an important symbol in Japanese culture (this very movie emphasizes silver hair as a characteristic of the witch), especially in shojo manga, but I have been unable to figure out why Sayuri (the sister said to be beautiful) has short hair rather than long (which is the symbol of status as a woman). That is the kind of creative choice that must be intentional, but I cannot figure it out.

 

From there, we have to get more specific into what symbols come from which creative.  What of this film is due to Kazuo Umezu and what is due to Noriaki Yuasa?  (As Kalat points out, some stuff such as the swirls and eyeball imagery in the dream sequences is important to both styles.)  The source manga for this film is innovative and celebrated due to the main idea of having a sinister mother figure at the heart of the horror for the young girl to deal with.  I figured the quickest way to be somewhat educated on the discourse around shojo horror and Umezu would be Wikipedia, so according to the page on the source text for the movie, Reptilia and its reception, this was due to benevolent mothers being a staple of Shojo horror, so the subversion is more interesting and raises the stakes.  It also lines up with Jung’s idea of the Evil Mother archetype, but Umezu represents this with Snake women (which in Japanese culture are associated with witches, mask themselves as human and try to turn others into snake people to build a warped family, while Jung regarded snakes as representative of the duality of man and the basis for unconscious thought), which does not match Jung neatly as far as I am aware. (How deep anyone should read into Jung is up for debate, and we should not expect a writer using one of Jung’s concepts to demonstrate all of them; I just mean that the Jungian subtext of Umezu’s works has been read in by critics and so requires more evidence than the claim itself.)

 

Another significant Umezu trope is the eyeball in the ceiling hole, which Tamami uses to spy on Sayuri in this film and drop snakes on her. Those instances also correspond to the idea of Sayuri as an unreliable narrator where there is ambiguity as to how much of the events of the film actually happen. Because the main character voicing doubts in Sayuri’s stories (Mrs. Shige) turns out to be the villain, and the rest of the film proceeds as if each supernatural event happened in some capacity (even if Tamami was not a Snake Girl that violently murdered a human-sized version of the doll, Tamami did still break Sayuri’s doll), I think it is fairest to take Sayuri’s side.  According to Weber’s thesis, shojo manga frequently does explore systemic lack of trust and respect in women, so the doubt cast on Sayuri’s story may just be trying to simulate that, in which case I assign that feature to Umezu, the trailblazer in shojo manga.

 

The pamphlet included in the Arrow release of this film includes an essay by Raffael Coronelli, who claims Yuasa was very enthusiastic about Japanese folk stories, even as the reason for his views about animals and humans being the same in capacity for motivation and thought or for there being divinity in things the West would label as monstrous. This would bring deeper meaning to the scenes of snakes and spiders in this movie, since they would not just be props but actual characters. Based on the film, I think there are more areas Yuasa diverged from Umezu, since this film downplays the evil mother relationship, and demotes the Snake Girl to a child shadow of the main character rather than the symbol of the mother’s evil.

 

This takes us to the doubles relationships in the film.  There is nothing so outright Jungian as in Gamera vs Guiron (where the Terans actually work better as the warped Animas to the main boys than as foils to their parents), but there are a lot of shadow relationships.  Tamami ultimately represents a warning to Sayuri about what would happen if she prioritized her looks over her heart.  Sayuri goes through similar scenarios and tests as Tamami (namely having to live in the attic), but her positive qualities show her handling the situations differently.  Similarly, while Mrs. Nanjo is a weak but caring parent, and Mr. Nanjo is a strong and caring one, Ms. Shige plays the role of the weak but cruel housekeeper while being the dominant and manipulative Silver Haired Witch. The introductory pamphlet mentions that Yuko Hamada (the mother in this film) also plays a domineering mother in Gamera vs Guiron, and, as I have kept saying, there really is not that much to connect Akio’s mother to the Terans, while here (especially because of Kazuo Umezu’s input) there is a direct line of comparison between Yuko Nanjo and Mrs. Shige.  

 

This suggests a different focus in the doubles relationships that exist and also probably proves intentionality in those doubles relationships (since my understanding of Kazuo Umezu’s version of this story is such that it would have condensed Tamami, Mrs. Shige and Mrs. Nanjo into the same false mother character). Separating the Good Mother And the Evil Mother is a coincidental similarity to Coraline, but, more than anything, it indicates that Yuasa, independent of Umezu, has some understanding of double relationships. My initial comparison of this film to Coraline was based on all the incidental similarities (Other Mother symbolism, ambiguous reality, living doll, prominent male friend in the film version), the same way David Kalat’s commentary track brings up the similarities between pure Sayuri and the American slasher Final Girl trope, but those are coincidental similarities because again the relevant cultures as so different and divorced that the comparison here is primarily to help you, the audience member, understand what this movie is similar to not what it is.

The presiding view on Gamera vs Guiron, as argued by Kalat in his Arrow video film commentary for the Gamera collection, is a fairy tale (where the proposed punishment from Mr. Kondo toward Tom manifests as the Terans shaving Akio’s head, but this film and other fairy tales remain focused on the same protagonists and same antagonists for the subtext.  If Noriaki Yuasa intended Gamera vs Guiron as a fairy tale, he failed in ways he did not for the movie that directly preceded it in his filmography). As I argued, in my Jungian analysis of Gamera vs Guiron, the film fits closer to the beats of Portal Fantasy (condemnation of technology and prominent imagery of Sweets, specifically candies or pastries) than Grimm’s fairy tales, but this film The Snake Girl… actually uses the kind of Grimm allusions people ascribe to the later film.

 

I was going to go through the tropes of Grimm fairy tales to compare with this film one by one but just referencing the film’s plot points will be sufficient to say my piece on that.  Especially during the dream sequences, traditional Grimm fairy tale imagery is leveraged as part of the horror.  First, Sayuri’s doll takes on a Fairy Godmother role, growing in size and transforming Sayuri’s pajamas into nice clothes; The Snake Girl invades the dream and murders the Fairy Goddoll. (Some critics like Kalat attribute this sequence as a reference to the Nutcracker, but that is not in their better interests; The Nutcracker and The Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman, the original version of that tale, is an early example of portal fantasy, which would make it possible for Yuasa to be aware of those tropes when he was making Gamera vs Guiron.) Next, once Sayuri is forced into sleeping in the attic (becoming a princess locked away in a tower like Rapunzel), she has a dream where she is menaced by a large snake and must fight it with a sword (not necessarily a specific allusion I can think of but the more generalized idea of a fairy tale scenario that lacks any portal fantasy confounding tropes).  And of course, rather than slaying the dragon, it turns out she has, in the dream, killed Tamami, who she at this point is sympathetic to, once again subverting the fairy tale imagery (and foreshadowing Tamami’s later death).

 

Most importantly, another notable common trope is the major theme of both this film and the Grimm tale The Maid Maleen, where someone’s beauty is proportional to the goodness in their heart (in this case where monstrous ugliness has a pseudoscientific explanation).  It is not perfect adherence to all of The Grimms’ tropes, but neither is any individual story from their collections.  I hope the existence and distribution of this film disproves the notion of Gamera vs Guiron being a Grimm fairy tale based only on the presence of violence and childlike whimsy, because, even if Noriaki Yuasa didn’t put these allusions in here, following his work on this film, he would know how to make these allusions and what the common tropes are and look like.  Yuasa’s filmography getting less fairy tale-like over time should be very telling, but I should again tie this back to the conclusion that The Snake Girl… is a very Grimm tale (if it is possible to find these same messages in Japanese folklore, I will encourage this conversation to continue along those lines. I am just presenting the argument my research supports).

 

Bringing this back around to Gamera vs Guiron, Sayuri is actually a quite similar character to Akio’s sister Tomoko: a young girl that is constantly discredited but singularly innocent and with an older male friend (in Gamera vs Guiron, the policeman Kondo). I find that interesting because the benevolent older males in the Gamera series usually interacted with the male child leads (Kojiro Hongo in his second and third Gamera films). This is not just a movie Yuasa did on the side but one that was very important to his storytelling style (also a film he negotiated to make between Gamera flicks as a palate cleanser), so further analysis into The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch will be necessary to understand Noriaki Yuasa more.

 

Sources

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray-review-yuasa-noriaki-arrow/

https://www.dabblewriter.com/articles/the-innocent-archetype

https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-1968-horror-film-review

https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/junji-ito-monthly-halloween-and-the-rise-of-shojo-horror

https://www.structural-learning.com/post/carl-jungs-archetypes

https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/thesis/_But_I_am_still_a_girl_after_all_A_Discourse_Analysis_of_Femininities_in_Popular_Japanese_Manga_Comics/17019113?file=31475207

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10357823.2017.1370436

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/TheBrothersGrimm

https://www.willamettecollegian.com/post/coraline-movie-vs-book-the-eeriness-of-perfection-and-simplicity#:~:text=Essentially%2C%20Wybie%20being%20present%20in,the%20other%20side%20is%20different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilia_(manga)

https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/04/02/serpent-youtube/

https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:854133/datastream/PDF/view

 

The Best of Scenes and The Worst of Scenes: Gamera vs Viras

 

A Plan9Crunch essay by Joe Gibson

Gamera vs Viras is a conflicted, almost frustrating film to watch.  The tropes that will define the rest of Gamera’s Showa era are established here, such as AIP’s mandate of American boys starring alongside the Japanese boys and extraterrestrials menacing Earth, but there are still the last vestiges of early Showa Gamera here as well, as it is Kojiro Hongo’s third appearance as a prominent adult hero (though by far his least prominent role) and the protagonists here are mischievous, not entirely virtuous as their introduction is sabotaging a minisub and inadvertently endangering their scout master.  The practice of extensive stock footage use begins in this film, but it was not as refined as in later entries to the point of being distracting.  All this to say, the film fluctuates wildly scene to scene in the tone, writing quality and creativity to the point where the simplest way to describe the quality of Gamera vs Viras is in its juxtaposition.

Tone and Realism

The cold open of this movie is a remarkably effective scene of intimidating aliens stating their intention to colonize the Earth but being attacked by Gamera.  Gamera’s assault contains none of his characteristic warmth and keeps him out of focus, his face most visible only after he’s breached part of the spaceship with it.  When Gamera destroys a section of the ship, they jettison it, and when he flies around them, they attempt to extinguish his jets.  In this part, the film has put the viewer more in the perspective of the aliens, Virians/Virasians/Virases as they are called, as the commanding voice on the speaker becomes frantic then regains its composure to make some evasive attempts but ultimately seems to realize the ship is about to be destroyed.  This is easily the most destructive Gamera has been since the beginning of Gamera vs Barugon, and it is an effective contrast to have Gamera’s next scene be him warmly racing two boys in a minisub and protecting them from the second spaceship’s Super Catch Ray, as every action taken by these agents thus far is in line with their characterization.

However, a film that begins so darkly and semi realistically should not also contain a scene where the UN decides to surrender to alien invasion in order to save two children.  For those unaware, a major contributing factor for why Noriaki Yuasa, the director of most of the Showa Gamera films, made films wherein the children were smart, heroic and always had Gamera to look out for them was because he had briefly filmed at a home for abandoned children and wanted to give them a hero to look up to.  Yuasa had his own issues with adults, hence why as the series went on, there was less emphasis on heroic Kojiro Hongo type characters and more on how Gamera is willing to do anything for the children.  A world where the UN would surrender Earth to save two children is a world that arguably does not need Gamera to look out for the kids.

This film already has the Virians use Gamera’s “unusual and overwhelming kindness to human children” to their advantage, threatening to kill the kids if Gamera attacks their second ship, and the boys already take an active role in trying to escape their imprisonment, so nothing changes in the stakes if the UN were to refuse that offer.  It must be emphasized that a world that will sacrifice itself for two people strains credibility more and in different ways than giant monsters existing.  The cold open to this film already showed that it is possible to approach realism in the spaceship’s intelligent defensive moves and ultimate ill fate.

Cohesion of The Main Characters’ Arc

As alluded to, the boys in this film, Masao and Jim, are rather mischievous, especially compared to the earnest Eiichi in Gamera vs Gyaos before this, the introspective and reactive Akio and Tom in Gamera vs Guiron directly after this, and the dutiful teens that go inside of Gamera a couple films later in Gamera vs Jiger.  Indeed, their introduction to the film is wandering away from their scout troop to perform a shortsighted prank by switching the controls of a submarine, cringe at the consequences of endangering Kojiro Hongo and the friendly scientist letting them use the sub but then also laugh and spin the situation their way to be able to be the only scouts that can use the minisub (when if they had not sabotaged it, everybody would have been able to).  Once the aliens kidnap them, they learn what they can about the spaceship and try to use it to their advantage, easily some of the most dynamic protagonists of the franchise thus far.  After some failed attempts of escaping and a startling willingness to sacrifice themselves to save the world, their scoutmaster actually inspires them to repeat the prank on the Virian machinery to escape and free Gamera from the alien’s control.

 

Their selfish setup would have lent itself well to a coming of age arc where they would mature in order to achieve their victory.  During their time on the Virian spaceship, they show more compassion than before, promising to free what they think is a captive monster in a cage but is actually the Virian boss’ in his equivalent of a throne room, and, when they can finally reach Masao’s sister on their wrist communication devices, the boys are actually willing to selflessly lay down their lives for the good of humanity.  For whatever reason, it is the moral authority of Kojiro Hongo’s Scoutmaster character that encourages them to do the same prank to escape, seemingly vindicating their mischievousness.  Their arc seems to run backwards of how it should, learning a lesson offscreen with the screen time given to them embracing who they were before everything changed.  Their actual contributions to Gamera fighting Viras are minimal, just commands for actions he would have taken anyways, an awkward middle ground between Eiichi needing Gamera to save him and Akio and Tom assisting Gamera in battle by launching a rocket for him to use.

Creativity In Fight Scenes

The action in this movie is also rather varied.  Space Monster Viras, technically a combination of several Virians with their boss, was a rather inventive physical suit with a mess of spindly tentacles disguising the actor’s legs.  Coming off villains that were essentially a quadruped and a bird, this is something creative and new, and it is equally unique how Viras fights Gamera, where it is on the backfoot until it can set up an efficient and underhanded attack, goring Gamera’s stomach.  That is just the final battle though; outside of the cold open, all of the other action scenes in this film come from the previous films, administered in a few lengthy stock footage segments recapping Gamera’s rampages in the original film and Gamera vs Barugon as well as his fights against Barugon and Gyaos.  

 

Quite distractingly, some of these clips were in black and white originally, and the film putting a blue hue on those scenes does not fix the issue.  As far as repeating the previous movie’s fight scenes, there is a slight issue with that.  While it is the contrast from those villains that makes Viras’ one short fight against Gamera stand out, the film did not need to show them again to achieve that effect.  Gamera vs Guiron features multiple of the Gyaos species, and the different way Guiron kills it sets Guiron apart.  Similarly, Jiger later on is unique simply for having so many absurd abilities that her film explores throughout three fights and an impregnation scene.

Conclusion

The highs of this movie are exceptionally high, and there was a lot of potential for the best Gamera movie yet, but the vision was inconsistent, almost to a greater extent than the original Gamera (which itself relentlessly switches between Daiei’s desire for a Godzilla ripoff competing with Yuasa’s vision of a child friendly icon).  Consequently, it is difficult to justify a favorable review of this film, when other Gamera movies used the same building blocks as this film much more consistently.  Still, this film’s place in the franchise is a major turning point and important to remember.  Without this film, the later Showa Gamera films would not have happened the same way, and Viras could not have been one of the main villains of the recent Netflix show Gamera Rebirth.

A Jungian Exploration of Gamera vs Guiron

 

By JOSEPH GIBSON

The following essay was presented at the 2024 National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State.

 

Abstract - 439 words

 

In the 1969 giant monster movie Gamera vs Guiron from Daiei Film, two curious boys embark on an interplanetary adventure.  Seeking a more advanced world, they come into conflict with its sole survivors, forcing a three round monster brawl between the boys’ friend, a giant turtle named Gamera, and the aliens’ watchdog, a quadrupedal fish with a knife for a head called Guiron (Yuasa, 1969).  Fans of the series praise this film in a backhanded sense, acknowledging lessened quality while upholding what it “tried” to do (Madole, 2022). This essay argues that Gamera vs Guiron uniquely explores psychological concepts proposed by Carl Jung, as opposed to more traditional themes for its technical subgenre of portal fantasy.  The ways in which the film develops its primary monsters, characters and worlds most strongly portray several Jungian ideas such as the self, shadow, anima, unconscious world and “answer to Job.”

Out of the twelve Gamera movies, Gamera vs Guiron is the fifth installment and the fourth of director Noriaki Yuasa.  AIP, an American production company Daiei partnered with for distribution, ordered Gamera vs Guiron to be a straightforward space adventure (Draper, 2023).  However, the crew’s input resulted in a script that follows plot beats of portal fantasy while containing events that benefit from a Jungian analysis.  Nisan Takahashi wrote all of the early Gamera films, Hidemasa Nagata, producer, enforced the films as fairy tale lessons for children, and Yuasa defined Gamera’s identity as a character and series through a reciprocal connection to active and curious child protagonists (Cynical Justin, 2022).  Meanwhile, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychoanalyst and contemporary to Freud, wrote prolifically on the collective unconsciousness, naming archetypes as patterns of behavior (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 13-16).  The persona, anima/animus and shadow count as archetypes of the self and personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious archetypes are the creator, ruler, caregiver, everyman, jester, lover, hero, magician, rebel, explorer, sage, and innocent (Main, 2023). Being a Japanese children’s film, it is certainly an unlikely place to find demonstrations of the archetypes of Carl Jung; Jung’s ideas have uniquely informed the landscape of cinema.  Jung’s insights into the self and shadow or anima and animus dichotomies have shaped the cinematic trope of doubles (Barnett, 2007). At the conclusion of this essay, the implementation of information from sources ranging from compilations of Jung’s work to scholarly articles analyzing Jung as well as portal fantasy conventions will indicate similarities to a Jungian perspective.  Because of the juxtaposition of these heretofore unconnected concepts, the findings in this essay will contribute to academic discourse on Japanese B movies and the men and philosophies that made them.

 

Jungian Shadow And Christ Concepts - 645 words

 

The rivalry between Gamera and Guiron is uniquely Jungian in that Guiron serves as Gamera’s Shadow. Generally, Jung writes on the idea of the shadow as being undesirable unconscious facets of the hero that keep them from a true understanding of themselves and their world (Jung & Stoor, pp. 91-93).  While analyzing Nietzche’s Zarathustra, Jung clarified that the shadow is a negative relationship between archetypes, informed by insecurities or possible failings (Jung, 2012).  Gamera does not fit any of the 12 common literary archetypes, so for this stage of the analysis, Gamera is Gamera, Guiron as an inverse Gamera.  On the surface, the knife head of Guiron contrasts Gamera’s protective shell, casting Guiron merely as the aggressor to Gamera’s defender, the sword against his shield in the theaters of land, sky and underwater. However, Guiron’s introduction into the film is defending the other world Tera from Gyaos, a monster that Gamera defended Earth from.  Furthermore, Guiron has a connection to the two remaining Terans, Flobella and Barbella, just as Gamera protects Akio and Tom specifically.  Additionally, the film chooses a gray and red/orange color palette for Tera that it keeps consistent with the infrastructure as well as the new Teran breed of Gyaos, indicating that the gray, red and green Guiron, since Gamera is also green, is to be Tera’s Gamera.  (Yuasa, 1969).  

Gamera is a being that inexplicably knows the state of the universe and the needs of his human friends, what they should do, and how he can help them, with no internal change necessary, which can only make him, according to Jungian psychological archetypes, the ideal Self: the Christ.  If the premise of attributing a turtle with human psychological qualities seems unwise, according to a 2002 interview with Jörg Buttgereit, Noriaki Yuasa’s understanding of the giant monster subgenre was thus that animals and humans were very similar in the capacity and expression of certain feelings (2002). Gamera undeniably serves a mentor role to the children, warning them against going to Tera and fighting to his utmost to keep them safe, even seeming to die and resurrect in the process (Yuasa, 1969).  This includes aspects of the Caregiver and Sage, but the Sage generally defers physical fighting to the hero (Gaynor-Guthrie, 2023). The Caregiver seems to be contextualized through the “Great Mother” archetype (Main, 2023). The Christ, as Jung defines it, can contain both and yet still more that applies to Gamera.  

Jung notes that the Christ of religion and tradition does not have a fitting Shadow and yet fights against evil, leading Jung to quote St. Augustine, “Those things we call evil, then, are defects in good things….” (Jung & Stoor, 2013 pp. 299-305).  Whereas Gamera defends Earth and children from Gyaos merely dutifully, Guiron does so sadistically. Importantly, whereas Akio and Tom build a relationship with the Christ figure Gamera, as Jung recommends, Flobella and Barbella’s use of technology as a shortcut for Guiron’s control undermines their society’s strength in the aftermath of a Gyaos attack (Yuasa, 1969). Gamera follows the boys to Tera because of his overwhelming drive to save children, but the distance the Terans put between themselves and Guiron downgrades his willingness to save them, turning him into a soulless weapon.  According to Wikizilla, the creature designer of Guiron, Akira Inoue, said, “....when I put the head of a knife on a body I created Guiron. It's not a living thing anymore, the idea comes from a weapon….” (Wikizilla, 2022).  This was a deliberate choice to reduce Guiron physically to a weapon even when the being showed complex thought in battle. It is significant that Gamera wins only when the children align with his will and Guiron’s allies retreat.  This essay will elaborate on Gamera as a distinctly Jungian Christ; first, it is important to see how that interpretation transforms the journeys of Akio and Tom with the villains.

 

Jungian Anima or Portal Fantasy in Gamera vs Guiron - 820 words

 

Akio and Tom’s journey displays Jungian themes, as they start the film as the characters most concerned with seeking unconscious truths about the cosmos and gradually gain understanding about their role in their world by mastering a shadow version of it.  While the basic setup classifies Gamera vs Guiron into portal fantasy, the film is a poor example of the associated character arcs.  Portal fantasy is essentially any story that emphasizes bizarre creativity from the perspectives of young children discovering fantasy worlds.  Another word for a child’s fantasy world is paracosm (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 28-29). Crucially, these stories function as a marriage between reality and fantasy, brought on by a child protagonist’s boredom (Tatar, 2020, pp 24-25, 27).  Gamera vs Guiron is commonly vaguely referred to as a fairy tale for reasons that fit portal fantasy. Coraline by Neil Gaiman, the typical modern and contemporary portal fantasy novel, also extends the genre to its ultimate implicit psychological stances on paracosm (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 35).

Coraline’s paracosm is, in story, real but can also be considered symbolic for the growth and maturity of a child during self play: wanting to escape the world around her into a new one filled with magic, realizing the imperfections of her paracosm, losing interest in it, and, finally, returning to it in order to finish the story.  Like all paracosm and most examples of portal fantasy, Coraline’s Other World is a mixture of reality and fantasy; in particular, the fantastical figures populating it are versions of the people she knows in the real world (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 30-34, 32). The expectation would then be for Gamera vs Guiron to follow these beats for the journeys of Akio, Tom, and the people they find on Tera, and, lest it seem an unfair comparison, Yuasa had already directed a horror film called The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch with similar tropes to those that would eventually inform Coraline: ambiguously real fantasy and the warping of surrounding people into monsters through the eyes of an intelligent young girl (Miles). 

The boys begin Gamera vs Guiron studying the stars through Akio’s telescope, when they see a spaceship.  Akio’s mother soon chastises them for imagining a spaceship rather than studying, and Tom’s mother agrees, casting them as stern characters, unlike Flobella and Barbella’s warm reaction to the boy’s curiosity (Yuasa, 1969).  However, Akio’s quirky neighbor, policeman Kondo, does not have a Teran equivalent, nor does Akio’s sister Tomoko, and Flobella and Barbella have an arc and dynamic more similar to Akio and Tom than their mothers.  Akio constantly orders around Tom, who obeys, and Flobella does the same to Barbella, while the mothers are equals. Also, the Terans plan to leave Tera, just as the boys left Earth. The film subverts portal fantasy conventions in order to include another doubles pair.  In this case, the doubles are swapped in sex, which points back to Jung’s idea of the anima/animus.  

The anima (man’s inner woman) and animus (woman’s inner man) generally comprise underlying personalities for the self based on the person’s previous experiences with an opposite sex parent, and Jung writes that when people remain unconscious to their world, the anima will be warped (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 104-109).  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is an archetypal doubles film, and its doubles pair is the confused Norman becoming his anima (Norma) in a deviant fashion (Barnett, 2007). Akio and Tom are curious about the cosmos and Tera because they want to escape Earth; the Terans are curious about Earth to escape there.  Akio’s telescope is not precise enough, so their animas act in imprecise and cruel ways: eating Akio’s brain for his knowledge (Yuasa, 1969).  According to Jung, “...when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction” (2013, pp. 112).  While Coraline crafted a narrative through experiencing the paracosm and ultimately outsmarting the Beldam, the only asset of Akio and Tom in their journey, other than Gamera, is a cap gun that Tom has as a masculine symbol.  The Terans deceive the boys and are attractive (Madole, 2022).

Interestingly, neither the cap gun nor the trickery excel for the pairs long term in their confrontation, even when they switch, with the boys using trickery and the Terans using laser guns.  This is because the anima and animus are complementary, and the self must accept both the logical male traits and the emotional female traits in order to achieve awareness (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 113). To win, Akio and Tom have to exemplify both halves, containing the emotional Tom and logical Akio and align the technology of Tera to Gamera’s will, controlling a rocket missile for Gamera to use against Guiron. The Terans do not assimilate Earth and divide, leaving Flobella at the mercy of an incidental missile collision, no longer in control of Tera.  

 

 Jung and Portal Fantasy In The WorldBuilding of the Film - 383 words

 

Gamera vs Guiron portrays its worlds and the struggle of using technology to try to understand or master them, and this is important both to Jung and portal fantasy.  Some of the historical hallmarks of portal fantasy are odd vehicles (the portal itself), references to sweets, magic, and an implicit disdain for Enlightenment scientific ideals and technology.  One of the earliest influences on the genre E.T.A. Hoffmann used the concept of whimsical fancies of bored children to create magical aesthetics and explore debunked magical thinking (Tatar, 2020, pp. 31-32, 26-27, 36). 

The Terans tempt Akio and Tom with donuts, and the overreliance of the Terans and human scientists on modern technology prevent them from understanding their worlds. However, the boys’ eventual mastery over Tera and return home hinges on the use of technology; crucially, the portal vehicle is not magical at all but a mere spaceship.  The aesthetic of Tera is not magical but technological (Yuasa, 1969).  According to Jung, “technology is neutral…neither good nor bad,” with the danger being a misplaced sense of control over the world, with the lack of consciousness in operating the technology inevitably leading to destruction (Brien, 2013). The film is closer to this because the use of technology is from honest efforts to understand the cosmos or improve life, from Akio’s telescope to the Earthbound scientists studying space and even the Teran innovations, and the positive characters accept Akio and Tom’s conscious explanation.

Under the purview of portal fantasy, the Teran Space Gyaos are technically an “Other Gyaos” but not ones that say anything about the nature of the boys’ paracosm.  Interestingly, the origin of Space Gyaos in this film is that they were a created species on Tera that wreaked havoc on their creators (Yuasa, 1969).  The Terans’ technological advancement led to their destruction.  There is a component of childlike randomness in the film’s explanation, that it was a computer malfunction that generated uncontrollable monsters, but the film constantly reiterates that Akio’s idea of a superior world would lack wars and traffic accidents, and Tera shows him that world with its teleportation machines and superior technology.  It is warped because technology does not bring Jungian awareness.  That superior technology can malfunction to create monsters, necessitating the creation of missiles and other monsters (Yuasa, 1969).

 

Answer to Job in Gamera vs Guiron - 427 words

 

Outside of the mere allusion, appointing Gamera as Christ requires more specific character beats to fit as a Jungian archetype.  Jung wrote exhaustively, and to some degree uncomfortably and unwillingly, about how the god-image could be both good and evil particularly in the Book of Job (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 127-128). This is, evidently, because of Jung’s complicated emotions toward Christianity and God as a whole following the loss of faith of his father Paul Jung (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 124, 134).  In the Book of Job, God tested Job’s faithfulness with a series of horrible trials, and Job endured it (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 309-320).  While Jung emphasized the importance of both positive masculine and feminine influences (syzygy of anima and animus) and the risks of lacking either, it greatly disturbed Jung to realize that God lacked the caring feminine traits until after Job’s story.  Suffice it to say, this goes against everything else in Jung’s psychology about man’s need to align with God’s will to find enlightenment if God was “unconscious” and “monstrous” (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 135, 138, 134).  Eventually, Jung concluded that Job showing greater goodness than God is what inspired God to become Christ (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 309). 

Inexplicably, this idea has a parallel in Gamera vs Guiron; in order to learn more about the Gyaos-slaying Gamera, the Terans technologically extract Akio’s memories to recapitulate the previous films, including showing Gamera’s first act of heroism (Yuasa, 1969). The montage briefly shows Gamera’s journey from destroying a lighthouse and catching a child to defending the same child from Gyaos to finally defending all children from the extraterrestrial squid Viras. This covers Gamera’s arc well; he was an attacking monster that saved a child, and that event inspired Gamera to be “The Friend to All Children” (Yuasa, 1969).  In a revisionist sense, this montage is the truest version up to that point in the series of those past events, and its deviations correspond to Jung.  It is not as precise as Jung’s Answer to Job, because Yuasa had a different agenda.  

Yuasa campaigned seriously to include the lighthouse scene and follow it through to its natural conclusions in subsequent entries (Cynical Justin, 2022).  An interview clarified why this was so important to Yuasa; he briefly filmed at a home for abandoned children, saw their sadness and appointed Gamera as a friend to all children for them (Buttgereit, 2002).  

Later creatives on the franchise would make the comparison even less subtle, but this is also the first film where Gamera undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. 

 

Limitations - 162 words

 

Jung’s writings and Yuasa’s film have different goals and will, consequently, not line up in every detail.  First, all this aforementioned Jungian subtext is exclusive to this movie and the presentation of those stock footage scenes. Secondly, as a consequence to Jungian unconsciousness plaguing the boys’ mothers, they do not encompass many of Jung’s Mother Archetype tropes; they are neither great sources of wisdom, nor terrible, seductive objects (Jung, 1968 pp. 81-84). Finally, this essay cannot present any evidence that Yuasa was familiar with Jung or held any Christian beliefs.  Yuasa’s description of his own beliefs in his works extends more to finding humanity in giant creatures than finding divinity in man (Buttgereit, 2002).  Also, as aforementioned, Yuasa directed The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch, which features both Christianity and Nietzsche subtext in its monsters (Wilkins, 2022).  However, that film was based on a large body of work from Kazuo Umezu, who has his own associated tropes and views (Miles).

 

 

Conclusion - 125 words

 

In conclusion, this essay contrasted interpretations of the film Gamera vs Guiron in order to argue that it predominantly upheld Jungian conventions, even deviating from the parameters of portal fantasy in order to do so.  The portrayal of Gamera and Guiron as a Christ/Shadow pair, the boys and villains along the parameters of animus/anima development, the uniquely Jungian stance on technology and rough depiction of the Answer to Job outweighed the alternative explanations that portal fantasy would provide.  Based on this research, there are similarities between the outlooks of Yuasa and Jung, and further analysis through this lens could help to better understand Yuasa’s intent on his filmography.  Further cursory research suggests potential commonalities in both of their views on animals and children.

 

References

Barnett, V. L. (2007). Dualling for judy: the concept of the double in the films of kim novak. Film History, 19(1), 86+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A160592787/PPFA?u=ogde72764&sid=bookmark-PPFA&xid=544229b0

Brien, D. E. (2013, October 27). The star in man: jung and technology. Jungpage. https://jungpage.org/learn/articles/technology-and-environment/681-the-star-in-man-jung-and-technology

Cynical Justin. (2022, August 26). The history and evolution of gamera [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfArMhrfvAA

Draper, M. (2023, August, 2). GAMERA: The heisei series retrospective - The greatest kaiju movies ever made [Video].  YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnAh4uzxxOY

Draper, M. (2023, May 17). GAMERA: The showa era retrospective - The rise & fall of a cult kaiju icon [Video].  YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jeTGqdW1-k

Gaynor-Guthrie, G. (2023, March 9). The sage archetype: a guide. Literature and Latte. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/the-sage-archetype-a-guide-literature-latte-1#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20sage%20archetype,the%20world%20and%20its%20mysteries.

Jung, C. G. (1968). Collected works of c. g. Jung Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press (pp. 81-84).

JUNG, C. G. (2012). 27 june 1934. In JAMES L. JARRETT (Ed.), Nietzsche's "zarathustra" (pp. 129). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G., & Storr, A. (2013). The essential jung (Paperback reissue, with a new foreword by John Beebe. ed.). Princeton University Press

K., K., & Swamy, S. K. (2021). Through the portals of the mind: A paracosmic study of neil gaiman’s coraline. Fafnir, 8(2), 28-37

Madole, D. (host). DaikaijuTony. & Barry, S. & Derek. & Blount, C. (panelists). (2022, January 15). TokuTitanCast #17 Ranking every gamera movie! In TokuTitanCast. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fttH5MNgCR8

Main, P. (2023). Carl jung’s archetypes. In P. Main (Ed.) Cognitive Development  https://www.structural-learning.com/post/carl-jungs-archetypes

Miles, S. (N.A. September, 26). [Film Review] Snake girl and the silver haired witch (1968). Ghouls Magazine. https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-1968-horror-film-review

Tatar, M. (2020). Inventing portal fantasies: E. T. A. hoffmann's the nutcracker and the mouse king. Marvels & Tales, 34(1), 24-37. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.34.1.0024

Wilkins, B. (2022, January 7). Review: yuasa noriaki’s the snake girl and the silver haired witch on arrow blu-ray. Slant. https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray-review-yuasa-noriaki-arrow/

Woodside, A.G., & Sood, S. C. (2016). Storytelling-case archetype decoding and assignment manual (SCADAM) (2st ed.). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1871-3173201611

Woolfson, T. (2009). The book of job revisited. The International Journal of Jungian Studies, 1(2), 123-143. https://doi.org/10.1080/19409050903109330

Wurdeman, A. (2022, February 15). The innocent archetype - everything you need to know. Dabblewriter. https://www.dabblewriter.com/articles/the-innocent-archetype

Yuasa, N. (1969). ガメラ対大悪獣ギロン, Gamera tai daiakujū giron [gamera vs. giant evil beast guiron]. Shout Factory!; Mill Creek Entertainment; Arrow Video; American International Pictures (AIP); Daiei Film

Yuasa, N. (Director). (2021). Gamera: the showa era collection gamera vs viras/gamera vs guiron [Film; BluRay with special features, specifically the interview taken from Die Monsterinsel of Yuasa with Jorg Buttgereit on August 10, 2002]. Arrow Video

Yuasa, N. (Director). (2021). Gamera: the showa era collection gamera vs viras/gamera vs guiron [Film; BluRay with special features, specifically David Kalat’s commentary track of Gamera vs Guiron].  Arrow Video

(2022, September). Guiron. Wikizilla. https://wikizilla.org/w/index.php?title=Guiron&oldid=170910

----

To read a review of Gamera versus Guiron, go here.