A fairly rare example of Netflix getting their hands on a piece of existing IP has arrived in the shape of Shannon Tindle and John Aoshima’s Ultraman: Rising. There was a time, not all that long ago, when Ultraman was the third most popular character in the world in terms of licensing and merchandise sales, mainly because he is so ubiquitous and beloved in east Asia. And yet I suspect that a mention of the character would just draw blank looks from most of us in the western world.
The origins of Ultraman date back to the 1960s and a TV series produced by Eiji Tsubaraya, the special effects wizard behind the early Godzilla films made by Toho. Perhaps as a result, Ultraman and Godzilla sometimes get lumped together in the popular imagination, even though the characters have never officially ‘met’ – although a couple of old Godzilla suits were repurposed as bad guy monsters in the Ultraman TV show, and there’s a canon Godzilla character called Jet Jaguar who’s a thinly disguised clone of Ultraman. We’re in the same realm of Japanese tokusatsu, anyway: big, colourful, somewhat bizarre pulp SF-fantasy entertainment.
The new movie skips delicately over the origins of Ultraman and reimagines him as something slightly more akin to an American superhero. Back in the way-back-when, Ultraman was the secret identity of one Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe), who used his special powers (basically, the ability to transform into a flying, energy-controlling giant) to stop wandering giant monsters from causing too much trouble – it’s a key point of the the film that these beasties are not innately bad but just need some wrangling occasionally. The prof’s dedication to his duties is enough to cause tension with his family, and his son Kenji ends up going to America to become a star baseball player.
But time takes its toll and the film proper opens with Ken (Christopher Sean) just having arrived back in Japan, ostensibly to play for the Tokyo Giants, but really to take over the mantle of Ultraman from his now-elderly pa. This is not going well as the new Ultraman has an excess of self-regard and is very light on the self-sacrificing dedication to his duties that his previous incarnation (which the film refers to as ‘Ultradad’) was so notable for. The ruthless Kaiju Defence Force is always hovering, fully prepared to kill any monsters which Ultraman can’t keep under control.
Things take a definite turn when a monster named Gigantron attacks a KDF air-convoy over Tokyo itself. Ultraman goes into action but is startled to discover that the cargo the KDF was so desperate to protect from Gigantron is, in fact, a very large egg – an egg which Ultraman finds himself in possession of. The egg hatches into an enormous pink baby monster, which imprints on Ultraman. It will clearly take a lot of selflessness and responsibility to look after the baby beast properly – is Ultraman really the right person for this job…?
So, this is another learning-and-growing-and-coming-of-age story, probably aimed at quite young audiences – the material isn’t presented especially subtly, with a lot of broad humour and several characters who seem destined for a long and lucrative post-film career as pieces of merchandise. But it’s really somewhat refreshing to come across a genre film which for the most part hasn’t always got one eye on the existing fanbase audience and isn’t trying to function on multiple levels simultaneously. I suppose it’s just possible some particularly severe parents may object to all the jokes about the baby monster’s bodily functions, or the presence of a track by the Sex Pistols on the soundtrack (this surprised me, to be honest), but for everyone else this will be a film the whole family can relax in front of.
It seems particularly well-pitched in this regard, as while younger viewers will presumably be enjoying the cute baby monster, the jokes and the action (and soaking up all the lessons about learning responsibility without realising it), their parents will be appreciating the film’s acknowledgement of the sacrifices involved in raising a child, regardless of whether that child is a human baby or a giant pink dragon – and there are some genuinely quite touching moments in the subplot about Ken and his father reconciling (Mrs Sato, and Ultraman’s AI, is played by Tamlin Tomita, whom sensible people may not have heard of but whom I obviously recognise from the pilot episode of Babylon 5 and a few episodes of Legacy of Monsters).
Ultraman: Rising and Legacy of Monsters are both interesting in that they’re essentially quite personal stories about slightly dysfunctional families, sold to a mass audience on the strength of their connection to a big-name character like Ultraman or Godzilla, with the implicit assumption that audiences are now sufficiently familiar with the genre conventions of daikaiju movies that these don’t have to established in advance. Ultraman: Rising very casually starts talking about ‘Kaiju Island’ without much more explanation – but surely everyone will get the reference to Monster Island from the Showa-era Godzilla films.
But then everyone seems to have become very tokusatsu-literate in the last ten years or so, even if the kyodai genre (which Ultraman pioneered) remains obscure in the west. The garish colour palette and some of the animation choices suggest to me that Pacific Rim was at the back of someone’s mind when this film was coming together, even if most of its visual style more closely resembles that of a Minions film or possibly The Incredibles. Either way, it is slick and accomplished, an appealing amalgam of Japanese and American traditions. I imagine it will do a good job of bringing Ultraman to a wider audience, but given the various previous iterations of the character have starred in literally dozens of different TV shows and movies, some of them very recent, this isn’t strictly a revival, nor is it really an introduction to the intricacies of the Ultra lore. Nevertheless, this is a fun and charming movie with its heart in the right place, even if it’s a little short on new ideas or the wow factor.
No Chic. Just Geek. 