The critic Viktor Shklovsky once described the durability of certain poetic images as a kind of immortality, for it’s as if they were never created, but constantly being found, in new but recognizable forms. The poetic image of the Japanese superhero Ultraman is now in its 56th year of rediscovery, with over a half-century of revival and reconfiguring amounting to a vast constellation of TV series, one-off specials, films, manga and video games. This enormous store of moving images is a testament to not only the popularity of Ultraman the character, but to several generations of artists, of many stripes, who’ve sculpted this franchise in an ever-changing flow of new styles and ideas.
Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno make their own addition with Shin Ultraman (2022), the second film in their series of reimagined classic tokusatsu (special effects) films. It follows Shin Godzilla (2016), a restoration of the Godzilla film as the horrifying charting of a monolithic, mythopoetic force of nature, bolstered with new strands of adventurous CGI design and political satire. Unlike that film, which was co-directed, Higuchi bears sole directorial credit on Shin Ultraman, while Anno was occupied with post-production on the final entry of the four-film Rebuild of Evangelion series, a new iteration of his life’s work. However, it’s a work of definite co-authorship, with Anno writing the screenplay, co-editing, and producing the film, along with having several other production credits. It’s also of a piece with the previous film, not only in subject and style, but in its excellent example of how the spirit of IP recycling and “cinematic universes,” which to an unprecedented degree has inundated much of today’s popular cinema, can be not just a corporate stratagem, but an adventurous, artist-led endeavor.
Shin Ultraman predominantly borrows from the original 1966 television series, the second work of the freshly independent Eiji Tsuburaya Productions, founded by one of the greatest special effects directors, co-parent of Godzilla (1954) and of kaiju eiga (giant monster movies). Ultraman represented a breaking away from the studio system, marked not only by Tsuburuya’s departure from the Toho studio, but a plunge into the younger medium of television. Ultraman was also a new genre alchemy. Splicing together the kaiju film with the superhero genre, its premise was of an intergalactic visitor whose accidental merge with a human being kindles their love for humanity, which they defend against a myriad of extraterrestrial, supersized threats.
The new film marks its own distinctive place in this densely populated franchise by embracing and baring the tension between a certain faithfulness to the debut series in particular and an overt break in tone and philosophical conclusions. The ’66 series provides a great deal of inspiration, from bells and whistles like its iconography and music cues to the film’s structure itself, which gives the impression of a cluster of episodes, interlinked with mounting stakes. It also brings back many of its old monsters, firing off with a fan-servicing montage of kaiju wreaking havoc and being destroyed. This prologue to the film is an entertaining speed through a classic rogues’s gallery of beasts, but the strangely dry and informational nature of this sequence points to something else.
It sets the scene of a Japan where, unlike in Shin Godzilla with its single, Rubicon-crossing monster-event, rampaging giant kaiju have become a humorously routine occurrence (although their origin and exact nature is suspiciously unknown). Their destruction and analysis is a systemized job of work for the government taskforce, S-Class Species Suppression (SSSP), the fired-up, proactive human heroes from the original series, reimagined as a motley crew of regulated, neurotic desk jockeys.
The tactics of Japan and the SSSP change with the explosive arrival of a mysterious new ally, a humanoid “silver giant.” With Ultraman, Earth has a new defense against the kaiju; that is, until it becomes clear that this superpowered defensive system is a conduit for new mysteries. Ultraman’s origins are unclear, and SSSP member Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh), who was caught in the blast of Ultraman’s arrival but inexplicably survived, is behaving strangely. It’s soon revealed that Kaminaga was killed in the impact and Ultraman has adopted his form, and the role of Earth’s defender out of a moral obligation born out of this new symbiosis with the fallen SSSP member. Their presence may initially protect and galvanize the planet, but Ultraman’s extraterrestrial power thrusts our pale blue dot into a byzantine intergalactic scene, and into a low-ranking and precarious position of a new cosmic order. Shortly after their arrival, Ultraman attracts new stellar villains and plunges Japan into cold and hot warfare with beings more intelligent and Machiavellian than the animal-like kaiju.
In emphasizing the unlevel playing field between Ultraman—heroic but distinctly inhuman in appearance, capabilities, and inner life—and their delicate, carbon-based wards, and turmoil caused by the revelation that humanity’s assumed, dominant intelligence and influence is subjective and now untenable, the film makes its disillusioning mark. There’s some retread of the more pointed subtext found in Shin Godzilla but that film is more committed to, and funnier and sharper with, a critique of the inertia of bureaucracy and the empty flash and fraudulence of political theatre. With this film, Higuchi and Anno have made an existentialist work that highlights a yawning gulf of perspectives. What we find is a contrast of eras between the film, a work of art that is very much of a de-spiritualized 21st century, and its antecedent, with its generally more positive, onwards and upwards view of heroism, technology, and humanity’s place within, and responsibility to, the rest of nature.
This disparity is hinted at, briefly, early on with a shot of the desk of the SSSP member, Taki (Daiki Arioka). It’s chock-full of figurines and other nerd relics, with one of his colleagues jibing that he’s “a typical geek who brings his personal life to work.” It’s an amusing bit of self-laceration from Higuchi and Anno, but it’s also not accidental that the most prominent icons on Taki’s altar are from Star Trek and Thunderbirds. They are the American and British contemporaries of Ultraman as TV shows that exemplified a certain optimistic strain of mid-’60s speculative fiction and scientific culture. These shows suggested that if the postwar period of economic miracles and industrialization were to continue ad-infinitum, the interlinking of new, visionary technologies with new ideas about society and art would bring about a fairer, better world.
This ardent attitude is illustrated in the ’66 series, for the most part, in a frequent lightness of tone, a sense of awe, a colorful palette, and an abundance of space age technologies, from spaceships to jets to lasers. However, the less ascendant, even pessimistic reality of Shin Ultraman is rendered with a cool, formalist touch. Often through prosaic spaces, like the hallways and offices of municipal buildings, it moves according to rigorously precise editing rhythms and is shot at consciously off-kilter camera angles that superbly disintegrate a stable anthropomorphic perspective, from the expected towering, aerial scale of the fight scenes to the use of iPhones for shooting setups where chairs, laptops, and other mundane objects engulf the frame and their human makers.
Rather than spaceships, the less flashy but more insidiously powerful information technologies are the dominating all-purpose tool of this universe. Most strikingly, they used in a dystopian fashion, with the calculating aliens Zarab and Mefilas bending data to their will to conjure both seductive and threatening demonstrations of their superiority over mankind. In the last act of the film, the theoretical framework of string theory becomes an important plot device. Developed at the end of the ‘60s, it was hoped that it would provide a triumphant capstone of the “heroic age” of physics by providing a single unified theory of everything. Instead, string theory describes a mind-bogglingly multi-dimensional multiverse whose qualities and scope are only truly, partly, scratchable through the tools of advanced mathematics. Ultraman’s heroism then seems less virtuous than Lovecraftian, less the role model of appreciative children, than something to be feared. This quandary becomes explicit with the rich dialogue scenes between Ultraman and the more human-like, yet not, alien Zarab (Koji Yamamoto, a standout with his creepy and funny performance of a con-man on the charm offensive) where different models of heroism and leadership, from the distant to the messianic to the dictator as the ultimate stern but caring father, are evoked.
For as much as Ultraman is depicted as a paragon, they are also deeply uncanny, from their physics-breaking movements to their unerringly blank expression emphasized by Saitoh’s excellent deadpan mimicry. The symbiosis between Ultraman and their human vessel, in the series, is limited to that climatic and often triumphant moment of transformation. In this film we get the disturbing image of Ultraman-Kaminaga gazing enigmatically down at the original Kaminaga’s grey, lifeless body, radiating a weirdness reminiscent of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptically melancholic, alien invasion movie Before We Vanish (2017). Ultraman repeatedly declares their love for humanity yet it’s a love that is cold and abstract. Its fulfilment, and the zenith of its estrangement, is reached with the dimension-hopping climax, where Ultraman ultimately decides humanity’s fate on a plane of reality and in terms that no human could ever truly conceive, never mind reach.
Despite the differing tones and philosophies, the ’66 series and this new film are not so cut-off. It would be gross oversimplification to characterize, unqualified, the former as bright and optimistic, and latter, with its often mischievous sense of humor and many unabashed pleasures, as a disenchanted incarnation. Across the original’s 975 minutes, it covered a wide range of textures and tones. Its collective mode of production entailed that the template could be played around with by a host of mostly young directors—the visually distinctive and generally darker episodes of Akio Jissoji being a case in point.
It also wouldn’t be fair to say that Shin Ultraman’s relationship to its source material is simply divergent, with a few fan-servicing crumbs sprinkled here and there. The fantastic combat sequences display a forward-thinking fealty to the source. Higuchi, Anno, and visual effects crew Shirogumi mix the use of newer, computer-generated effects, such as motion-capture, with miniatures and other practical effects with direct input from the old guard.
Bin Furuya, Ultraman’s original suit actor, served as a motion-capture model, advised on the choreography, and played the role along with Anno, who played the part in his first directorial effort of note, the short jovial fan film Daicon Film’s Return of Ultraman (1983). The classic, eye-scorching “spacium beam” was created by optical effects master Sadao Iizuka, whose career started in 1954 with Godzilla. Now nearly 90 and still using traditional hand animation, his pen and paper technique melds perfectly with pixels.
This hybrid approach stems partly from a love of old, analogue filmmaking methods and a desire to keep them flourishing in the present. It’s a trait that has significantly marked Higuchi’s own career as a filmmaker. A key, regular collaborator of Anno’s since the ’80s, and a writer, storyboard artist, and the protagonist's namesake on the Evangelion series, he made his reputation separate from Anno as the SFX director for the rebooted Gamera trilogy (1995-99), which was acclaimed for its synthesis of a Japanese tradition of handmade special effects with the new CGI status quo fermenting in Hollywood.
Their approach also forges new ways of using special effects, in progressive reflection of past techniques. The use of motion-capture CGI, a technology which, with few exceptions, has generally been employed to achieve a bland realism, is in this film a two-fold non-illusionist element. When used to animate the kaiju, it’s posited as a more pliable inheritor of the original actors-in-suits method, in that these virtual beasts possess an appealing hirsute quality, with their lumbering movements, combined with a rubbery texture of the animation. These sequences have an impressive physical presence, a strong sense of weight and tactility, while at the same time an uncanniness with the encouraged awareness that these are sculpted creations crashing through photorealistic landscapes. In the film’s later fights and SFX sequences, which largely take place off-surface, at the boundary of other dimensions and with less (comprehensible) physics-bound combatants, the CGI loses some of its tactility and is pushed towards abstraction.
The Japanese word “Shin” has a number of meanings, such as “new” and genuine.” It’s also, with an announcement released around the Japanese premiere of Shin Ultraman, a brand, with the latter films, the last film of Rebuild of Evangelion (released as Shin Evangelion in Japan), the upcoming, Anno-directed Shin Kamen Rider and two potential Ultraman sequels, announced as a new cross-studio, Japanese cinematic universe called “Shin Japan Heroes.” In response to comparisons to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and whether this is an indicator of future crossovers, both Haguchi and Anno have stated this joint venture is simply a marketing strategy and has no bearing on their creative work–a burst of PR, a line of toys, and a pachinko game likely being the easiest route for such an endeavor, given the daunting prospect of sorting out the ownership and profit stakes between four different rights-holders on even just a single film. Whether or not this will remain the case, the work backs them up for now. There are a few moments of intersection, from the use of Evangelion music in Shin Godzilla (with original Evangelion composer Shirō Sagisu having scored all the Shin films so far) to the appearance of the actor Yutaka Takenouchi in both the latter film and Shin Ultraman, playing the same role though seemingly different characters. These are light, passing touches compared to the MCU’s imbroglio of criss-crossing narrative continuity, which function in a manner close to micro-transactions (for instance, you can “access” Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s plot and emotional stakes if you pay for a Disney+ subscription and watched all of WandaVision) than the mythic frameworks that the company’s publicists and defenders regularly evoked.
The use of the term “Shin” then seems shoehorned as the code name of some grand operation of corporate synergy and storytelling, but can be more substantially understood as a unified mission statement and creation of those personnel on the factory floor. This artisanal stamp is a greater crossover element than any of the characters, iconography, or even copyright holders, connecting not only Anno’s and Higuchi’s handiwork but also, to name just one, assistant director Masayuki, who was also a key animator on the Rebuild films. The “Shin” appellation also points to the project’s inseparable dual aims, of tending to a lineage and breaking new ground. Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman are works that pick up and adapt long-running franchises, while also standing alone, idiosyncratically. In the case of the Rebuild of Evangelion, it’s a stranger and, in some ways, more ambitious embodiment of this spirit of progressive recycling. Since the 1997 film and finale reboot, The End of Evangelion, the series, which is also an overtly existential variation on the kaiju genre, has been reiterated out of both a commercial instinct towards betting on a known quantity, and Anno’s obsessive, artistic impulse to reflect, and re-reflect. The four Rebuild films mark a remarkable totalization of this tendency. On par with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), they assuage the corporate reliance on old IP in order to ram through the front door grand works of intrepid formal, societal, and personal expression, wherein the tendency to be stuck in the past, on repeat, is an active and ambivalent force.
The preponderance of interweaving cinematic universes in this and the last decade of mainly English-language popular cinema has not produced a string of exemplars of filmmaking craft and the innate inclination of genre fiction towards reiteration. Instead, a corporate lack of imagination and a fear of risk, heightened rather than allayed by a monopolizing stranglehold of just a few companies, has turned a near-infinity of possibilities into a homogenized mush. Universal Studios’s mid-2010s Dark Universe, which produced two films before ending in a rake of cancelled productions, is a good case in point. Despite having two rich reserves to draw from, a successful, early version of this crossover model, the Universal Monsters brand of the 1930s, and the horror genre more generally, they clung to the market and forced these properties into the form of a pale shadow of those superhero-style heroics being bought and sold elsewhere. Under the aegis of Disney-Marvel, neither an overarching, meticulous auteur like Hideaki Anno nor a remarkably attuned system of separated but close-knit groups of artists that made the original Godzilla could survive. Instead, their brand universe depends on fragmented, denuded production teams, many of whose duties and challenges are off-loaded onto a despicably overworked and underpaid post-production. They’re not the first company to push their artists beyond human limits but to do so in order to create corporate products often depleted of any non-corporate approved, individual or collective mark, adds insult to injury. Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman show another way, as brilliant chimeras of the power of persistent metaphor and imagery; learned, honed craft; and the modernist desire to reshape, to make new forms and ideas.
