×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

This Week in Anime
Hideaki Anno's Reimagined Shin Japan Heroes Universe

by Christopher Farris & Steve Jones,

After an illustrious career in animation, Hideaki Anno takes on tokusatsu with the Shin Japan Heroes Universe. Join Chris and Steve this week as they explore some of the franchise's work.

Shin Ultraman, Shin Godzilla, and Shin Kamen Rider are streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Chris
Steve, to stay relevant in this modern media landscape, it's time we gave ourselves a reboot. What we need is a shift to live-action special-effects spectacle with a gritty, deconstructive tone. This is the new This Week In Anime. This is...Shin TWIA!
Steve
Chris, for some reason, I have never felt more ready to put on a rubber suit and punch people in an abandoned quarry.
I'll be glad to join you because the inciting incident of this train of thought was Shin Kamen Rider finally hitting streaming release on Amazon. And as you learned back when we covered FUUTO PI, the heroes of these things always come as a duo.
And sometimes in duos squared! At least, that's true if we're talking about the Shin Japan Heroes Universe, a cinematic tetralogy from the twisted mind of Hideaki Anno. Debuting seven years ago on this very weekend, Shin Godzilla breathed life (and atomic lasers) into the series, and it just wrapped up this year with the aforementioned Shin Kamen Rider. Throw in some Eva 3.0 + 1.0 and Shin Ultraman in between, and you've got a slate of four movies that do a hell of a lot of different things under an uncommonly weird creative ethos. But we already said bye-bye to Eva, so let's focus on the ones about men in silly suits.
I'd normally take any opportunity to gush about Eva's big finish, but we have done plenty of that already. But it still perfectly springboards off into a discussion of the other movies. Hideaki Anno has always worn his love of tokusatsu and its influences on his work on his sleeve; Evangelion itself takes off heavily from Ultraman. So it only seems fitting that the man got the opportunity to produce his visions of these Japanese pop-culture icons.

Also, combine them all into a big merchandisable toy robot, as is expected of any prestige production.
Brightly colored plastic makes the tokusatsu world go 'round, after all. And like many people, my first experience with Evangelion happened in total ignorance of Anno's influences from his childhood. In fact, I'm still largely ignorant of the tokusatsu factors, but that's part of why this collection of films has fascinated me. I feel like I'm getting an even more intimate look into Anno's psyche when I watch these, and that's saying something considering how much of himself he poured into Eva.
Auteur theory and the influence of a single guiding individual on a production can be overblown, but I still love when I can get some sense of the leading creator just through their work. And that you can feel that about Anno in these movies is what makes them so fascinating as adaptations because his familiarity and reverence for the source material come through in them just as strongly as his pet ideas about organizational bureaucracy or the struggles of interpersonal understanding.
Yeah! Each of these texts is rich in its own way. Even on the surface level, you have a set of painstaking homages that embrace the inherent goofiness of their respective franchises while never straying a single step away from sincerity. I'm sure they're all chock-full of Easter eggs for diehard fans too. But even if that stuff flies over my head, I have a lot of fun picking up on the ideas that must have directly inspired Eva. For instance, Shin Ultraman features a motley crew of monstrous kaiju that become more intelligent and sophisticated as the story progresses.


Something familiar about that first guy...
See, there's one of those Easter Eggs already! It rules that Gomess, always known in the Ultra series for being I Can't Believe It's Not Godzilla, here pops up at the beginning of Shin Ultraman specifically designed to look like the Shin version of the Big G.

It's great because it means the joke lands even for people who have only seen these specific versions of the properties.
I love that you can tell they just slapped some modifications onto the exact same model. That's the resourcefulness I'm sure was all over those old TV shows. And yeah, there are all kinds of fun cross-references between the Shins. For instance, here's Shinya Tsukamoto, the mad directorial genius behind Tetsuo: The Iron Man, popping up to act in both Godzilla and Kamen Rider.
It's not just how these old shows influenced Anno's work; the whole cultural cross-pollination powers this world of special effects and spandex. Hell, Shin Ultraman practically leads into itself, cheekily acting as a pseudo-direct sequel to Shin Godzilla, following on with that tale of even more Kaiju popping out around Japan and the escalating effectiveness of the government task force assigned to them.

Oh, and before we get too far on that one, I should acknowledge that Shin Ultraman is the one where Anno didn't serve as the director. His pal and collaborator for the whole Shin universe, Shinji Higuchi, handled directorial duties on that one, though Anno still wrote and produced it.
And he helped edit it, which you can feel in certain scenes' rhythm. But there's no denying Higuchi's importance as a collaborative voice here, especially in his ability to translate tokusatsu tropes onto the big screen. I'm still blown away by how good Shin Godzilla looks for a film that was made with less than a tenth of the budget of a typical Hollywood SFX extravaganza. The Big G genuinely looks better than any MCU monster I've seen recently. And yes, of course, that includes the wobbly baby form.

Godzilla's googly-eyed growing tadpole stage is adorable, and my friend, I will hear no slander against him from anybody out there.

But seriously, you're right about Anno and Higuchi's handling of the visual acuity of this stuff. The wider shots throughout the movie The King of the Monsters, which are distantly visible against a land or cityscape, are some seamless movie magic you can only get from people who live and breathe this genre's building blocks.

And the first time I saw the atomic breath scene? Chills.
I was lucky enough to see that in theaters; the whole audience was stunned and speechless after that scene. Overall, Shin Godzilla remains my favorite of the live-action trilogy because it feels the most focused and explicitly political in its ambitions. Which, as a homage to the original Godzilla, is only appropriate! It's a film that firmly took hold of the not-even-a-decade-old splinter of the atomic bombings and yanked on it fearlessly. Shin does the same with modern governmental inadequacies and disasters like Fukushima.
It also means it's aged amazingly. Let me tell you, this biting satire of bureaucratized government disaster response hits decidedly harder post-2020.

I also have to respect that after decades of semi-affectionate jokes from fans about Anno's fondness for detailed scenes of officials having meetings in boardrooms, he just went and made that the central feature of his Shin debut in Godzilla here.
It's so good! We get so many different impeccably staged conference rooms! Movies are at their best when they're 90% of people conversing in rooms (see Oppenheimer for a recent example). I am feasting.


Shin Ultraman hits some of the same touchstones, but it's a lot more focused on the weird alien activity. Not a bad thing, but a different vibe for sure.
Oh yeah, as I said, it's starting from the same place, but it's for the best that Shin Ultraman decidedly winds up doing its own thing.


A good portion of that thing is switching out the pointedly dry take on Godzilla for openly embracing the sheer inherent weirdness of toku as an institution and the Ultra series in particular.
And you have to respect how hard they embrace it. I'm talking "pitch-shifted Kenjiro Tsuda voicing a little shady ET in a fedora" hard.
It is like the opposite of those comic book movies that act ashamed of their source material. You can feel the appreciation of long-time fans getting to put their stamp on something they love. Heck, this isn't even Anno's first pass at Ultraman, with his Return of Ultraman student film having been his original directorial debut! Hey, maybe that's why he let Higuchi take the helm this time.
That, or both writing AND directing a movie that prominently features a giant woman in a pencil skirt, might have laden Anno with accusations he would not have been able to shake easily.
You've heard of Ultra Galaxy Fight, but this is Ultra Galaxy Brain. Especially with these guys accurately predicting what my feed would look like if this happened.
True that. This movie is hilarious when it wants to be.
There are some perfect gags, highlighting a critical effective element of Anno's approach to these stories. They deal with depicting aspects of things like Godzilla and Ultraman as how they might play out in the "real world." But it's done with a cheeky, appreciable understanding of the material instead of trying to deconstructively tear it down.
And you have to imagine that's why all these companies let Anno play around with their intellectual property. The dude adores this material, and more importantly, he loved it enough to interrogate it and remix it into his artistic ambitions. That's the person you want at the helm of an adaptation of a beloved franchise—someone with a critical understanding of the material who isn't afraid to inject his voice respectfully into the conversation.
It works out coolly because Anno's injections can also come from his explorations as much as his unconcealed love for the source material. The revelation that the human hosting Ultraman had been wholly replaced by the giant of light was a famous ending twist for the original Ultraman. But here, Anno uses the knowledge of the presumed fans in the audience to write that point in early because, hey, someone trying to learn how to interact with and relate to humans? That is entirely up his alley!

It also forms the film's backbone, which otherwise resembles a collection of episodes more so than a traditional movie structure. So having that core relationship and motivation for Ultraman gives the audience something to hold onto. And it gives Anno more opportunities to be horny.
We get that weird bit with Asami, but we also see her cutting her way through a locked door with a power saw, so at least there's something here for everyone.

The "multiple episodes welded together" structure is noticeable in both Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider, compared to the more consistently cohesive narrative of Shin Godzilla. It's a consequence of trying to faithfully adapt material that was television-based originally, compared to something that had always been a movie. But that focus on connections and relationships persists through them all, even the one that's 90% of people doing research and paperwork in offices.
Yeah, and ultimately I was okay with the latter two films adhering more to the monster-of-the-week structure of their namesakes. A fan of those shows will want as much bang for their buck as possible. And even someone like me, looking at them from a more anthropological standpoint, will appreciate a fuller understanding of how these series originally operated.

So it's okay that Shin Ultraman throws a bunch of goofy guys at our hero before it gets to the ultimate weapon that looks like a space crucifix. Haven't seen anything resembling that before!

Zetton and his big orange boobs are iconic in their own right, even apart from all later influences, on Anno or otherwise. And here, it's another place where you can see them reiterating some of those unifying themes across the movies, with the way they repeat that great gag from Shin Godzilla about people getting up and going back to life as usual even as a monstrous disaster looms over them.

Again, a trope that hits much harder post-COVID.

Which I guess is why it's refreshing that Shin Kamen Rider speeds straight into insect chimera insanity. Of the three, it least resembles a poignant political thriller, but most resembles a fever dream.

We talked about speedrunning the setup at the start of Shin Ultraman, but Shin Kamen Rider doesn't even begin with that luxury. It just goes from minute one, and suddenly trucks are being thrown off cliffs, and our grasshopper guy is pulping people's heads.

I love it.
Gotta say, Fuuto PI did not prepare me for how many squibs there would be in the first two minutes.

Some early episodes of the original 1971 Kamen Rider could feature the right amount of red stuff, so it still fits Anno's indulgence in homage. And hey, it's purposeful, too, in how it sets up Hongo's aversion to violence and his new superpowered bod's capacity for it.

The part of me so tired of the homogeny of modern blockbusters (particularly superhero ones) appreciates Anno's deployment of shocking ultraviolence and unhinged pacing at the start here. It means there's no mistaking this for one of those "standard" films.
I'm so tickled by how seriously it takes itself too. The dude is decked out in a leather jacket, scarf, and Halloween helmet, and he's waxing poetic about the weight of the lives his hands have taken. Not a single ounce of cowardice is to be found on the screen. Just pure commitment to the bit. All superhero films should be so lucky.
It might be because this is the source material I'm most familiar with, but Shin Kamen Rider is one of these films where I think I could most feel Anno's reverence for the original. He's not just recreating specific scenes in shooting locations from the 50+-year-old TV show but also incorporating plot points from Shotaro Ishinomori's original Kamen Rider manga.

That means apart from the Evangelion connection, this column's subject is entirely anime/manga-related!
Thanks for the confirmation, because every time the location moved to an empty trainyard or an old chemical plant, I could only assume it had to be a spot where tokusatsu shows had been filming fights for half a century.
Toei's tokusatsu shooting locations are as recognizable as their recurring actors, but the places featured in this movie are specifically iconic to the '71 original. What's neat is that even as it's doing actual shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from that show or making certain Kamen Rider fights the spider and bat monsters first, per tradition, Shin Kamen Rider isn't wholly beholden to the original. Ruriko's role in the story is vastly remixed from her TV show iteration, and the story happily throws curveballs about her past role in SHOCKER or what this version of the group's goals are.

Spoiler: They are doing an Instrumentality. Anno.
I legit laughed out loud at this scene transition. Men will literally do an Instrumentality instead of going to therapy. Tale as old as time.


But anyway, all that is really cool to hear! I mean, I just took it on faith that Anno was nerding out the whole time, but I can only imagine how much fun prior fans must have had doing the Leo DiCaprio Pointing meme throughout the two-hour runtime.
It's an inescapable element of the experience if you've got the fan knowledge to accompany Anno on the Rider references. But the movie succeeds as a wild superhero ride on its own. Not least of all since, even aside from all the visual recreations, this is a gorgeous movie all on its own.

Zero disagreements here. Despite his decades of work, Anno's grasp of mise-en-scène has not dulled in the slightest.

Just screenshots alone can communicate what's being done here, and that's before seeing what this thing gets up to in motion. Whether that's the wild effects in the fight with Ruriko's wasp ex-girlfriend, which recalls Anno's work on the live-action Cutie Honey movie, or the battle between the Double Riders that might be the most faithful live-action Dragon Ball Z fight put to film.

It takes the inherent weirdness that we saw them embrace in Shin Ultraman, and dials that up to gonzo levels, which includes so much of the presentation itself.
I also respect how it raises the stakes by introducing more and more Kamen Riders to the point where the last big group fight scene has a dozen of the guys onscreen.


Also, the Big Bad takes a beat before the beatdown to tie his scarf. It's the little things.
Anno and the movie he's making already know that scarves are cool as an inherent part of Kamen Rider. But he also takes time to sell that to newcomers who might not be so cultured already.

I don't know if this is another Riderism or just a quirk of the actor chosen, but I appreciated the dainty way his hair flared out beneath his helmet. It's very aesthetically pleasing.
They've played with that look in a couple of other productions (including the last time they tried a grown-up reboot of the original series, in 2005's Kamen Rider: The First), but the degree of their deployment here is specific to Sosuke Ikematsu in the role. So he was chosen for the power of those feathery locks or because he does show some serious acting chops in the part.

We talk about takeaways when comparing this one to other superhero films. I would love to see others willing to do something like having a scene where our hero silently contemplates the tragedy of it all and openly weeps for over a minute straight.
To see genuine pathos wrought in the same script that features lines of dialogue like this? That, to me, is cinema.
It's a take you can only get from the likes of the man who brought us Gunbuster so many decades ago. That one was also built on goofy toku-derived sci-fi dialogue and harrowing emotional payoff, so it's not surprising that Anno has only continued to succeed in that sort of space throughout this movie this year. But even just comparing Shin Godzilla to Shin Kamen Rider, you can see the sheer range he's cultivated.
Sure, in some respects, he's a big kid who has been playing with the same toys for decades now. But it takes talent and passion to play with those toys this well and in a manner that can transmit some of that joy to the audience. Anno possesses a singular voice, and it's been nice and reassuring to see him flex it so much in this post-Evangelion landscape. I hope he maintains this creative restlessness. Gimme all the Shins he can dream of.
I'm not sure what the future holds for Anno, especially as he's, at last, wrapped the Shin Japan Heroes Universe with Kamen Rider here, and I presume he has some pact with the rest of Khara to put him down if he ever claims he wants to make more Evangelion. But, like the gonzo weirdness of a tokusatsu hero take-off, that looming unexpectedness is half the fun.
You got that right, partner.
discuss this in the forum (6 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

This Week in Anime homepage / archives