T5W#179-Top 5 Reasons the Godzilla Anime Trilogy Fails

This was a freaking nightmare to endure.  Over the course of a year, I watched and reviewed a trilogy that should have been a sure fire hit.  I mean come on, how hard is it to mess up a Godzilla mov…wait let me stop right there cause there’s the 1998 movie to think about and (in some fashion) the 2014 (I know I know people like that one much better but come on, they forgot to put Godzilla in a movie called GODZILLA).  The three part Godzilla Anime Trilogy consisted of Planet of the Monsters, City on the Edge of Battle and The Planet Eater and each one got consistently worse and worse and worse to the point where the only inevitable score I could give the final film was a 0/10.  Looking back on them all, there are a multitude of reasons why these movies didnt come close to succeeding and im gonna try and choose 5 of them.  So on todays Top 5 Wednesday, we covering my Top 5 Reasons the Godzilla Anime Trilogy Fails…brace yourself for a hopefully very entertaining rant.

#5-The Animation and Writing

CG Anime have never quite hit it off as much as everyone would like.  In all honesty, some of the Vulture Mech stuff in City on the Edge of Battle did look pretty cool.  However, the entire trilogy is done in a very messy artstyle that’s both boring and hard to look at cause…well its not pretty.  Most of the characters look virtually identical and all contain the same lifeless model design with very few facial expressions.  Traditional animation should have been the way to go on this Godzilla project and mayyyybe add in some CG for the monsters…if you wanted to make them actually do something but we’ll get to that in a little bit.  Ive also gotta squeeze in complaints about the fact that this is a Gen Urobuchi written project.  The man who gave us some of the most brilliant Anime of the last decade like Madoka Magica, Psycho Pass (Season One, cant ever stress that enough) and Fate/Zero instead gave us an Aldnoah Zero train wreck where action is second to character arcs that go nowhere and metaphysical debates that drag on and on and on and onnnnnn.  Come to think of it, maybe Urobuchi only wrote a draft and it got reworked and he just said whatever and let it be without touching it again.  Seriously, Urobuchi and Godzilla should make an awesome team, they deserved better.

#4-The Godzilla Matrix Reloaded

When you go see a Godzilla movie, what’s the one thing you expect to see no matter what?  If youre answer for some reason was a deep philosophical introspection of the human soul and the heart of darkness…well that’s good for you for wanting to talk about that but that’s not why we’re here.  Instead of giving us some awesome all out monster brawls on a grand stage, about 7/8ths of the Godzilla Trilogy is just people hashing out what they believe is the meaning of life.  Mostly, it just adds to the snoozefest but other times it becomes infuriating when characters decide to get into these debates in the middle of what little action there is.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s room for philosophy in a Godzilla movie.  The original Gojira film is one of the greatest Japanese/Monster films ever made not just for its incredible model work but also for its deep look at the horrors of nuclear disasters, with the monster itself as the walking metaphor of destruction.  It did so with horrifying and powerful imagery.  The Anime Trilogy just shoves angry faces at us to hammer in that humans might be the greater monster.  Couldn’t we just let what Ken Watanabe proclaimed actually happen without the Ethics 101 lecture, “Let them fight”.

#3-Godzilla Himself

So remember when I ranted above that Godzilla 2014 kind of forgot that Godzilla was part of the movie?  Well in about 4.5 hours of Anime, Godzilla accounts for maybe half an hour to forty five minutes.  And even when he’s finally on screen, his actual presence is as minimal as his movement.  In all fairness, the towering mountain design is pretty cool, it’s a very scary Godzilla (Not as scary as Shin Godzilla though).  Only problem…well there are a few.  One, he basically moves one step an hour, which takes Godzilla forever to get from Point A to Point B.  Two, he’s so massive it takes him about five minutes to turn or move his hand.  Most of his final battle with Ghidorah is comprised of slow turns and Godzilla lucking into hitting anything.  Every time he produced the legendary roar, I just groaned, it’s never earned and I think Haruo does more screaming than Godzilla.  In the end, Godzilla is around, he just doesn’t give a care about anything going on around him and is as content to sleep off this saga just like the rest of us.  At least the 2014 Godzilla got to do something cool.

#2-Planet of the Monsters…WHERE ARE THE MONSTERS!!!???

The initial premise of the Godzilla Anime Trilogy is a good one, very unique.  Humanity is driven off Earth by Godzilla and an army of monsters that appear all across the planet.  Years later, with resources low and recolonization basically impossible, humanity returns home with its Alien allies to face the King of the Monsters and anything else waiting for them.  Except the “Planet of the Monsters” is completely empty.  There is no sign of any of the other supposed monsters and zero sight of any of Toho’s classic gallery of Kaiju like Rhodan, Angulus or Gigan.  Mothra is supposedly around but only in a shadowy cameo.  The most “monsters” we see are the occasional skeletal Dragon like beast that roams the skies and even then they don’t do much or show up to cause much hassle after their first appearance in the first film.  Godzilla (and it’s random identical offspring?) is the only monster we see in this trilogy until Shenron Ghidorah shows up in Part 3.  There is a huge tease for MechaGodzilla in the second film…but that ends up being just that, a tease.  Nope, no MechaGodzilla, not other Kaiju, just boring old statue Godzilla.  Premise wasted and we barely made it thirty minutes into the first film…WTF?!

#1-Haruo (Eren Jaeger’s long lost cousin)

This list could be a lot longer and I could rag on every element from the animation to the lack of monsters and battles to the look alike cast to the fact that Gen Urobuchi somehow wrote this mess of a film.  But the one thing that always drove me to new levels of rage was the “hero” of the trilogy, Haruo.  From the moment he first appears, Haruo is basically presented as the equally pissed off cousin of Attack on Titan’s Eren Jaeger.  Same motivation (monsters killed his fam), same insta set offs (spot Godzilla/Titan=RAGE!!!).  Except where I guess Eren has some redeeming values (or doesn’t, idk I didn’t get that far in Attack on Titan), Haruo just keeps doing all of the wrong things all of the time and thinks he’s right even when the deaths of dozens are on his hands.  Hell there’s a moment in Part 2 where Haruo tells his crew they can go back to the ship but at the end of that speech says, “Yeah you’re all staying anyway to help me kill Godzilla cause life goals”.  Even when he suddenly realizes towards the end, “I’m not a good person”, he’s still acting like a rage filled brat who wants his Sempai to notice him…which makes Godzilla Sempai in this example I guess.  I feel bad for both of his voice actors really.  The amount of rage in Haruo’s voice clearly has to be the frustrations of both actors having to deal with a character who never learns and is more the monster of the trilogy than Godzilla itself.  News Flash: The film should be about Godzilla destroying things, not Haruo puffing his chest to feel like a man while everyone accepts him as a giant Christ metaphor which lands him blind adoration and girls begging to sleep with him…Godzilla is the King and the Anime should have remembered that…ok rant over.