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“Whose roar is it, anyway? Localization and ideological communication with respect to the toho Godzilla franchise”

2024; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/20004214.2024.2367264

2000-4214

Jeeshan Gazi,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Since the mid-1980s, film critics and audiences have come to recognize Ishirō Honda's original cut of Gojira/Godzilla (1954) to be a substantial meditation on the atomic bombing of Japan, an analysis that had been initially obscured by the re-working of the film for distribution to Western audiences. This article elucidates how the story of the international distribution and localization of Toho's Godzilla films communicates the story of Japan's relationship to the United States, who dropped those bombs and shaped Japan's post-war constitution, through the analysis of a further three key films from Toho's Godzilla franchise: Koji Hashimoto's Gojira/The Return of Godzilla (1984), Takao Okawara's Gojira Nisen: Mireniamu/Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999), and Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi's Shin Gojira/Shin Godzilla (2016). Each of these films re-set the series' continuity, and all but the last were radically re-cut for distribution abroad. Comparative analysis of the Japanese versions of the films with their American cuts demonstrates that the Godzilla franchise provides a unique transnational frame for charting the tensions concerning Japan's re-emergence upon the world stage at key moments since the Second World War.