Dubious Comforts wrote:
DerGolem wrote:
My Japanese Film class was scheduled to watch Itami Juzo's Tampopop (1985) today but our professor came in and announced that in light of the recent tragic events in Japan he was changing today's film to Gojira, which had originally not even been on the syllabus. He said that he was going to show Gojira since it was a perfect example of how the Japanese people deal with tragedy as that seen after the Second World War and today in the wake of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear power plant breakdown.
Honda had much to say in regards to how society deals with tragedy in Japan as exemplified by the discussion on the commuter train (the same couple later appears on the cruise ship in Tokyo Bay).  What did your professor and the class say about this aspect of the film?
My professor talked about how Gojira revisited and evoked the horrors of the war for the Japanese and how watching a movie like this could be cathartic. He didn't focus on any particular scene but spoke about the film as a whole. He also talked about how Gojira worked to help reestablish the Japanese peoples confidence in their military and for that we watched more specific scenes. There was also a lot of analysis regarding the character of Dr. Serizawa who defies any of the traditional mad scientist tropes by actually turning out to be the hero.

After all of that my professor had us watch clips of Gojira side beside the same clips from the American Godzilla: King of the Monsters and talked about how the film was changed to make it suitable for American audiences; i.e. removing any overt political references or mention of the war, nuclear bombs, the Daigo Fukuryƫ Maru incident and so on. This side by side comparison did include mention of the removal of the train scene mentioned above.