Ishiro Honda Bio By Ed. Godzisewski and Steve Ryfle

[Mac]

I'm looking forward to this 100x more than I am the stiff cartoon.

[jellydonut25]

I feel like between everyone here and my Godzilla friends online and IRL, I'll have read the book without reading it.

[Geno]

[jellydonut25]

Some people have been getting theirs early already and the exquisite praise is actually making me think when I find work, I'll be ordering this (assuming it's still in print)

[Geno]

The book just came in. I've been hooked for an hour straight and the information on Honda's life and first two films are really interesting so far. I'm only 62 pages in but it's great. Well worth the purchase. There's also some great photos.

[lhb412]

Hearing terrific things, and you^ say photos?

[Geno]

Yeah there's some great pictures of Honda from his personal life and him on the job. There's more on the website but some of these I haven't seen before. I think the critiques on the genre films could be a bit better but so far its good. I'm definitely hoping i get to see any of his more personal drama/comedy films someday, and it's regrettable he was stuck with a lesser genre for so long.

[Mac]

[canofhumdingers]

My mother-in-law surprised me with this biography and a book called “The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: the Lost Films” as birthday gifts.

Super excited to read this Honda biography. Thumbing through it, it looks like it’s going to be great. And yeah, the pictures are great!

As for the lost films book, I’d never even heard of it but it also looks quite interesting.

I read pretty much exclusively while traveling for work (home is too busy with little kids), so this should make for a fun couple of months.

[Godzilla21]

[Geno]

New interview with Godzisewski is up at Toho Kingdom.

http://www.tohokingdom.com/interviews/e ... -2017.html

[Mac]

I like that a good portion of the interview is dedicated to All Monsters Attack .

[lhb412]

Finally digging into this (got it for Christmas) and am absolutely loving it so far. Nothing I'd read or heard so far in all my years of reading Godzilla books and magazines and special features on discs has given this level of insight into Ishiro Honda. I just stopped reading halfway through the production of the original Godzilla.

It was on Guillermo del Toro's commentary track for Pacific Rim where I first heard the story that Honda gathered everyone before making Godzilla '54 and told them that if anyone didn't believe in the project they should leave. I had never heard this before, and thought maybe GDT was conflating some different stories together - but no: the incident is recounted here.

[lhb412]

Oh, my god. I had no idea Kenji Sahara did insane method acting stuff while making these movies!

Continuing to act amnesiac during the entire days filming on Rodan, going undercover as a buyer to study sleazy real estate types for Mothra vs. Godzilla, and friggin' pulling out one of his teeth to look the part in Matango!?!

Sahara was clearly the Jared Leto of the Godzilla series... only, you know, likable.

[tbeasley]

[lhb412]

[tbeasley]

[lhb412]

Reading about how everyone at Toho hated Russ Tamblyn delighted me.

[lhb412]

Finished it. Fantastic read. Must have for every kaiju fan. So many points in the history of the genre were made clearer to me.

Fascinated by how Honda became pigeonholed as a sci-fi director. The reason it happened was slightly different than what I expected.

[Joseph Goodman]

The anecdote related in this book that I found most fascinating involved the tearful send-off Honda received from the Chinese villagers near the POW camp he was held at. The stories of what a gentleman Honda was have been widely related, but this one was new. For them to to think so well of a soldier from an invading army that unleashed such incomprehensible wickedness upon their country, speaks remarkably high of what kind of person Honda was.

[lhb412]

^ Man, that's a kicker.

[canofhumdingers]

Finally finished reading this book not five minutes ago. What a treasure trove of information! By all accounts, Honda was the kind of person this world could use a whole lot more of.

[Kailem]

It took me longer than I expected (I kinda slowed down with my reading for a while there and was only getting through one chapter at a time), but I finally finished this last week (conveniently just in time for the Godzilla Encyclopedia!) and yeah, it was fantastic! Filled to the brim with tons of great information and anecdotes about Honda as well as the films he made (especially the various Godzilla ones), and gave me a much better understanding of him than I ever had before. The story mentioned a few posts above of how the Chinese villagers told him he should stay with them after the war ended really speaks to the sort of man he must have been.

Not to mention just revealing that whole other, non-tokusatsu side of his directorial career that I just had no idea about before reading this. I didn't realise he made so many films prior to his whole run as Toho's premiere genre movie director. And it was great getting more details and context about stuff I'd heard before. Like I knew Honda was never a fan of the "shie" dance in IotAM, but I didn't realise just how much he disliked the anthropomorphisation of the monsters in general, given that a lot of that stuff started and continued in his movies. And the way it sounds like the only time he got properly mad while filming being because of Russ Tamblyn on War of the Gargantuas made complete sense.

I'll definitely be re-watching his films now with a new sense of understanding about certain aspects of them, like the outdoor hiking scenes he often liked to have harking back to his childhood and early documentary filmmaking days. And the info about those who worked with him was great too, not just Tsuburaya obviously but also people like Hajime Koizumi who was responsible for so much of how those classic Showa films looked. Again, this book really gave me such a renewed appreciation for the people who made these films possible, Honda most of all obviously.

So yeah, it took me longer than I would have liked to get through (which was a *me* problem, not one with the book), but it was an excellent read and in the end the timing worked out perfectly; on to the Godzilla Encyclopedia!