New Godzilla anime series

[Benjamin Haines]

Toho's official Godzilla account on Twitter just announced a new Godzilla anime series.

https://x.com/godzilla_jp/status/1994632413868175634

Google translation:
"Worldwide release!
A new Godzilla anime series is in the works.
For the first time in the series' 70-year history, a story will feature a boy who possesses the power of Godzilla as the protagonist.
Is the boy a human or Godzilla?"

I hope this turns out to be good but I don't think that premise is interesting at all. It's also the same premise as IDW's current ongoing Godzilla: Kai-Sei Era comic book. I haven't read that yet but I have read the preview included in the Free Comic Book Day sample compilation issue earlier this year and that was as lame as the premise suggests. Hopefully this series will be better.

[lhb412]

Interesting parallel thinking between IDW's current comics and this 'Godzilla Shonen' anime. They're both wrestling against the obvious monster of the week format (like Ultraman or Hanna Barbara Godzilla) because Godzilla is... well, a movie star. He's too epic to be rationed out in a regular weekly basis. He's still gotta feel special. Singular Point also wrestled with this, slowly building up to Godzilla (even having him gradually evolve into his familiar form alá Shin) like a single movie split into chapters.

Let's see; if this show is 13 episodes we probably get a big Godzilla sequence in the first episode, another major appearance halfway through, and then major Godzilla screen time in the final two episodes or so? No doubt our hero kid has a nemesis also connected to some kaiju and we have a parallel fight between kid and villain and Godzilla vs. enemy kaiju. Final Wars 2.0

[Benjamin Haines]

^ You're describing how Godzilla's screentime is structured in the first season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters!

I'm a big fan of how Final Wars depicts superpowered people alongside kaiju, so I'd like to see a similar approach in this series. I'm worried that it's going to be much more like what IDW is currently doing with the Kai-Sei Era comic. They've published four issues and the solicitations for the next four have spelled out the twist about how they're depicting Godzilla, and it sounds to me like potentially the lamest take on Godzilla ever. Spoiler warning for that in the next paragraph.

So, experiments with a mysterious energy called Kai-Sei in 1954 awakened Godzilla and introduced an age of monsters. In the present day, G-Force recruits a teenager who can miraculously harness Kai-Sei energy himself, giving him Godzilla's superpowers. I think that premise is boring as it is, replacing the role of an opponent kaiju with a teen who can shoot laser beams out of his hands, but the solicitations for issues #6-#8 indicate that this generic teen superhero even becomes a replacement for the depiction of Godzilla himself as a giant dinosaur monster. Godzilla faces off with the teen and it ends with Godzilla vanished, seemingly obliterated, but it's soon revealed that Godzilla lives on without a physical body as pure Kai--Sei energy trapped inside the teen's body. The issue covers also suggest that the teen will then transform into that green-glowing Kai-Sei Godzilla during action scenes, relegating Godzilla to the Hulk role of a Banner/Hulk knockoff. I don't want to see anything like that in this new anime series but I fear that's where it's going, or that it might be something even worse like having Godzilla straight-up get transformed into a human by a magic spell or something. Having Godzilla lose his physical body and possess a human teenager is essentially the same as having Godzilla shapeshift into a person, just with the extra step of portraying the teen as a separate being at first. Even if it ends up being a temporary occurrence by story's end, it still replaces the character of Godzilla with somebody else for the duration. It would be an uncreative copout to do that with an adaptation of pretty much any character (Sherlock Holmes, Popeye, any character really) but it's especially bad for a non-human character like Godzilla.

Although Toho probably remains as strict as ever about Godzilla's required traits in licensed media, it seems like Legendary (with GxK) and both IDW and Marvel (with their recent comics) have leaned into the freedom Toho allows to create new Godzilla designs and give him new power-ups with corresponding visual manifestations. I've been digging all of it until IDW tried substituting Godzilla with a generic teen superhero, and now it looks like Toho might be taking a similar approach with the next Godzilla anime. I just hope it ends up being good.

[Dai]

Can't say I have any hopes for this, considering the mainstream-baiting premise, but I'm curious to see how they handle it. I suspect that Toho are trying to capitalise on the popularity of Kaiju No. 8 by doing a more family-friendly, official Godzilla take on it.

[lhb412]

^ come to think of it; kaiju themed Shonen action shows (Attack on Titan and Kaiju No.8 specifically, but the inspiration is widespread) have been mainstream for a good while now. You could see this new project as Toho's belated attempt to do an official "Godzilla" branded version of an already popular thing that was itself inspired by kaiju movies.

Like how Zone Fighter was a belated attempt to make their own Ultraman.