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The Millennium Bug is a flat-out, gore-filled, kaiju celebration — deviant love-child of Ishiro Honda and Rob Zombie. You won’t understand the sheer perverse geek joy of this film without actually seeing it, so head for the official website and blog to check for festival appearances. Or wait for the upcoming DVD release.

While you’re waiting, you can get a feel for things from this highly amusing interview, in which some of the actors give their reactions to the film’s extreme weirdness, and actress Ginger Pullman tells all about her first day of filming, which involved a prosthetic vagina and giving birth to something nasty…

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For more on The Millennium Bug, see previous Backbrain articles on the subject.

• via Avery Guerra. Written by Robert Hood.

Todd commented on the event depicted [warning: the following contains spoilers]:

Gigante and King Komodo finally have their long-anticipated battle, though it is short-lived. KK was supposed to be transported back into his Cryo-tank (located deep beneath the earth), but the transversable wormhole’s vortex accidentally opened up in the sky just above Area 50 instead.

When KK drops to the ground he is confronted by the “Area 50 Defense Force” (or AFDF), and by GIGANTE, who will flip KK into another TW vortex created on the ground at the conclusion of their kaiju battle. This will escort KK back to his Cryo-tank where he will be gassed back into suspended animation and preserved for the big, conclusive battle in NYC later on.

Todd added: “Here’s a mild spoiler for ya; with 8 giant monsters, my story will obviously be mostly about the kaiju-battles, but it will not be ‘politically correct’, and the climactic end-game battle in NYC may shock some readers. It won’t be pretty…”

I’m guessing that rather depends on how you define “pretty”…

Below are Todd’s pencil sketches of the eight monsters. In regards to them, Todd remarked: “I’m no Crash McCreery, but tried my best to emulate his style in my own way. These are the giant monsters who will be battling it out in my story.”

Please note that you can buy these monster pics as signed, limited edition (50) pencil prints, available from the American Kaiju website. For $20 each, these are an absolute bargain and will undoubtedly be major collecter’s items one day very soon.

The American Kaiju:

ALIGON:

ANGKAH:

GIGANTE:

KING KOMODO:

KING YETI:

KWAI-LONG:

PETT:

POSEIDON:

Source: Todd Tennant. All images are copyright © Todd Tennant 2011 and should not be reproduced in any way without permission. Article written by Robert Hood.

So, yeah, we like the merchandise. But what if playing with the toys proved to have deadly consequences? Perhaps there’s such a thing as sympathetic magic — the belief that one thing or event can affect another at a distance as a consequence of a synchronistic connection between them. Play with the toys and what they represent will come! Human imagination can be very powerful.

Director Greg Pope has taken this premise and made a short giant monster film that is a tribute to both giant monster films such as Godzilla and the merchandise they inspire. It’s called Giant Monster Playset.

The film features a young boy named Collin (Finn Pope), who receives a mysterious package. Upon opening it, he innocently plays with its toy monster contents. Simultaneously a gigantic beast appears, bent on the destruction of his own small town. The boy’s older brother Martin (played by Asher Pope) discovers the connection between the two and realizes only he can stop it. (Source: Press release)

Check out the trailer:

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With its clear dedicatory approach to the monster mayhem, Giant Monster Playset looks like a lot of fun and director Pope appears to have caught much of the attitude that made the old films so imaginatively exciting. Pope himself is a musician, filmmaker, and graphic designer. As owner of Octoberville Creative LLC, he has produced several award-winning commercial and corporate films, and his pop songs have been featured on radio and network television shows such as Dawson’s Creek, Last Comic Standing, and America’s Next Top Model. He has put his musical talents to good use here, too, by producing an album of the music from the soundtrack, titled Monster Suit.

The big power-rock sound he creates is awesome — and you can sample the whole album here, before downloading it from CDbaby or iTunes. Pope also wrote and produced the film.

As well as talented young leads Finn and Asher Pope, the cast of Giant Monster Playset includes Paul Conrad, an award-winning Designer and Illustrator who formerly worked at Pixar Animation, Walt Disney Studios and Big Idea Productions. Conrad has contributed creatively to films ranging from the Academy Award winning film Up!, Cars 2, Cars Toons, VeggieTales and The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. The character of Chilton is his first film role. He was also responsible for art direction and package design.

Director of Photography is Daniel Collins and Josh Davis served as Production Assistant.

Pope (pictured above with the playset) is hoping to get the short film into assorted as-yet-unnamed film festivals, though I hope it will also be available one of these days for home viewing — perhaps online?

The Gallery includes an extensive collection of conceptual artwork, sculptures, green-screen and production shots, and further stills from the film.

Source: Greg Pope via Kaiju Search-Robot Avery; Press Kit; Official website.

Addendum: Here’s a just released new teaser trailer that includes some cool moments not included in previous material:

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Gallery:

Check out Paszkiewicz’s darkly subversion website, Arsenic Lullaby.

About to be screened on 27th October in a special charity event is a new film that takes the metaphorical connection between the earthquake, the City and the monster one step further and makes it explicit. Here, Tokyo is not just bricks and mortar, but an entity that has had enough. The film is called EDOnism, and it’s tagline says it all: A Quake Awakens.

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EDOnism (Italy/Japan-2010; dir. Alessandro Fantini)

Synopsis:

Edonism is the tragic story of James Hallway, an English businessman from the UK who comes to Tokyo looking to fulfill his dreams and lead a peaceful life with his beautiful wife, Sophie. Instead he finds toil, torment and alcoholism. Unable to bear his descent into self-destruction, Sophie leaves, abandoning him to his downward spiral into the gutter. Day by day, his reality is consumed by hallucinations and weird perceptions. Once things can’t get any worse, he falls into a coma.

When he awakens from the coma, he begins to learn some terrifying truths about his condition and his connection to a long-forgotten legend from ancient Japan. Together with the resourceful Dr Geena Landlord he attempts a desperate quest of discovery that leads them both to the very heart of a conspiracy involving a secret government order and the enigmatic being known as the The Cat Fish.

Trailer:

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Above: Director Fantini (as Secret Agent #2) studies the script

The film’s production company, LAFAN Productions, is teaming up with BierVana in Akasaka and O.G.A. for AID to host a very special screening of EDOnism on Thursday, October 27 at 7:30pm-10:30pm. For more information check out the event’s Facebook page. Proceeds and donations from the event will be given in support of O.G.A. for AID.

O.G.A. (ORTIZ Global Academy) for AID was formed in response to the Eastern Japan Earthquake Tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011. Since its inception, the group has been dedicated to bringing relief aid, heart care programs, and contributing to the reconstruction of the town, Minami Sanriku that was almost completely swept away. The EDOnism benefit screening will raise funds for the Community Learning Center that is being established in Minami Sanriku.

Program includes the screening of Miyukino Snow Film Festival entrant ‘Walking Lost’ – a short video release by LAFAN Productions directed by Nate Jensen. There will also be a special preview of LAFAN’s upcoming film, The Ballad of Harper Lee and Dickie Dee, which is due for release in early 2012.

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Film details:

Director, editor, animator, screenwriter and soundtrack composer: Alessandro Fantini
Producer, art director, co-writer, casting director and location manager: Lorenzo Fantini
Line producer: Miles Elliott
Assistant producer: Lucy King
Post production supervisor: Nate Jensen
Make up artist: Kana Yoshida
Cast: Sacha Mühlebach, Helene Salvini Fujita, Hiro Super, Lucy King, Lorenzo Fantini, Kyle H., Nate Jensen, Tony Evans, Alessandro Fantin, Cyrus Malekani.
Genre: Sci-fi thriller, drama, adventure
Runtime: 65 min.
Language: English
Filming locations: Tokyo

According to producer Lorenzo Fantini, the inspiration for the film came from a variety of influences. “The initial concept came out of Alessandro’s experience of the L’Aquila Earthquake in Italy last year,” he explained. “The traumatic effect of that experience translated into his exploration of Earthquake mythology. Some of the central imagery of the film came from a painting by William Kurelek, ‘The Maze’. This depicted a section of the human skull and the figure of a Cat Fish. He then discovered quite by accident that the Cat Fish was related to earthquakes and associated to key events in the history / mythology of Japan.”

The Tokyo setting, while appropriate from a thematic point-of-view, came about through a combination of convenience and artistic circumstances. Lorenzo explained: “The idea of setting the film in Tokyo had come about through a desire to work together on a film / media project. Alessandro’s aesthetic and creative inclination has been heavily influenced by Phillip K Dick, and of course Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He had really wanted to capture the atmosphere of the metropolis as a living, breathing character for long time. My residency here, and knowledge of the city, finally allowed him to realize this desire.”

Read the complete interview with Lorenzo Fantini.

See the Gallery at the end of this article for more images from the production of EDOnism, as well as drawings from an animated sequence within the film, just like this one of the “Cat Fish”:

The Metaphorical Premise:

There are stories and legends of how cities are not just buildings, roads, electric and water systems, but living, breathing entities that are sleeping as their oblivious inhabitants go about their daily toil. We, as humans, always take for granted that they will always be there servicing our needs, creating our conveniences and cocooning us from all the elements nature can throw at us. But what if they awoke, what if they decided to be less than benevolent, to be less than kind to us?

People say if you’re not careful cities will eat you alive, some enter the sprawling metropolises and mega cities of our world, and never return from them. Some who enter change, their life-force drained and spent. A city is a force of nature, just as the wilderness, the deserts, the mountains and the oceans are. A city is not an inanimate realm. They are a world of dangers, aeon old mysteries and secret societies. (From the EDOnism website)

An Essay on EDOnism:

REMEMBERING EDOnism
by Alessandro Fantini

When I faced for the first time the idea to shoot a movie in Tokyo, while I was discussing the hypothesis with then soon-to-be EDonism producer Lorenzo Fantini two years ago during his latest stay in Italy, I immediately thought that the script should have deal with something gigantic, frightening and epic. No other city in the world is able to suggest the feeling of a majestic and intimidating human beehive as much as Tokyo. It seemed that all my obsessions for movies like Blade Runner, Akira and Ghost in the Shell as well as my interest in Shintoism, Ukiyo-e art,  and Suehiro Maruo, would have take me sooner or later  to nowhere but to the enigmatic land of geisha, samurai, Godzilla and hi-tech marvels.  As usual, the way I fleshed out the concept and the story was closer to the process of conceiving a painting or a comic than to a traditional pre-production of a movie.

As soon as I began to figure out the several images inspired by the “abstract” perceptions of Tokyo and his history, I started to be able to link all those “icons” together into a synaptic narrative map.  Actually the very first drawing I made on my moleskine was that one of a dissected brain connected to the foundations of buildings and skyscrapers. Indeed I think the real monstrous mystery we’re still dealing with, is and will always be the human brain, so I decided that the plot had to revolve around this statement by developing an ambiguous visual and narrative syntax, balancing this obscure metaphysical content with more recognizable “sci-fi” and “cyber-bunk” schemes. The earthquake became the most powerful dynamic rendition of the inner conflicts of mind, even because I was able to experience it in person during the night of 6^th April 2009, when a cataclysmic quake almost completely destroyed l’Aquila, the capital city of Abruzzo, the region where I live.  I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming of being inside a shaking train leading to a subterranean dark station, since my unconscious was trying to translate into mental visions the trembling of my bed (luckily I was more than 100 km far from l’Aquila, so my home town was left intact). Since I like to take note of every vivid dream may occur in weird circumstances, this one about the train was later integrated into the screenplay, shaping the scenes leading to the epilogue (I think it has been a logic choice, ‘cause the Tokyo subway somehow is a superb reflection of the cerebral maze).

Thus all the legends about the giant Cat Fish I read over my researches about Japan myths and folk tales nourished my imagination providing me more key plot elements: the mythological subterranean creature causing earthquakes was the perfect embodiment of the menacing mystery of Nature, like a sort of invisible Moloch or Leviathan, as well as the symbol of the tumultuous relationship between mankind and the earth, the mind and the human body. After the major quake of March 2011, the Tsunami and the Fukushima incident some segments of the story and symbolism now seem to foreshadow those unpredictable tragic events, although I think it’s just an eerie coincidence since the movie features a so (sadly) recurrent natural phenomenon in Japan.  However, I didn’t want to work out the umpteenth disaster flick or monster movie: on the contrary, I wanted to filter the same sense of amazed anguish of movies like “Cloverfield” or “The Ring” into the more intimate realm of the life of  a “gaijin”,  James Hallway, and push it forward to a wider psycho-mythic dimension depicting a contemporary world ruled by the obsession of pleasure and money (more or less the same approach Von Trier had in directing his latest movie “Melancholia”, focusing on the state of mind of the characters while a planet is about to destroy the earth). Once all the connections were finalized and the core of the story was clear, the writing of the screenplay took me less than one month. Over the winter Lorenzo, who vigorously produced the movie, helps me to refine the dialogues, finding the locations and casting the actors, and until the beginning of the principal photography we discussed and debated for hours the characters motivations on Skype, while at the same time I kept painting covers, drawing storyboards and composing music in order to build a solid aesthetic platform to the upcoming shooting and editing phases. Even though the original screenplay didn’t contain any “anime-like” sequence, drawing and animating the back-story recounted by the character codenamed “Catfish” when I was about to finish the editing in April 2010, was the coherent output of that intense visual preproduction.  Tokyo provided a colossal set to the movie, an emotive environment that neither digital effects nor scenography will ever be able to reproduce with the same visual power, offering the perfect physical backdrop to the metaphysical journey of the protagonist. Indeed its breathtaking amount of details properly evoked the hyper realistic visionary ambiance that I imagined while I was writing the script. Basically EDOnism has been a grand scale effort propelled by the target of finalizing a project that at the beginning could sound utopist, if compared to the very limited range of technical and financial resources at our disposal.

If we consider that, aside the two weeks of shooting in Tokyo around Shibuya, Roppongi, Odaiba island and the Meiji Park, the whole time span of production evolved between the two hemispheres, between Italy and Japan, the movie is also the best demonstration of how the power of teaming up with people who desire to share the same vision together can defeat any time, space and money boundaries.

In a certain sense EDOnism could be an example of the unbeatable strength of the Collective Unconscious.

Gallery:

Source: Lorenzo Fantini via Avery Guerra; EDOnism website. “The Maze” image sourced from Art Fixx.

After the merely half-decent releases that have appeared over the past decade, this will be the first that has been fully restored, and should display a much improved visual quality. There are some fantastic extras, too.

This giant monster classic, which created a fearsome and deeply felt metaphor for nuclear terror, deserves top-notch treatment. Despite having several copies of the film already, I’ll be lining up for this one!

Special Features:

• New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series)
• New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr
• Audio commentary for Godzilla, King of the Monsters by Kalat
• New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai
• Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube
• Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects
• New interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato
• The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo fukuryu maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla
• Theatrical trailers
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic J. Hoberman

It can be pre-ordered now on the Criterion website.

You can check out plenty more of them here.

• via Retronaut, Pink Tentacle and Sean Williams

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Undead Backbrain asked Wright how it came about.

The trailer was made during my final year in university as part of my dissertation on using practical special effects, I’ve grown up on a healthy diet of old B-movies and the Godzilla movies and so wanted to try my hand at doing a kaiju movie. I was determined to make a really old-school man-in-a-suit monster movie that captured the feeling of those classic movies.

I spent around a year on making the trailer amongst other projects, from getting concept art done [see above], building the props and making the costume from scratch to finally shooting it in small sections over two weeks either in the studio working with a green screen or out on the university sports field with a small crew of no more then four other people.

The Kanigar costume was made from cardboard, papiermâché and fabric, just building it on the dining-room table and having help from my mum putting the suit together, just a very low tech way of making the costume, for example the eyes are made from Easter egg packaging with lights inside.

We asked if there would ever be a proper feature version of Kanigar to go with the trailer?

I still have all the costumes, props and miniatures but am still trying to get my foot in the door of the UK film industry. If given the opportunity and resources, however, I would definitely jump at the chance to make a feature version.

Maybe one day soon Wright’s “little tribute to those old monster movies” will become a bigger tribute!

For more production images, see the Gallery below.

• Source: Bevin Wright via Avery Guerra. Written by Robert Hood.

Gallery:

Reviewed by Robert Hood

Mecha is one of the most popular sub-categories of anime and has produced some of the best and longest-running animated sci-fi series ever. Though quintessentially Japanese when considered in terms of this genre, mecha’s tropes and central characteristics have also been adapted across cultural borders. Godaizer, a luminous, 18-minute animated film made by an independent creator, comes from Singapore. Producer/director Yeo plays upon the genre’s Japanese heritage in many different ways, not just via signage.

Godaizer is not the kind of frenetic anime that is all action and noise, certainly during its opening third. In some ways it is more suggestive of Miyazaki’s cinematic style (not so much visually as in general ambiance). Its opening sequence, showing the start of what is obviously another typical day, is slow and contemplative, as the youthful main character, awoken by a bedside clock, looks out upon the morning and the chooks, pushes open rusting gates and then pulls switches to start up the vast repair shop in which he lives. The roof slides back to let in the sun, service gates grind open and lights come on.

A wealth of information, both situational and emotional, is conveyed in this initial sequence, all without words. As the boy shuffles through a vast workshop, we see that it is full of large robots of various kinds, from toy-like to militarist: a virtual history of giant robot design. This robot construction and repair shop has clearly seen better days, however, and its staff – the boy and an old man he finds asleep under one of the machines – are to an extent just going through the motions. The glory days are past.

Mecha anime features huge robots created for military purposes and most typically controlled by youthful pilots. Sometimes the relationship between human and machine is simply that of pilot and aircraft. But the nature of the bond can also be metaphysical, as in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or based on deliberate physical and mental imprinting. Often, the particular human pilot is the only one able to effectively control the giant machine.

In Godaizer, it becomes clear that the boy is the pilot of the workshop’s ultimate robot – the largest most impressive in the building – and to do so effectively, mental discipline is required. But both he and his robot have seen little action for some time and the air of ennui he exudes resembles a “holding pattern”. Yeo gives us a glimpse into the past through the simple device of a wall covered in newspaper clippings and a photograph of a youthful pilot and his family – clearly the boy’s father with wife and young son. The implied tragedy is never elaborated upon. However, the emotional significance is clear. Can the boy live up to the past and the expectations of his grandfather? Will he be given a chance to do so?

As a genre, mecha crosses over into daikaiju (or “giant monster”) territory, as the giant machine becomes Earth’s only effective defense against monstrous giants and gargantuan alien invaders. In the 70s and 80s in particular several television series tried to exploit the immense popularity of Ultraman by taking this approach, as in, for example, the 1972 series Iron King. Such is also the case in Godaizer. After the opening sequence, the film cuts to a modern scientific laboratory just as an experiment is taking place. As a result of the experiment a huge creature awakens and breaks out of its confinement, heading off to engage in the kind of rampage through city streets and countryside that Godzilla and his friends made famous. So our young protagonist is required to don the uniform and put aside self-doubts to face the challenge.

Godaizer embraces the dynamics of daikaiju conflict as thoroughly as it exploits the tropes of the human/machine dynamic lying at the heart of the genre. It is a superb work of animation – lacking the “clean” lines of both traditional cel animation and modern CG imaging, but replacing them with a luminous, painterly quality that emphasises brush strokes and texture. It comes over as an animated painting, beautifully rendered, colours vibrant and surfaces finely textured. This enhances the story, what there is of it, very effectively indeed. In some ways, this artistic execution is more important than the plot.

A mecha/daikaiju classic in miniature, Godaizer may be short, but what it lacks in direct narrative complexity it makes up for in attention to suggestive detail. Everything is there, conveyed through beautifully rendered visuals (by Ray Toh), an artist’s attention to emotional detail, and an effective soundtrack that may be wordless but is not lacking in suggestiveness. The film is truly cinematic in the sense that it is the imagery and the atmosphere created by the art and the sound effects that carry the narrative and emotional meaning — by implication rather than through dialogue. Though it doesn’t exactly work like a film from the early silent era, it has adopted the visual essence that is the soul of cinema – and the result is both entertaining and accurate to its genre.

See it when it comes to a festival near you – or when it appears on DVD. You won’t regret it.

• Film website: www.godaizer.com