Mothra (Honda, 1961): Barbican Cinema, 6.15pm
This film is part of the '70 Years of Japanese Monster Movies' season at the Barbican. Details here. This event will begin with a live performance on stage by Frank Chickens. Frank Chickens are a Japanese punk pop performance group with a cult following in the UK, who were founded in London in 1982 as a duo with Kazuko Hohki and Kazumi Taguchi, but the group has now expanded to more than 20 members. They were John Peel‘s favourite, had an independent chart hit with “We Are Ninja”, had a Channel 4 TV series: “Kazuko’s Karaoke Klub”, won the Foster Comedy God Award in 2010, released five albums and toured worldwide. Their song “Mothra” is directly inspired by the 1961 film.
Barbican introduction:
The divine Mothra is an unusual beast, a rare female kaiju, who
appears in three different forms over the course of her debut film –
first as an egg, then a larva, before emerging from a chrysalis, built
against the then new Tokyo Tower, as a giant moth. Her city rampages are
provoked not by malevolence, but in her desperate search for the
Shobijin, her two kidnapped guardians - the mini-priestesses, or ‘Small
Beauties’, memorably played by Yumi Ito and Emi Ito. Mothra has many moments of humour, casting comedian Frankie Sakai in
the lead role and satirically swiping at the imperialist land of
Rolisica, a thinly veiled parody of the US and the Soviet Union. But the
exciting scenes of Mothra’s destruction of Tokyo landmarks and a city
clearly based on New York, are played straight, and remain classic
moments of kaiju fury.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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