About heroes and monsters: the immortal inheritance of Tokusatsu

Under a blue sky and among the buildings of an uncertain city, a final battle is fought. A masked character, armed with special powers and dressed in a suit of incandescent colors, faces a gigantic creature similar to a reptile that makes the ground rumble with every step. The fate of the Earth is at stake, and while the hero tries to dominate the beast by the neck, it manages to escape the siege and throws its opponent into the air. But our hero does not give up. He returns to the fray with new blows, while bridges and electricity pylons fall around him.

This sequence corresponds to a Japanese audiovisual style called tokusatsu, which flooded the world’s screens with series and franchises as varied as Godzilla, Ultraman, Captain Twinkle or the contemporary Power Ranger. But what is behind this type of productions based on the almost artisanal use of special effects such as cardboard models, rubber costumes, prosthetics and various choreographies? The answer comes from the communicator Gabriel Muñoz Tancún in “Tokusatsu. Characteristics, history and audiovisual influence”, a book in which he explores the origins of this subgenre so close to post-war Japanese science fiction.

The film “Gojira” (1954) and the series “Gekko Kamen” (1958)—known in Spanish as “Godzilla” and “Capitán Centella,” respectively—are considered the productions that started the tokusatsu. Godzilla was a being affected by radiation and his skin marked by multiple scars seemed to remember the victims of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Captain Twinkle was a masked vigilante and pacifist.

Although he tokusatsu responds to this specific context, Muñoz affirms that this type of productions are also related to older Japanese traditions such as theater kabukifrom where they inherit the fight choreographies, and the bunrakuthe puppet theater that inspired the creation of the kaiju (monsters), the true protagonists of the stories.

The globalization

The style tokusatsu became a global phenomenon over time, when the series became popular super sentai who gave life to squads of superheroes, who fought against evil organizations with the help of giant robots or mechas. The season of one of these series (“Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger”) was adapted by Fox Kids for the American market in 1993, under the title “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.” The episodes broke audience records and a new era began in this type of franchise.

As Muñoz’s book reveals, the tokusatsu It is now spread through the Internet and has a whole legion of followers in Peru. An example of its vitality in our environment is the short film “Chicha Sentai” (2021), in which a boy transforms into a superhero to confront insectoid monsters that invade Lima. “In this case, the director (Roger Vergara) uses the style of the franchises of super sentaithe fights, the monsters, but with elements of the Andean and Amazonian cultures,” says Muñoz.

A tokusatsu with a local flavor as a kind of link that unites distant Japan with Peru, whose diplomatic ties have been around for 150 years as recalled this week by the visit of Princess Kako.

The book

Tokusatsu. Features, history and audiovisual influence

Author: Gabriel Muñoz Tancún

UPC Publishing

104 pages