All Monsters Attack (1969)

Rated G because there's less mass murder.  There's still violence.  In fact, in a way, the violence is a bit worse because it's aimed at a kid.  I know.  I'm being silly.  I mentally compare the violence of this movie to the violence in Home Alone.  Sure, there's the risk of the little kid getting stabbed, but that's it.  There's also some questionable language in the movie.  If anything, the morals of this movie might raise some yellow flags.  But still, G.

DIRECTOR:  Shin'ichi Sekizawa

It's barely a movie.  Can we all acknowledge this?  It feels like an afterschool special.  It clocks in at an hour-and-nine minutes and a lot of those minutes are devoted to clips from other monster movies.  For a guy who is trying to keep his head above water with a million stupid things and is insanely stressed out, to sit down and write about All Monsters Attack seems like I'm ignoring all the steps of self-care.  But part of my stupid self-care routine is writing.  After all, no one is going to die.  It's all a dumb circle of nonsense.  Just realize that the effort I'm putting into this is both therapeutic and toxic at the same time.

Here's where I'm going to be a little controversial:  I didn't hate it.  There's something absolutely brilliant about All Monsters Attack that loses a lot in the budget and the execution.  Do you know why I know it's brilliant?  All Monsters Attack is a way worse Home Alone.  All of the foundations for Home Alone are there.  Sure, Ichiro is a good kid who has some really rough lessons to get through.  Sure, he has a probably bad takeaway given the fact that I watched this in 2025.  But fundamentally, this is Home Alone.  Honestly, it's more Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, but I tend to ignore that Home Alone 2 exists.   It's a kid who is left alone all of the time.  Like Kevin, Ichiro has all of these problems in his life outside of the events of the story.  It is through his isolation that he discovers who he really is as a person.  That's not a bad idea.  I even like the idea that the Toho monsters are able to help him come to grips with it.

...but not that much.  The weakest parts of the movie are the kaiju stuff.  Now, I think we can all pick apart why I don't like the kaiju stuff with this movie.  I don't like the Godzilla-fighting-creatures sections of these movies on a good day.  But when the majority of the Godzilla stuff are clips strung together from previous movies, much like the clip shows of yesteryear, man, there is almost nothing to appreciate here.  To a certain extent, the clip show format works for the narrative.  Ichiro falls asleep and dreams of Minilla and the other kaiju from other Toho releases.  They cut him into these scenes as if he has always been in these scenes.  That's fine. Whatever.  It's not good, nor will I find a way to make it good.  But I can tell you that the movie pushes its luck when it comes to this storytelling device.  

Ichiro's initial "travels to Monster Island" is because he takes a nap.  Okay, I can get behind that.  But the movie, desperate to get to a place where Ichiro can interact with other Toho Monsters, keeps falling asleep.  That kid is the most well-rested kid in history.  This takes place over the course of an afternoon into the evening.  Literally, Ichiro is kidnapped by the equivalent of the Wet Bandits and is tied to a chair.  Guess who thought it would be a good time to take a nap?  Honestly, I know that this is a movie that's trying to make a buck on the cheap.  There is probably this Monster Fever in Japan and they need to release something on the quick.  So they release this movie with all of these old clips taking up a notable percentage of the movie and they string the story together so people aren't visibly mad at how cheap the movie is.  But that many returns to Monster Island?  What little is believable about this movie is sacrificed for Godzilla punching another monster.

But, let's pretend that the Monster Island stuff wasn't so prevalent in this movie.  I have to admit that I thought that this movie was going to be one giant clip show.  But once the first packet of clips went away, I actually kind of got invested in the kid's story.  I think my favorite parts of the Godzilla movies have always been the human element. There's why I got so excited for Godzilla Minus One, because Godzilla is incidental to the story.  But while Godzilla Minus One was imbued with a heavy dose of gravitas, All Monsters Attack is appropriate kids' fun.  I don't think that Godzilla should be tonally one thing.  If the franchise fell off the rails as hard as it did with those early movies, it makes sense to make them for different audiences.  If anything, All Monsters Attack is almost a commentary on how these fantastic monsters have influenced children.

That's a question I have.  Is All Monsters Attack an in-universe story?  Listen, it seems like a lot of the characters know what Ichiro is talking about when he talks about monsters.  He doesn't have to explain who these characters are too often.  It feels, aesthetically, that All Monsters Attack exists in the world of Godzilla and Monster Island, but with an understanding that the Japanese people of this universe seem to like Godzilla and Monster Island.  Ichiro's room has a bunch of Godzilla toys, including a Mechagodzilla (?).  At least, I think that's Mechagodzilla.  These movies don't really stick with me from film-to-film, so that's on me.  But as a commentary, from a real world perspective, the story could be a defense of these movies beyond the typical read that "guys in monster suits" punching each other around has no value.

Listen, I hate the message that All Monsters Attack gives.  If anything, it is an advocation of violence.  Ichiro is bothered by a bully.  He's undersized compared to the other kid, who even has an avatar in Monster Island.  But there is this commentary all through the movie that Ichiro needs to stand up to that kid when I'm on Ichiro's team to begin with.  He needs to give Gabara a wide berth and that's the only way to go about it.  And that's Ichiro's natural inclination.  Yet, the movie goes out of its way to say that Ichiro can absolutely destroy this kid that's a whole head taller than he is.  As a kid who was bullied and tried this, I can tell you definitively that it does not work.  That kind of stuff is the stuff of outdated movies.  But I need to acknowledge: this is an outdated movie.

My biggest takeaway is that there's a reason that Pokemon exists.  I never got into Pokemon, so please bear with my outside perspective.  From what I understand, Pokemon comes from the idea of "Pocket Monsters."  In the case of Pokemon, a youth collects these Pokemon and has them fight.  Holy moley, if you watch All Monsters Attack, you have Ichiro yelling out monster names and he watches them fight each other.  He's even got the baseball cap and everything.  That's fun that we can kind of see the entire mindset behind the creation of this franchise.  But also, like, is it great storytelling?  Probably not.  Still, it's fascinating to see how much of an impact Toho's kaiju characters had on Japanese culture.  All Monsters Attack is a pretty terrible movie because of it, but I'm going to be brave and say that it's not the worst thing out there.  Considering that so much of this movie was clips from other movies, it's mildly watchable at times?  That's not an overwhelming sell of the movie, but I'm sure that they'll take it.