ANI-MOVIES, *Godzilla: Planet Of Monsters

After several decades of live-action movies, Toho finally decided to make a Godzilla anime, and not just as a single film but a full on back-to-back trilogy. There have been two unsuccessful American animated TV series(one based on the U.S. film), but never a genuine anime. Instead of standard animation, they got Polygon Pictures to do a CGI production. Polygon has already gotten a good track with Ghost In The Shell: Innocence and The Sky Crawlers, also handled American properties like Transformers, Star Wars, and Tron. The anime itself doesn't have it take place in the normal Godzilla setting, but acts as a far flung outer space epic.

A quick opening narrative tells that the Earth was overrun with kaiju during the late 1990s, and the most powerful of them all was the overgrown fire-breathing reptile called Godzilla. Godzilla ends up finishing off the other kaiju, with mankind not having any way of getting rid of him. Suddenly, an alien alliance made of two races come to Earth offering to help humanity kill Godzilla in exchange for being allowed to migrate to Earth. The aliens try to counter with their own "Mechagodzilla" which fails to activate, leaving the aliens no choice but to round up the remaining humans and head off in a big space ark to find another planet to live on. Cut to two decades later, and the allied humans and aliens decide to head back to Earth after not locating an inhabitable world. After warping back to the Solar System, they discover that twenty millennia had past on Earth, and the Big-G still stomping around. Captain Haruo becomes de facto leader of an anti-Godzilla exploration team to lure the lizard into an ambush after finding he has an Achilles heel in his dorsal fin. Their plan actually works and this Godzilla gets blown to bits, however the original Godzilla was waiting in the wings and is over 300 meters tall(over twice as big as the Monsterverse version!). Haruo awakens from the attack in the care of an insect like humanoid native, meaning we could stand to see a giant butterfly in one of the sequels.

Planet Of Monsters acts as a decent beginning to the Godzilla anime trilogy, more setting up the hardships the humans and aliens had trying to survive in space for twenty years, and finding out how much Earth itself has changed during the passing thousands of years. The film seems more like a Starship Troopers anime movie as opposed to the standard kaiju story. If you're a fan of the original Showa Era of Godzilla, this anime might seem like a Gene Roddenberry-inspired follow-up to that set of films. The animation itself is fair enough with the characters, but works much better with the starships, mecha, and monster diagrams. You can see though that it would have benefited from having more standard animation as opposed to having it all done in CGI with more lifeless-looking character expressions. Whether or not this all works together as a well-toned trilogy is yet to be seen.