Great news for fans of Godzilla and director Honda Ishiro: a brand new book about the late director's life and films has just been published:
Featuring a foreward by Martin Scorsese, the book has been hailed as the definitive work on Honda.
I wanted to write about the book myself, then I found this excellent review by my good friend and Japanese film expert Mark Schilling, so please check his piece instead:
While Schilling says this is the first English-language book on Honda, another book came out in 2009:
Here's the review I wrote back when the book came out:
Mushroom
Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda
By
Peter H. Brothers
AuthorHouse
2009,
282 pp, $14.95
Until not so
many years ago, well before the rise of Hideo Nakata, Takashi Shimizu and
J-Horror, Japanese genre cinema was almost exclusively known abroad for
monsters movies. You had Mothra, Ghidorah, Gamera, and then the king of them
all: the mighty Godzilla. The original Gojira
was directed in 1954 by Ishiro Honda. It proved so popular that it was followed
by 27 more films featuring our favorite radioactive lizard, and is still
considered one of the most influential franchises in the history of monster
movies. Honda himself went on working on many other such films and became one
of the most prolific fantasy film directors.
Author Peter H.
Brothers saw the original Godzilla
when he still was a child and instantly became a hardcore Honda fan, so much so
that he later became one of the original staff writers on the legendary
fanzine, Japanese Giants, and went on
studying and writing about his work for such magazines as Cult Movies, Fantastic Films
and especially G-Fan.
Mushroom
Clouds…
starts with a short but detailed biography of the Japanese director and is
followed by a meticulous analysis of his filmography. Despite the huge amount
of research he must have put into this book, Brothers’ approach is far from
academic. He is a fan at heart; someone who for 30 years has written for
fanzines, and it shows in his enthusiastic “ziney” style, which at times can be
a little repetitive. Also, after having problems finding a mainstream
publisher, Brothers decided to do everything himself and self-publish the book.
As a result, there are some spelling mistakes and redundancies, and in general
the text needs better editing. These minor problems notwithstanding, this is a
must for Honda fans and lovers of fantasy films. There is a great deal of
information never before seen in English book form, a good deal of which was
translated from Japanese-language sources. Most of all, far from being a dry
list of names and facts, this book is the story of a humble and soft-spoken man, a dedicated craftsman who during a remarkable 60-plus year career created some of the most
amazing "beautiful nightmares" people worldwide have had
the pleasure to watch on screen.
And don't forget my book!
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