Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "