The Invisible Man Appears (1949)

directed by Shigehiro Fukushima, Shinsei Adachi

83 minutes

Japan

3.5 stars out of 5

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I recently got together a list of every tokusatsu film I've ever seen and realized that this and The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly were conspicuously absent. I have seen Motoyoshi Oda's Invisible Man, but that's it in the way of invisible-man movies. So let's talk about this little-known but important early work of tokusatsu.

One can definitely see influences from this on Toho's "Transforming Human" trilogy. Not only in the fact that it's a noir-ish story about an altered human with a little crime thrown in for funsies, but also because the effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya as his first postwar work (he had previously done effects for war films). I can't compare it to the Universal Invisible Man, because the only memories I have of that are seeing it playing on a TV somewhere in public when I was a small child. For what it's worth, even though the visual language is a direct callback to the Universal film, The Invisible Man Appears was actually based on a different source (a children's science fiction novel). However, Japanese Wikipedia claims that a lot was altered from this source, so it remains that riffing on the Universal original was probably intentional after all.

There's a general vibe of scientific experimentation run amok in the plotline, and the scenario chosen to highlight that is basically the idea that being invisible, you could do whatever you want, including - shock horror - jewel thievery. It gets a little more complicated than that along the way, because there's confusion about who exactly the invisible man is: is it the professor who invented the invisibility formula, or someone else? And is someone taking advantage of the whole situation and dressing up as the invisible man to get away with crimes? (The answer to that one is "yes".) To be honest, the plot was really confusing to me, and it required some Wiki journeying to unravel it all - could be because I was so tired I started passing out during the last half-hour of the film - but, while this is fun as a very of-its-time crime thriller, the real draw here is the special effects.

There's a reason why the unwrapping sequence from the Universal film is still so instantly recognizable. It might have been surpassed by computer animation in terms of quality, but I think - I hope - people still appreciate the effort behind creating an effect so sophisticated at such an early date. It's the same with The Invisible Man Appears. The effects are remarkably good for the time thanks to Tsuburaya's mastery of the medium, and the film is full of shots that take full advantage of the concept of an invisible human running wild. We see the invisible man manipulate objects around him, we see chairs depress when he sits on them, we see him gradually disappear when he removes his clothing. The sense of physicality despite the lack of a visible physical body is conveyed extremely well. (The first reveal scene was so good it almost made me not think about how I was basically watching a guy invade somebody's home and get completely butt-ass naked in front of him.)

It's also just really fun to watch this as an artifact of the time it was made. I was happily surprised to see that there's a scene where the characters all go to see a Takarazuka Revue, which is something I have a little knowledge about and interest in. I particularly want to highlight one member of the cast: Takiko Mizunoe, who was herself an opera performer in real life; she was Japan's first female film producer and a prolific player of male roles in theater. She definitely stands out from the rest of the actors as someone who looks and acts more like a stage performer than everyone else. Aside from that, the only face I recognized was a very young Saburo Date in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.

This was a pretty obscure film for a long time, and was unavailable on home media outside of Japan until its Arrow Video release in 2021, which is a shame because everybody loves Eiji Tsuburaya. (He apparently didn't regard his work on this film as being that good, and in fact decided not to stay at Daiei because of it - imagine!) I would love to have a movie marathon of the Transforming Human trilogy and stick this in alongside it, I think it fits really well with later kaijin-type films.