Director – Ishiro Honda, Screenplay – Shinichi Sekizawa, Based on the Novels The Undersea Kingdom (1954-5) by Shigeru Komatsuzaki & The Undersea Warship: A Fantastic Tale of Island Adventure (1900) by Shunro Oshikawa, Producer – Tomoyuki Tanaka, Photography – Hajime Koizumi, Music – Akira Ifukube, Director of Special Effects – Eiji Tsuburaya, Production Design – Takeo Kita. Production Company – Toho.
Attempts are made to abduct retired navy admiral Kusumi and his ward Makoto, daughter of the missing naval captain Jinguji. Also caught up in this are two fashion photographers, Susumu Hatanaka and Yoshito Nishibe, who are following Makoto in the hopes of recruiting her as a model. The abductor reveals he is an agent of the Mu Empire. The group fight the agent off and he flees by diving into the ocean. A package is later delivered to the admiral containing a film about the Mu Empire, telling how it sank beneath the waves tens of thousands of years ago. The people of Mu have built their own underwater city but want to reclaim the surface as their own and demand that the world surrender to them. They also regard Captain Jinguji’s construction of the Atragon-class super-submarine Gotengo as a threat. A man appears revealing that Captain Jinguji is alive and he is one of his officers. He is reluctantly persuaded to lead them to Captain Jinguji who has set up a base on a remote island where he has built the Gotengo. However, Junguji refuses to join the fight in that he has not surrendered from the War and denies the use of the submarine for anything other than nationalistic purposes. It is only when Makoto is kidnapped by a Mu spy and taken to their underwater city that Jinguji agrees to bring the Gotengo into action against the Mu Empire.
Japan’s Toho studios had been in business since the 1930s and found enormous success after making Godzilla (1954), which became an international hit and spawned a series of sequels that are still being made today. Godzilla created the Japanese Monster Movie and a great many imitators. The popularity of these saw Toho making other monster movies and then in the 1960s teaming them up together in a series of monster bashes, as well as venturing into other genres such as the space opera, kaidan eiga and regular dramas. Ishiro Honda (1911-93) had started work for Toho in the 1930s and became a director after the war years. After making Godzilla, he became the studio’s leading director (see below for Ishhiro Honda’s other films).
Atragon came out amid a spate of submarine adventures made during the 1960s that were inspired by the success of Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) and the popular tv series spun off from it, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-8). Others in this mini-fad included the films The Underwater City (1961), Around the World Under the Sea (1966), Destination Inner Space (1966) and on tv the Gerry Anderson puppet series Stingray (1962-4). These came out around the same time as the Space Race was amping into high gear and it is not too hard to see these as simply being outer space adventures that had turned towards inner space if you like. I have a more detailed listing of such films under Underwater Adventures.
During the 1960s period, Toho and Ishiro Honda had ventured into outer space a number of times with works like Battle in Outer Space (1961) and Gorath (1962), along with some of the Godzilla entries such as Monster Zero (1965) and Destroy All Monsters (1968). Atragon is just a variant on these that turns to inner rather than outer space. The one noticeable difference is that water effects are a good deal more difficult to achieve than space effects were with the resources Toho had at the time and the submarines often look like little more than models in bathtubs. The one bonus the film does have is a quite cool looking super-submarine, which can also fly and has a handy drill bit built into its nose.
Atragon has the most interesting political subtext of all of Toho and Ishiro Honda’s film during this period other than the fierce metaphor for the atomic bomb that was Godzilla. Much of the film is centred around retired the admiral (Ken Uehara) and the quest to find the missing captain (Jun Tazaki) who, when found, proves to be a relic from World War II who never agreed to Japan’s official surrender. In other words, the film becomes an ideological battle between a post-War Japan that had agreed to demilitarise and embrace pacifism and a warrior who still adheres to the Wartime code ofbushido and fierce Japanese nationalism and militarism. The big moral decision that Jun Tazaki’s captain is faced with is his outdated refusal to use the submarine for anything other than national duty and the pressing need to use its superior defences to combat a threat to the entire world. Most Toho films are wooden and one-dimensional in terms of characterisation but the writing of the captain and his moral dilemma makes the most captivating character out of any of the Japanese monster movies.
The Gotengo submarine vs the monster Manda
On the other hand, Atragon is not always that interesting a film. For over half the film, nothing much happens – the story is centered around the retired admiral, the captain’s daughter and two fashion photographers as they get caught up – one of the photographers Tadao Takashima is the nominal hero of the film but hardly gets to do anything throughout except tag along with the action. He doesn’t even a token romance with the captain’s daughter as was usually the case in these films. Throughout these scenes we see some Mu agents but the kingdom and the missing captain, least of all the submarine of the title, remain unseen until some way through the film.
Crucially, for all the submarine featuring in the film’s title, the Gotengo is never launched or goes into action until the last quarter of the show. Certainly, these scenes do perk up markedly with scenes of the submarine taking on the Manda sea serpent with its freezing ray and then blasting through into the palace with its drill bit to rescue the prisoners as the whole underwater city starts collapsing.
Ishiro Honda made one subsequent super-submarine adventure with Latitude Zero (1969), although that was not a sequel to Atragon as is sometimes misreported. The sea serpent Manda did make later appearances among the line-up of Toho monsters in Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), while the latter also featured a reappearance of the Gotengo.
