Happy Godzilla Day! The celebration wouldn’t be complete without Toho’s highly anticipated new short film, Fest Godzilla 2: Tokyo Vanishing. The result of fanbase crowdfunding is finally here! And it delivers. Even without subtitles to help with the dialogue, the visual storytelling was enough for me to get the plot and follow along. The result is a fun piece of practical tokusatsu filmmaking that longtime fans and newcomers are going to enjoy.
Not only do we get the newly modified suit in the form of Burning Millennium Godzilla, but we also get the long-awaited return of Monster X, who hasn’t appeared in an official Toho project (to my knowledge) in roughly 20 years! The short opens up with a quick recap of the previous installment, and I couldn’t help but notice the voiceover narrator sounds very similar to the announcer from the 1983 Godzilla Revival Festival trailer, pretty uncanny. From there, the story picks up where we left off in the last one, with Monster X striking his badass landing pose.
What follows is easily one of the best fight scenes we’ve seen across any of the live-action shorts so far; you can see how much the production has improved over these six installments. Monster X reminds us of what a powerhouse he is, showing off the most fluid and athletic moves we’ve seen from a kaiju fight since the Showa era, while Godzilla struggles to keep up. That said, it still feels like the crew is slightly holding back what the Godzilla suit is fully capable of, I’m assuming due to keeping the suit from wearing off easily and the scale of the production.
However, the battle isn’t without a couple of questionable moments toward the end. I unfortunately think two shots look suspiciously AI-generated. Looking closely, heavy video compression makes the first shot showing an overall view of the city’s destruction hard to tell for sure (a possible video overlay for an explosion?), as for the second…I’m honestly hoping it’s just rushed CGI. Using generative AI for something that’s supposed to honor the practical, handmade art of tokusatsu feels deeply insulting to the audience.
Despite that gripe with the finale, the ending sets up something that makes me wonder where they’ll take the story next year. Out of the six live-action shorts we’ve gotten, this is definitely a major improvement! I truly hope Toho gives the team a green light for a full 30-minute extravaganza next time. I realize at the end of every short I’m left with the same “That’s it?? I want more!” feeling, and make no mistake, I mean that in the sincerest way possible.
