TRIVIAL PURSUITS
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Buoyed by the international success of their Godzilla and Rodan films during the 1950s, Japan’s Toho Studios unleashed a third major monster character in 1961’s Mothra.
The movie’s slim plot line involves a research group investigating the irradiated
Infant Island in the South Pacific. The outfit discovers a primitive culture that worships the deity Mothra, ministered to by twin foot-tall cave-dwelling priestesses.
When a group member kidnaps the sisters for exploitation as a Tokyo nightclub act, Mothra hatches from her egg and swims to Tokyo, where she slithers in larval form through the city, enacting mass destruction.
Under attack, Mothra forms a defensive cocoon on Tokyo Tower, where she metamorphoses into a giant winged creature. She flies to rescue the twins and finally returns them safely to their island cave home.
Mothra appears to have an overt moral dimension, wreaking havoc only when hapless humans pose a threat to those she looks after. Neither fully butterfly nor moth—she has jaws instead of a proboscis—she demolishes buildings by virtue of her sheer size, shoots flames from all parts of her body and flies at supersonic speeds, generating typhoonforce winds with her massive wings.
Second only to Godzilla in the number of starring roles and joint appearances, Mothra showed up in more than a dozen films out of Toho Studios over the years.
Mothra often appears in battle against testy reptilian foes, including Godzilla, though he is sometimes her ally. But unlike Godzilla, who dies in each film, Mothra is always reborn as an essential protector of those in need.
Mothra was the first Japanese monster movie in which the starring creature wasn’t killed at the end
of the story.