Godzilla: All Monsters Attack (1969)

"Everyone is so hard a work that they forget about the kids, huh?"

This is, appropriately enough, the 666th film I've blogged over the last nine years, and it's winderful. For completely unexpected reasons, it's the best Godzilla film I've seen so far.

Opinion, it seems, is divided between those who hate the film for its lack of focus on the monsters and extensive and for its obvious use of stock footage of the monsters on the one hand, and those who point out that this is quite clearly a sodding children's film, and a magical one at that, on the other.

This is a film about a litte boy, Ichiro, whose parents work long hours and leave him alone for hours after school (unthinkable in this day and age), and who is both obsessed by Kaiju and plagued by a bully whom he likens to Gabara. In his dreams, nicely shown as such by the type of effects that we Doctor Who fans call CSO, he flies to Monster Island and sees all the monsters, befriending little Minya. For those who comlain about Minya talking, these are dream sequences and this is a sodding kids' film, pretty much Mary Poppins with Kaiju.

I think it's a lovely, elegantly plotted and ingenious film, albeit cheap, about a little boy encouraged to fight bullies- and crooks- by a parable on Monster Island. Who'd be a kid in 60s Japan?