Trailer
Plot summary
Two engineers disappear, and while on a photo shoot Susumu Hatanaka and Yoshito Nishibe see a car drive into the sea. They spot Makoto Jinguji being followed, and learn that her father, the Imperial Captain Jinguji, is said to be alive and at work on a submarine. A driver claiming to serve the drowned empire of Mu tries to abduct Makoto and the retired Admiral Kosumi; the photographers chase him into the water. A package marked MU holds a film of the undersea continent and a demand that the surface world capitulate. The United Nations asks Kosumi to appeal to Jinguji, and one of Jinguji's officers leads the party to a tropical island with an underground dock, where the captain refuses to help.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Atragon (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The destruction of Ginza and Marunouchi for the film did not go as planned: the technician driving the truck panicked and drove off too quickly, causing the entire model city to collapse at once. The staff thought the shot was ruined, but Tsuburaya took care of the matter in the editing room.
- Five Gotengo models were built with steel hulls, the largest 4.5 metres (15 feet) long and made by a real ship-building company for 1,500,000 yen. That version was fully radio-controlled, with wings, fins, gun turrets, bridge and drill all movable, and big enough for a technician to lie inside it.
- Shinichi Sekizawa wrote the character of Captain Jinguji for Toshiro Mifune, but no one approached the actor, and by the time casting was underway Mifune was tied up in rehearsals for an 18-month shoot for Red Beard (1965).
- A late draft of the script had Captain Jinguji learn of his daughter's kidnapping and prepare to sacrifice her to save the world. Director Ishiro Honda cut the scene because he saw the story as a parable of global problems rather than personal ones.
- Director Ishiro Honda had no idea whom to cast as the Empress of Mu until he met Tetsuko Kobayashi by chance while she was working on a TV show on the Toho lot. Kobayashi applied the Empress's makeup herself.
- Shinichi Sekizawa created Captain Jinguji after reading about the Brazilian-Japanese groups Machigumi and Kachigumi, one of which felt Japan should have won World War II; he wanted the admiral to embody that nationalism.
- Atragon became Toho's first tokusatsu eiga (visual effects film) released on home video, in 1982. It did not reach US home video until Media Blasters' DVD in 2005, though it had been in constant US television syndication until the early 1980s.
- The vast wall of smoke and flames erupting from the explosion of the Mu power chamber was shot with a camera fixed upside down beneath the water line of a small tank, with a sky backdrop behind it. Colored paints poured into the water made the billowing, smoke-like clouds.
Stills
Similar movies
