[Fantasia 2020 Review] Monster Seafood Wars is a Silly Kaiju Film that Needed to be Sillier

“Real World Peace can be achieved when everyone in the world can eat and smile a lot.” It’s a nice slogan and an inspirational message stated by Yuta (Ketsuke Ueda) at one point in Monster Seafood Wars. But it’s also at the heart of why this movie didn’t completely work for me. 

Let’s focus on the second half. It’s important to smile and Monster Seafood Wars will put a smile on your face for good chunks of its runtime. Told three years after a disaster, the narrative is split between a documentary and the real events as they happened. Every year on the first lucky day of September, Yuta brings seafood from his father’s sushi restaurant to the Namiyoke Shrine as an offering. 

This year, though, someone knocks him off his bike and steals his offerings: crab, squid and octopus. Moments later, a kaiju octopus shows up in the bay, followed by a kawaii quid with doe-eyes and they start flailing their foam arms at each other in a parody of Toho Studio monster movies. Interspersed through this development are interviews with scientists and government officials that the prime minister created the Seafood Monster Attack Team (S.M.A.T.) to stop the encroaching horde of monsters. 

Yuta is at the forefront of everyone’s concerns since he worked for a chemical company to develop Setap Z, a solution that causes creatures to grow to immense proportions. As Yuta deals with S.M.A.T. and the kaijus, he finds himself at odds with his rival Hikoma (Yuya Asato) over their mutual affections for Nana (Yoshida Ayano Christie), who works with the defense ministry. 

S.M.A.T. creates giant vinegar guns to stun the monsters because, in the words of the director of a research institute of a vinegar company, “there’s nothing more useful than rice vinegar to beat sea monsters.” But as the third monster joins the fray in the form of a giant crab, things begin to look dire and the team is forced to come up with plans to save Tokyo...and the world! 

This is all delightfully silly and put a smile on my face. Additionally, as the the defense ministry assigns names to the creatures, the public's perception changes...especially after they realize how delicious the monsters are. Here is where the script by writers Minoru Kawasaki (also the director) and Masakazu Migita is at its sharpest and most pointed. While the monsters are presumably rampaging across Tokyo, a new fad shows up on YouTube affectionately nicknamed Mon-Gou...monster gourmet. And soon a battle over which one is the tastiest almost eclipses the real world threat of attacking monsters. It becomes a challenge for some, a YouTuber’s gift to commenters for others. Even a member of S.M.A.T. begins cooking the monsters in secret. 

Unfortunately, too much of the second act is relegated to the internal bickering between Yuta, Hikoma and Nana as Nana becomes a chess piece in the battle the two boys are waging. This is where Yuta’s world peace slogan comes in, as he envisions a world where people eat giant animals as a sustainable food source. And while it introduces these more serious themes in the second act, it feels like treading water. Once the story races to the climactic finale, all pretense of asking thematic questions is dropped and feels like filler. Yuta’s two part salve for mankind is only partly applied.

Monster Seafood Wars feels like a short film stretched to feature film length and I found myself incredibly bored in the middle section when the monster attacks were practically negligible. And for a movie about people’s instant desire to eat giant monsters over the detriment of society...I expected it to be more sillier than it ultimately was. 

Hey, at least the sounds the crab monster made were cute.