Criterion Waited Thirteen Years After Honda's Death

The Visual Effects Society is inducting Ishirō Honda and Tomoyuki Tanaka into its Hall of Fame this September.

Honda directed Godzilla in 1954 and Tanaka produced it. This is being framed as a celebration of their technical contributions to cinema—but it is actually an institutional apology disguised as an honor.

The announcement takes for granted that Honda and Tanaka made special effects pictures, that tokusatsu work belongs in the same technical category as modern VFX. That the craft was always legitimate. Japanese film critics spent forty years treating Honda as a technician, not a director.

The Criterion Collection did not add any of his films to its catalog until 2024—thirteen years after his death. International film festivals programmed him sparingly. Serious cinema, in the postwar consensus, happened on sound stages with human actors. Everything else was craft, manufacturing, problem-solving—not art. Honda did not fail to gain recognition despite his technical brilliance.

Honda did not fail to gain recognition despite his technical brilliance.

He was systematically excluded from serious consideration because of it. The moment you classify something as "special effects," you have already decided it exists outside the space where meaning happens. You have made it subordinate to writing, performance, direction—the things that supposedly contain the actual cinema. Honda spent fifty years fighting this classification and lost.

The VES induction reverses nothing. It merely relocates Honda's work into a category that now exists to celebrate what institutions previously dismissed. We have not changed our minds about what he was trying to do. We have created a separate honors track for technical achievement so the real film world stays undisturbed.

This is how institutional legitimacy works. It arrives late, it never admits the original judgment was wrong. It transforms the person into a symbol of the category they were fighting against. If you have ever positioned yourself as a craftsperson to survive in a world that only respects artists, then spent years trying to disappear that distinction, you recognize this exactly. The honor comes when you are finally safe to be flattened into the thing you refused to be.