Warning From Space - Production

Production

After the success of Toho's 1954 film Godzilla, which depicted a giant dinosaur attacking Tokyo, many Japanese studios began to produce similar monster films, including Warning from Space. Along with other films such as Shintoho's Terrifying Attack of the Flying Saucers and the American Forbidden Planet, Warning from Space became part of a fledgling subgenre of films based around science fiction creatures. The film also included the fashionable use of nuclear weapons as many other films did at the time, but showed how the weapons, which devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade earlier, could be put to good use. Still others noted the film used another common theme of cosmic collisions in the style of earlier films such as the 1931 film End of the World, which depicted a comet on a collision course with the Earth.

The Pairan aliens were designed by the prominent avant-garde artist Tarō Okamoto, which used a single eye common among monsters and aliens. Although posters showed the Pairan aliens towering over buildings, they were on the scale of humans, at about two meters. Walt Lee reports that Gentaro Nakajima's novel, on which this film was based, was in turn based on the Japanese folktale Kaguya-hime. The film was one of fourteen Japanese color pictures produced in early 1956, but the first color Japanese science-fiction film.