Sometimes one scene can change an entire movie. Sometimes it’s a twist late in the film that recontextualizes everything that came before. But more often the scene that changes everything is one that we never see. It’s a scene that was cut or changed in a significant way so that the movie we see and the movie we almost saw could have been very different things. Such was the case with Netflix's amazing animated adventure Ultraman: Rising.
Ultraman: Rising, a surprisingly good movie, follows Ken Sato, a pro baseball player who is also the son of Ultraman. As a child, he and his mother moved from Japan to Los Angeles while his father stayed behind. Ken grows up resenting his father for sending his family away, even after he returns to Japan, following the disappearance of his mother, to pick up the mantle of Ultraman from his dad.
While father and son do ultimately reconcile, the path to that is different than it originally was planned to be. I recently had the chance to speak with Ultraman: Rising co-directors Shannon Tindle and John Aoshima, who previously worked on the equally amazing Kubo and the Two Strings. They told me that originally, the plan for the film was to have Ken learn that his mother was the one who decided to leave Japan, taking them both away from the danger. In a scene, just before the film’s big finale, Ken sees a recorded message from his mother. Tindle explained…
We had a scene where we discover that Ken's mother is actually the one who made the choice to move to Los Angeles. It wasn't his dad. Ken blamed his dad all that time for it. We found out late in the film that because, originally, when you see Mina and Mina dying, she was actually projecting a message from Ken's mother. And we're seeing that.
This certainly would have changed a lot about Ultraman: Rising had the original concept for the scene remained. While Ken and his dad do eventually come together, in the version of the film we see, we still assume that Ken’s anger toward his dad is understandable, if not justified. This twist would have said that Ken’s understanding of the entire situation was wrong.
Mina is an artificial intelligence that is named after Ken’s mother and is voiced by the same actress. In many ways, the character plays the role of mom since his actual mother is missing for most of the film.
Shannon explained that Ultrman: Rising was getting long and that cuts needed to be made to tighten it up. As a result, Ken and Mina have an emotional goodbye, and many of the words that were going to come from Mom, come from Mina. While Tindle personally prefers the original concept for the scene, he let it go for the good of the film as a whole. He continued…
And the film was getting long, and I thought, well, let's just have these same words come out of Mina's mouth, because she's, at that point, she's his mom. She represents his mom in the film. So we condensed it. So I prefer that solution, and I liked letting the audience know that it was Ken's mother who made that decision.
Ultimately, Ultraman: Rising never directly addresses the question of who decided to leave. Considering that the movie has a post-credit scene that teases a sequel, one that would include Ken's mom in a much larger role. Perhaps, if the movie has created enough new Ultraman fans, a scene like the one that was cut could find its way into the next chapter of the story. Shannon Tindle told me that he is very interested in making that sequel if it gets the green light.
