Do Human Characters Matter in Kaiju Films?

Ummmm depends if they are crucial to the plot like the Fords from 2014 or Emiko and Serizawa from the 1954 original

Xenotaris

Exactly. 

You could have a kaiju movie without humans and having it focus on the monsters and anthropomorphizing them.

It depends on what story you want to tell.

HinikunaGoji,
I guess if it's a Disney situation and they talk and sing. Otherwise, the furthest this concept could get as a viable storytelling piece is a short.

Even though the movies mostly focus on kaijus, the human characters still count as well.  There are a few movies in which a human helps Godzilla defeat a kaiju. An example is Godzilla (2014). It would either be a short, mini movie or Godzilla would've been killed. 

*cough*invasion of astro-monster*cough*

^^^

Listen, human characters feel rather forced and unjustified these days.  The only characters that I felt had a justified reason to show up were the Brodys and the Russells and even then they were largely unneeded.

sonictiger

they felt a lot more natural in Singular Point, and I’m not sure I would describe it as forced.

I loved the first scene in KOTM

Even when the characters don't work, I don't think having characters in a kaiju film ever feels forced--In fact it feels very natural. These stories are by and large about how people react to a world inhabited by monsters and what that means for them. That's about 90% of what the genre is right there.