POSTWAR JAPAN. FROM ZERO TO MINUS.
After World War II, former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) finds a family just as he’s drawn into a battle against Godzilla.
Rarely has any of the 36 predecessors received a similar kind of global attention. As we follow a group of Japanese who learn that they can’t trust their government, or the Americans, in taking on an overwhelming new threat, the film offers more emotion and historical relevance than Hollywood’s Monsterverse. The American film community was in awe of the visual effects, showing what you can do on a smaller budget.
Slow at times, but with spectacular moments and amusing nods to Spielberg.
2023-Japan. 125 min. Color. Widescreen. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki (Koichi Shikishima), Minami Hamabe (Noriko Oishi), Yuki Yamada (Shiro Mizushima), Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando.
Trivia: Original title: Gojira mainasu wan. Also released in a black-and-white version. Yamazaki also contributed to the visual effects.
Oscar: Best Visual Effects.
Last word: “Being able to be on-site and interact with the artists right then and there and having that feedback loop is very effective for us. […] When I’m the director and the [visual effects] supervisor and I have this vision in my head that is so solid, it eliminates the need for outsourcing and saying, ‘Oh, that’s not what we thought we were going to get.’ It’s very solidified upfront. If we didn’t have that workflow, I think we would go in circles and go back and forth, and that’s when you end up wasting a little bit of time and money here and there.” (Yamazaki, Comic Book Resources)
