Beauty in the beast: A look at the tech behind the terror, as Godzilla turns 70
From suitmation to newly expressive faces, the world’s longest-running movie franchise acts as a sort of archaeological record of special effects in cinema.
When movie producer Tomoyuki Tanaka wrote his outline for Gojira and presented it to Toho Studios, executive producer Iwao Mori liked the idea but wasn’t sure how feasible it would be.
There were concerns over cost, so he consulted with Eiji Tsuburaya, head of special effects. Things were only ever going to go one way after that.
Tsuburaya was a huge fan of the Hollywood movie King Kong (1933). Gojira was the kind of creature feature he dreamed of making. He told Mori he would ensure the special effects were convincing, and would make sure they were achieved within the assigned budget.
Tsuburaya had studied King Kong extensively; he even had his own 35mm print of the film. That movie had innovated on several aspects of cinematic special effects, particularly stop-motion animation.
But, King Kong had been made on the then-massive budget of over-half-a-million dollars, and all of Hollywood’s resources. Gojira’s budget, while high by Japanese standards — it was the third-most-expensive Japanese film of all time in 1954 — could not match up.
Stop-motion would have driven costs up. So Tsuburaya went for what became known as suitmation, where a character in a monster suit moves through scaled-down models at a slower pace, while being filmed at a high frame rate.
The Gojira suit was made of bamboo, chicken wire, and cotton stuffed in cloth bags. The monster’s skin was made with a mix of rubber, Vaseline, clay and gypsum. The first version of the suit was so heavy, it was unusable. A second, lighter version weighed 100 kg.
The actor playing the part, Haruo Nakajima, was soaked in sweat within minutes of putting it on, and could only operate it for short periods of time. For close-ups, director Ishiro Honda used a hand puppet.
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Over the next decade, the use of thinner latex and rubber reduced the weight of the suits, but they were still cumbersome. A big shift would come nearly a decade later, with the use of animatronic elements in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962; also directed by Honda).
This film marked the introduction of limited mechanical elements to enhance the kaiju’s expressiveness. Animatronic mechanisms were used in the head to articulate movements such as the opening and closing of the jaw, and slight movements of the eyes. This allowed for more detailed expressions during close-ups, infusing drama into the monster’s personality and interactions.
Animatronics developed rapidly over the next few decades, pushed forward in the US by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Jaws (1975; Spielberg) brought us the first fully animatronic movie monster. Star Wars (1977; Lucas) gave audiences R2-D2 and C-3PO. ET (1982; Spielberg) had its lovable alien, and things came full circle with Jurassic Park (1993), in which Spielberg channelled his love for Godzilla, and combined animatronics and CGI, to build an array of breath-taking dinosaurs.
Five years later came the first Hollywood adaptation. Fresh off the blockbuster success of Independence Day (1996), director Roland Emmerich and screenplay writer Dean Devlin took Godzilla to New York City. This time, the monster was almost completely CGI, with barely a dozen practical effects involved.
Rather poetically, at his most destructive yet, he didn’t really exist.
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In 2014, production house Legendary Pictures, known for the Dark Knight and Hangover movies, announced that they had acquired the right to make films featuring Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah.
This marked the birth of the Monsterverse. Hollywood could now pit these titans against each other, or have them collaborate. The five films released by Legendary so far have earned over $1.5 billion.
The first of these, Godzilla (2014), cast this monster as the world’s only hope, amid attacks by an army of mutant kaiju. This Godzilla incorporated elements from animals such as bears, dogs and eagles, to give it an especially expressive face. Motion-capture technology was also used, to create realistic movements in the movie’s other monsters.
Andy Serkis, whose motion-capture filmography is probably better-known than his onscreen appearances, consulted on the project to help make the creatures more “soulful” and “believable”.
The rest of the Legendary releases — Kong: Skull Island in 2017; Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 2019; Godzilla vs Kong in 2021 and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in 2024 — have been high on technique too (albeit, low on plot).
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Over the years, Godzilla has grown, shrunk and grown again.
For a long time, the kaiju stood at 50 metres, a height that worked well for looming over the Tokyo skyline of the ’50s while staying proportional to the miniatures and models used in practical effects.
It took 30 years for the first growth spurt. In The Return of Godzilla (1984), the monster soared to 80 metres. He had to, if he wanted to rear over Tokyo’s new cityscape.
By 1991, in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, he was standing at 100 metres.
Emmerich cut him down a bit, in ’98, to 70 metres, but that was more a factor of the monster’s new design, which was more reptilian, with a horizontal creep. He and Devlin drew inspiration, they said, from the real-world “king of the tyrant lizards”, the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex (which was about 6 metres tall, and most likely moved around slouched).
The 2000s saw Godzilla return to heights of 50 to 60 metres. Then Legendary Pictures stepped in, and all bets were off. The 2014 Godzilla was 108 metres tall. Shin Godzilla, a Japanese production directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, was envisioned as 118 metres tall.
Legendary’s King of the Monsters added another metre and, by 2021, Godzilla stood at 120 metres, more than double his starting size.
The really incredible statistic, though, is the franchise’s length: 70 years, 38 films, and more in the works. In its quest to offer audiences something of a refreshed experience with each addition, the franchise has embraced new technology, or invented its own.
As a result, the Godzilla movies act as a sort of archaeological record of that ephemeral world of make-believe within make-believe: the world of special effects in cinema.
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