When the star of Hollywood's newest horror-action-thriller debuted in the film's trailer a couple of weeks ago, Japanese fans wasted no time scrutinizing his appearance. Among the typical Internet troll comments:
"Out of shape."
"Couch potato."
"Fat from the neck downwards and massive at the bottom."
Poor Godzilla. Not even the world's most fearsome monster can escape fatshaming.
But haters, step aside: Hollywood is bringing Godzilla into the modern age, using special-effects technology to create, for the first time, a creature whose size matches his legend.
More than 500 computer animators and artists worked several years to perfect what, at 355 feet tall, is the largest of the 30 different Godzillas to hit theaters since the character's debut 60 years ago.
Inspired by Japan's still-fresh terror over the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was conceived by producer Tomoyuki Tanaka in the early 1950s after a flight Tanaka was on passed over the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site. It was then that Tanaka came up with the idea of a dinosaur reanimated by the testing who goes on to decimate Tokyo.
Photo: Warner Bros Pictures
Photo: Kimberley French/Warner Bros
Photo: Warner Bros Pictures
Back then, movie special effects largely consisted of filming small-scale models and enlarging the images for the screen, or using stop-motion animation.
Eiji Tsuburaya, then known as the master of Japanese special effects, figured it would take seven years to make the film with models, and concluded that the only practical solution was to create a suit to be worn by an actor. There was no precedent — nothing like it had ever been done in a movie, and no such suit had ever been built.
According to the short film "The Making of the Godzilla Suit" by Godzilla expert Ed Godziszewski, after some disappointing initial designs — including one that found the creature with "strange simian-like features" — the film's art department looked to a children's dinosaur encyclopedia . . . for inspiration." Godzilla was created by combining "images of a tyrannosaurus [and] an iguanodon, and then adding back plates similar to those of a stegosaurus." They also added jagged, bumpy skin to resemble the scars that marked the living victims of Japan's atomic blasts.
The first test of the suit — built from bamboo and chicken wire covered in fabric and melted latex — was a disaster. The low-quality latex was so stiff that the actor inside could barely move in it; when he did manage to walk, the suit disintegrated around him. There was also the problem that the whole apparatus weighed 220 pounds. (Modifications, including using liquid plastic, were eventually made to lighten and strengthen the suit.) But the limited scope of movement turned out to be an unexpected boon, adding to the creature's imposing vibe.
Unfortunately for actor Haruo Nakajima — history's most prolific Godzilla, having played the creature, sometimes with the help of other actors, in 12 films — no thought had been given to the experience of wearing the suit. There was no lining separating him from the snug-
fitting suit's raw outer elements, so when the cheap material rubbed against his sweat-drenched skin, it left sores all over his body.
With the temperature inside the suit reaching as high as 130 degrees, and the small breathing holes in the suit's neck plugged with sweat, the actors sometimes fainted.
Despite all the deficiencies, though, this was the suit that would make Godzilla an icon.
"They didn't get movement detail correctly — it always looked like a guy in a rubber suit," says Jim Rygiel, special-effects supervisor for the 2014 "Godzilla."
"That said, I remember watching it as a kid and totally buying into it."
With the creature's look and movement set, one more essential element was still missing: Godzilla needed to roar.
"The sound designers of that [first] film did a lot of experimentation, starting with animal sounds, and nothing was quite working. [Composer Akira] Ifukube came up with the idea of using a musical technique," says Erik Aadahl, one of the sound designers on the new film.
Ifukube created the infamous Godzilla roar by coating a leather glove with resin and dragging it along the strings of a double bass, then playing it back at slower speeds to intensify its sense of menace.
Despite initially facing bad reviews in Japan, the creature caught the public's imagination. A sequel, "Godzilla Raids Again," was released in 1955; the following year, a version of the original film was re-edited for American audiences, including new footage featuring Raymond Burr as a reporter, and released here as "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!"
The franchise was off and running, with eight films released in the 1960s and another 18 by 2004.
The design of the Godzilla suit changed every time, often for reasons more aesthetic than practical.
"Every suit created before the '90s was handmade, one of a kind, built from scratch, and made with the idea they would be used for only one film. [Toho] never made a conscious effort to duplicate the exact detail of any previous costumes," says Godziszewski, the editor of the science-fiction publication Japanese Giants.
The 1955 suit for "Godzilla Raids Again" was skinnier and had a smaller head than its predecessor. For "King Kong vs. Godzilla," the creature sported human-like eyes on the sides of its head. Two years later, for "Mothra vs. Godzilla," it became more triangular, with sharper claws on more distinctive fingers.
In 1989, "Godzilla vs. Biollante" saw significant progress with what Godziszewski refers to as "Muppet Godzilla" — the creature's upper half was designed with exterior controls that allowed for a swiveling neck and facial expressions that were not unlike the abilities of the Muppets.
Nine years later, Hollywood decided it was ready to tackle Godzilla for the first time. Helmed by "Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich and starring Matthew Broderick, the 1998 "Godzilla" had a budget of approximately $130 million and utilized the latest in computer effects to make the monster larger than life — while still, for certain close-ups, using a man in a Godzilla suit.
Emmerich instructed his creature creator, production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, to approach the monster as if starting from scratch.
"Roland . . . said to go wild. 'We want something that will run 500 miles an hour through the streets of New York,' " Tatopoulos told the now-defunct Eon Magazine. "That obviously dictates the design in that it can't be like the old one, which was more slow and heavy."
The result was perhaps the most reptilian Godzilla to date: Original Godzilla actor Nakajima remarked in an interview with scifi.com that "its face looks like an iguana and its body and limbs look like a frog." Fans felt betrayed, and critics slammed the film.
Meanwhile, back in Japan, Toho's 2004 film "Godzilla: Final Wars" was a bloated mess and a box-office disaster. Soon after, Toho said they'd be taking a break from producing their own Godzilla films.
For the 2014 Hollywood version (produced by Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros.), director Gareth Edwards took the opposite approach, seeking to make the newest "Godzilla" a return to the original.
"Our mandate was to go right back to the essential DNA … to the roots of Toho's 1954 design," says producer Jon Jashni. "[We also took] a zoological approach, making sure that mass, motion and the laws of gravity were all being respected."
Starting from the original, Edwards' team made incremental modifications, consulting with Toho at every turn. As the film would be the first in franchise history, including Emmerich's, without a man in a latex suit playing the creature at some point, the designers were no longer limited by the proportions of the human form.
Godzilla's body was made "more muscular and foreboding," according to Rygiel. Gills were added and scale texture was deepened, to resemble volcanic crust.
"We looked at a lot of creatures, like Komodo dragons and bears, to see how they reacted when they fought," says Rygiel.
For the legendary roar, sound designers Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn also looked to the past.
"The original roar is probably the most famous sound effect in cinema history," says Aadahl. "The goal was [for audiences to] be able to close their eyes and hear the roar, and know instantly it's Godzilla."
The two experimented, including re-creating Ifukube's double-bass treatment. While Aadahl and Van der Ryn won't reveal exactly how they came to the final Godzilla roar, they do reveal several surprising origins to some of the monster's other sounds.
"We found a 1972 Plymouth that wasn't running," says Aadahl, "and it had this very rusty, squeaky door hinge that had this animalistic quality. We thought, that's a great creature thing, and recorded this door for an hour at every iteration."
Once Godzilla's fundamentals were complete, the filmmakers enlisted "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong"s' Andy Serkis, Hollywood's foremost creature/motion-capture actor, to film videos showing how the monster's emotional reactions would look from the outside.
"With just a couple of eye twitches Godzilla looks like he's dying, or he's pissed," says Rygiel. "We used that as reference for the animators."
The result is the most imposing Godzilla to date — and, the filmmakers hope, a Godzilla that restores the luster to the iconic monster.
"If audiences have a long-standing love or appreciation for Godzilla, then this will be the Godzilla in their mind's eye," says Jashni. "We respected the past, while bringing him into the present, and positioning him for the future."
The evolution of Godzilla
Warner Bros Pictures
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