The bloodiest monster fight in Godzilla’s 72-year history started on a living room floor. Takashi Yamazaki, who wrote, directed and supervised the effects for Godzilla Minus Zero, says the climactic battle between Godzilla and King Ghidorah was shaped by watching his own two cats fight.
In an interview given during the film’s opening week, Yamazaki explained that his cats usually get along and like to play together. Every so often, though, the wrestling heats up until he cannot tell whether they are still playing or really fighting. Now, he said, whenever he sees any two creatures fight, he thinks of the pair at home.
Mild spoilers for the final battle follow.
A fight to the death, written into the script
Yamazaki said he decided at the writing stage that the monster clash would be a fight to the death, and that only one of them would walk away. His reasoning came straight from nature: animals that fight for real tear at each other and wear the other down until they can land a finishing blow, so two kaiju able to kill each other should do the same.
That is what audiences see on screen. In the Ginza ruins, Godzilla severs one of Ghidorah’s heads with his tail, and Ghidorah bites off one of Godzilla’s arms, which grows back. Ghidorah later reattaches the lost head. It is a long way from the shove-and-roar wrestling of older monster films, and it helped earn the movie an R rating in the United States for “some violent content/bloody images,” a first for a Godzilla film.
There was a sad side to it too. Yamazaki admitted that watching Godzilla take a beating sometimes reminded him of a cat being bullied, which made parts of the battle hard to watch, even for the man who made it.
From the couch to the effects team
Turning a house-cat scrap into two giant monsters took a lot of people. The effects team at Shirogumi grew to about 50 artists for Minus Zero, roughly 15 more than on Godzilla Minus One. Yamazaki brought veteran CG animator Atsushi Sato out of semi-retirement to supervise key animation, especially Ghidorah and its physical contact with Godzilla, and he has called the Ginza showdown the hardest scene in the film because the two creatures had to tangle and collide without passing through each other on screen.
Here is the short version of how the cat idea fits the wider film:
- The idea: two pet cats whose play sometimes tips into a real fight.
- The rule: a script note that the battle is to the death.
- The craft: about 50 effects artists and a specialist animator for the contact between the monsters.
- The result: the franchise’s first US R rating.
What comes next
Yamazaki and his team won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Minus One, and the new film is already up for Best Film and Best Director at Japan.s Nikkan Sports Film Awards on December 27. Yamazaki has also said he would be a bit sad if Minus Zero turned out to be his last Godzilla film.
The sequel is doing well enough to keep the conversation going. Badiyaa reported on its record North American opening for a foreign-language live-action film and on the final opening-weekend count of $30.59 million. The film has now taken about $64 million worldwide, and it opened in Japan on November 3 with the biggest first day for any live-action film there.
Further reading
Image: Dodoeggs, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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