This weekend,
Godzilla celebrated his 64th birthday by looking towards the past
and the future. Godzilla: The Planet
Eater, his latest epic, premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival,
while a replica of the suit from his first film stomped around Godzilla Fest
2018 in Hibiya. Normally, the former would be much bigger news than the latter,
but the first two entries in Polygon Pictures’ animated trilogy have already
turned off many a fan, and it turns out that suit wasn’t just for photo ops. A trailer screened
at the Fest, already making the rounds on social media, shows it razing a
modern tokusatsu set.
The end product is a short film which will debut at the Eiji Tsuburaya Museum
on its opening day, January 11th. Godzilla’s target is Sukagawa, the
famed special effects director’s hometown.
Both the suit and
the footage are stunning. This isn’t actually the first recreation of the
original Godzilla – a version without
legs or a tail briefly appeared in Godzilla
Against Mechagodzilla – but it blows that earlier attempt out of the water.
The GXMG suit lacked fine details, to
the point that Gareth Edwards, no stranger to special effects, thought it was
computer-generated. Looking at the new suit, it’s as though sculptor Yuji Sakai
and his team traveled back to 1954 with a 3D scanner. Sakai is no stranger to
this design, having modeled a
massive vinyl figure of it for X-Plus last year. The footage of
it interacting with convention-goers is a bit surreal, but it feels right at
home in the trailer, even with the Heisei-era Maser Cannons closing in.
No word yet on the
talent behind the camera, the talent inside the suit, or even the title of the
short. With Hideaki Anno,
Shinji Higuchi, and Toshio Miike on the board of the Eiji Tsuburaya Museum, hopefully it follows
their Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo to
home video. Godzilla may be getting up there in years, but he’s not a skeleton
yet – it would be a pity if his next adventure was confined to one
room in a museum.
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