Godzilla (Takashi Yamazaki)

Takashi Yamazaki’s version of Godzilla is the giant monster, or kaiju, that serves as the main antagonist in the 2023 film *Godzilla Minus One*, the 37th movie in the Godzilla series. Yamazaki adapted and co-designed this incarnation. In the film, the creature is a huge, dinosaur-like being that was exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb tests during Operation Crossroads in 1946, after which it terrorizes post-war Japan.

Yamazaki wanted this Godzilla to look very cool. He gave it a relatively small head, very thick legs, and toes that lift when it stomps, like a wild animal’s. The design uses millions of polygons. Its skin texture mixes a dinosaur origin with a different, wound-like texture when it regenerates. The creature is a metaphor for nuclear weapons, so Yamazaki designed its body to work like a weapon: elements come together to create an implosion, which produces the blue rays.

Yamazaki had previously made a similar Godzilla for the 2021 ride *Godzilla the Ride: Giant Monsters Ultimate Battle*, a five-minute flying theater experience at Seibu-en. He designed that version through sketches and digital sculpting in ZBrush, with modeler Kosuke Taguchi creating the final 380-million-polygon model. That design combined elements from the Heisei and Monsterverse iterations, giving the monster a small head and large thighs for aerial shots. Yamazaki described it as both cool and frightening, with a vertical stance, thick legs, and a mountain-like overall shape. He worked with the VFX company Shirogumi, which gave him his start in film, and treated the ride as a test for *Godzilla Minus One*. Close-ups in the ride taught Shirogumi how frightening Godzilla could be, informing the feature film’s approach.

For *Minus One*, Yamazaki started with the ride design but made it sharper and more pointy, especially the dorsal plates. Its eyes are golden, almond-shaped, and relatively small, imitating Hollywood Godzillas. The creature first appears in a pre-irradiated form during World War II, with a stance and proportions closer to a theropod dinosaur; a muscle simulation made that form move convincingly. The irradiated Godzilla, which Yamazaki saw as both a monster and a deity, was deliberately kept from moving too animalistically. Shirogumi avoided performance capture, unlike in *Shin Godzilla* (2016). A 3D-printed physical model was made as a reference, though Yama