by lhb412 » Sat Jun 08, 2019 12:17 am
I love this tiny bit of animation so much. It really illustrates a difference in approach between America and Japan.
In the last decade we've seen Hollywood kaiju movies, and several have really captured that tokusatsu spirit, but still they can never quite shake this Western approach that by adding elements of biological realism that the monsters will themselves become more realistic. The monsters, no matter how fanciful, have this added, animalistic detail that could never be there in a monster suit but follows from the tradition of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen pretty cleanly.
Then we have Shin Godzilla going the opposite direction and preserving the unreality of Godzilla even though he's now computer-generated and no longer a man in a suit. This version of King Ghidorah is also coming from a place more of formal abstraction then what the new Hollywood film, with its bat wings and Cobra necks, would ever go near. He's like some sort of nightmare fusion of eel and fish with death-mask faces.