12 Days of Monsters: Day 2
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Godzilla
from the 2016 film SHIN GODZILLA
PERSONAL CONTEXT
My brother and I grew up watching old Godzilla movies and loving them. My family would rent movies to watch on the weekend, and my bro and I often picked Godzilla movies. (There are tons of them.) In the fall of 2016, we heard that a new Japanese reboot of Godzilla, written & directed by Hideaki Anno (famous as the mind behind hit anime NEON GENESIS EVANGELION), was being shown in American theaters for just one week - so we both excitedly jumped into a screening.
The first time you see Godzilla on-screen (other than his tail), just for an instant, my brother and I each shared an uneasy look in the theater, and he asked "...What the fuck was that?"
Despite the jarring initial impression, I ended up loving that movie. I still adore it, and think about it frequently.
THE SET-UP
What is Godzilla?
I mean, you know Godzilla. Everyone knows Godzilla. He's a giant green reptile who spits atomic fire and wrecks Tokyo. He's featured in dozens of movies since his first appearance in 1954. Rather than walk through his whole visual history (it is long), I just want to set up one aspect of his portrayal that’s been somewhat consistent:
Godzilla’s appearance in the 1954 film GODZILLA (sometimes spelled GOJIRA).
Godzilla started out as basically just a giant animal. More specifically: His initial depictions were that of a regular animal, that became giant through some process (that granted him additional abilities, like his signature nuclear fire breath). This is most directly established in the 1991 film GODZILLA VERSUS KING GHIDORAH, which gave us a pretty funny retconned origin story for Godzilla: He was a member of a species of dinosaur called the Godzillasaurus (I shit you not), which happened to survive the extinction of the dinosaurs on some remote island in the Pacific Ocean, until it got mutated by American nuclear tests during World War 2. (This is the 18th Godzilla film, by the way.) The 1998 American reboot, GODZILLA, kept basically that same backstory - instead of being a dinosaur, the animal was originally an iguana, but it too got mutated by nuclear testing into a gigantic city-destroying monster.
Godzilla’s appearance in the 1998 film GODZILLA, representing the most major redesign of the monster in its filmic history. It’s hard to say “We want the JURASSIC PARK crowd to see this movie in theaters” much louder than this.
This means that Godzilla would look and act like an animal. While the rubber-suit design of the original Japanese films doesn't particularly try to emulate any real animal, and the 1998 design is more inspired by the fictionalized velociraptors from 1993's JURASSIC PARK than by real iguanas, they are still positioned as being basically just big animals. Their behavior and appearance make sense in that context, and their rampages begin as an accidental consequence of their size and escalate when they try to defend themselves from human military forces.
So you never find yourself wondering "why does Godzilla have arms?" or anything like that. In the fiction of these movies, he's a big animal, so he has arms, and legs, and a nose, and whatever else.
The Movie
A Nightmarish Pokémon
SHIN GODZILLA's design of its eponymous monster is pretty fucked up. Have you seen it? Unlike other depictions of Godzilla, it goes through stages, changing as the movie progresses.
The first moment we actually see Godzilla in the 2016 film SHIN GODZILLA. Note the carriage of gills behind its head (swaying as it stumbles), as well as the facts that it has no arms and can’t stand upright.
The first time you see it, it's got a thick neck saddled with swaying, blood-gushing gills; it's got huge lidless eyes whose pupils don't seem to track any movement; it's got this lipless, gumless mouth lined with mean-looking needle-like teeth. (This was the "What the fuck was that?" moment I had with my brother in the theater.) Eventually it stands up, and starts to mutate, growing hands and changing color.
Eventually, Godzilla’s mutations reach a configuration that more closely matches what we'd expect him to look like: an upright, bipedal, two-armed creature with a tail - but he's still a horror movie version of the lovable green dinosaur (who's even been the hero of a children's cartoon series).
A later form of Godzilla from SHIN GODZILLA. This is as close as we get to the iconic green monster’s traditional appearance
His eyes (now small, reflective, and beady) still don't track any movement. His skin is cracked with glowing, steaming red crevasses that suggest he's still half-formed, like a volcanic island arising from the ocean. And his mouth! His mouth is a freakish pile of teeth jutting out at irregular angles. He doesn't so much have "multiple rows" of teeth, as much as he has a goddamn thicket of teeth.
Godzilla’s teeth grow messily out of his misshapen mouth, whose lipless maxilla and mandible don’t even fit together
Admittedly, it took me a bit to adjust to this design. It was trying to be evocative of the actor-in-a-rubber-suit look of the earliest Japanese Godzilla films (even though this one is actually pure CGI), so it didn't look like a "real" creature in that regards - and then on top of that, it has this almost sloppy anatomy that further distances his appearance from all of my usual measures of verisimilitude for movie monsters. At times, its reflective and unmoving eyes seem almost painted-on, and its mouth hardly looks functional at all.
But this is on purpose, and it works well.
In this movie, Godzilla is far more alien and unnatural than in any of his previous incarnations (even the raptor-like 1998 one). While the film does suggest that this started out as some other creature that got "mutated" by exposure to some man-made catalysts, the movie doesn't even bother to speculate what it could have started out as - by now, this creature has mutated so much that it's become something entirely new, and strange.
Writer/director Anno crafted a version of Godzilla that is more like an enigmatic alien (similar to the "angels" from Evangelion) that just happens, by freaky coincidence, to resemble our image of Godzilla. And the movie makes this strangeness explicit, too - in many ways. One of my favorite moments is when a character asks a simple question:
The Visual Design
Why does Godzilla have teeth?
The question is asked by a member of a group of academics trying to learn more about the creature. The character points out that the creature is so preposterously large that it could not possibly generate enough energy to grow to that size and move around by using the same aerobic metabolism that all known animals use - in other words, Godzilla couldn't possibly get enough fuel to run just from eating. It would be like trying to power a tank with a gerbil wheel - it wouldn’t work, no matter how fast that gerbil is. It's just too big.
So, if it doesn’t eat...why does it have teeth?
The 1998 version of Godzilla (which happens to be one of the smallest incarnations of the creature) does just eat food like a normal animal, but that’s been the exception. Multiple versions of Godzilla throughout the years have suggested that Godzilla instead "feeds" on nuclear radiation in some way. The 2014 American reboot, also titled just GODZILLA, suggests that Godzilla was always around and always this big and always "ate" radiation - but it also has teeth and a mouth and all that stuff, because despite that backstory, this version of Godzilla is still meant to be seen as just a big animal. It competes with other big monsters, and it fights them by biting and scratching. It has an unusual diet, sure, but we’re supposed to understand it as a normal part of a real ecosystem, like a scaled-up version of things we’re already familiar with.
But not the version in SHIN GODZILLA. In this incarnation, the process of becoming Godzilla has rendered this organism far more freakish. There’s no ecosystem in which this creature is normal or sustainable. As we learn more about Godzilla throughout the film, we start to realize just how alien it is. I seriously strongly recommend this film, so I don't want to spoil some of the cooler moments in it - but I will say that Godzilla's anatomy and exact nature continue to get significantly stranger beyond what I’ve shown you so far.
An attraction at the Nijigen no Mori theme park where visitors can zipline into a model of Godzilla’s mouth based on his appearance in SHIN GODZILLA (which provides one of the few clear pictures I can find that shows his irregular teeth and weird flower-like gullet without spoiling the movie or being fan-art). Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe
Of course, any organism that size is fundamentally fantastical - as is the premise of a normal living organism being "mutated" into something so different from its base morphology. But within the inherently wild premise of the giant monster genre, Anno treats the prospect of Godzilla more "seriously", which leads him to explore and depict it less like a big animal and more like a scientific enigma. This approach comes through constantly, and the result is a Godzilla that feels very recognizably Godzilla but is otherwise completely freakish.
By framing Godzilla as a puzzle rather than a wild animal, it subtly shifts how the movie relates to Godzilla as a part of its overall messaging: focusing so heavily on “figuring out” Godzilla makes the movie not just about fighting Godzilla, but about understanding what Godzilla means. In this way, SHIN GODZILLA picks up the torch from the original 1954 debut, and openly directs the audience to wonder what this creature represents, what it says about us, what it reveals about the people who fight it. There’s no real question what Godzilla represents in the 2014 reboot - it represents Godzilla, you know, Godzilla. But in this 2016 reboot, it represents something much more complicated, and much uglier.
Going back to the teeth: While we do eventually find out what "powers" Godzilla has, and we do get shown what it uses its mouth for, we never get a direct answer to why it has teeth. Instead, we are left to draw conclusions from the way Godzilla's design changes over the course of the film.
That thicket of teeth is as wild as it is because this Godzilla doesn’t need teeth. It doesn't use them. It may, at some point, have needed them - but that was before it became Godzilla, a part of its life so far gone as to be almost irrelevant. Now, they are purely vestigial. Unconstrained by any function that their host would need them for, they grow arbitrarily and without order, like a lawn full of weeds.
This Godzilla doesn't have teeth just to look like a big cool reptile.
This Godzilla has teeth to show us, through their malformation, just what a monster he has become.
