The original 1933 film KING KONG was a special effects marvel for its day, famously using stop-motion animation to render the big gorilla. This was one of the moments where monster special effects almost single-handedly made a movie into a cultural firestarter - inspiring such greats as Ray Harryhausen, whose own artistry would push stop-motion even farther, with Harryhausen’s movies then inspiring another wave of monster-obsessed filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, and…

Ahem.

Meriam C. Cooper - the originator, director, and producer of KING KONG (but not its special effects artist) - was proud of what he considered to be his legacy.

Decades after KING KONG’s debut, Toho Studios released KING KONG VERSUS GODZILLA in 1962. The idea for the movie started with one of Cooper’s partners (who originally wanted Kong to fight Frankenstein’s monster, to capitalize on the gorilla’s popularity), but Cooper aimed his contempt at Toho Studios:

Now let’s jump forward to almost 60 years later.

GODZILLA VERSUS KONG came out in 2021. It’s the culmination of a new monster movie franchise helmed by Legendary Pictures, which released reboots of GODZILLA in 2014 and KING KONG in 2017 (as KONG: SKULL ISLAND). And there’s something about this latest King Kong that struck me.

Unlike the original 1933 version, or the version from the 2005 remake produced by WingNut Films, the Kong of 2017 is almost strictly bipedal and fully upright.

In an interview before the release of KONG: SKULL ISLAND, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts explained that this was intentional:

As he notes, actual gorillas are typically quadrupedal; only humans can walk fully upright constantly. This has other implications for Kong’s latest design - the arms, legs, chest, gut, and rump are all shaped substantially differently from those of the real animal (Gorilla beringei).

Which means that the current legacy of King Kong, whose creator had such contempt for the idea of a man in a gorilla suit...

...is a movie that cost over 155 million dollars (more than 30 times the budget of the 1962 version, after inflation), and used state-of-the-art CGI and visual effects, to convincingly depict a creature...

...that moves and acts like a man in a gorilla suit.

The price of Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism - i.e. giving human traits to non-human things, like animals - is overwhelmingly common in media as an easy way to help us relate to a non-human character. If you’ve seen a couple of Pixar films, you know there’s no limit to what we can anthropomorphize.

Just look at snakes.

Snakes are distinctive for not following the standard four-limbed body plan that is so common throughout other terrestrial vertebrates. But just tweak their eyes a little bit and suddenly we’ve got a roadmap for their every mood. You see this everywhere, from Disney cartoons to horror movies.

What I want to talk about, though, is something else: the tendency to depict animals as humans think the animals look/behave, based on human intuitions. This is kinda an offshoot of anthropomorphism - let’s call it “anthropo-speculo-morphism”, if you want a hideously long name for it. These sorts of depictions are usually based on how we imagine humans might use the anatomy of an animal.

For example: How often have you seen a snake use its tail as a whip that rolls up prey like a yo-yo (as depicted in this clip from THE JUNGLE BOOK, or this clip from ANACONDA)?

While many snakes do constrict their prey, their tails aren’t tentacles and can’t grip animals that way (they grab prey with their mouths and coil using their upper body). Snakes are pretty common, and no living snakes use their tails like Indiana Jones uses a bullwhip, but this depiction of snake movement never stops showing up. It’s not that we’re trying to add human-like attributes to these snakes - we’re trying to depict attributes that are specific to snakes (e.g. coiling around prey to constrict it) - but we’re still using human movement and anatomy as the basis for those depictions (e.g. “How would I use a long, thin appendage to grab something?”).

This becomes even more prevalent when we’re depicting an animal battling a human. Figuring out how a human might fight a snake is much easier to do when the snake uses maneuvers similar to what humans use to fight each other. For instance, check out the bit in RESIDENT EVIL where you fight a giant snake. In reality, snakes don’t trade blows - they either successfully snag and immobilize you, or you get away. But in a video game boss battle, the enemy needs to be able to deal multiple non-lethal blows to the player while the player responds with their own, to create an iterative and interactive combat experience. So the result is a snake that is constantly mobile, needlessly circling the player, reared up like a boxer, and repeatedly lunging forward like it’s throwing jabs with its face.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

People do pick up on unrealistic animal behavior more than they may realize (you don’t need to be a herpetologist to feel like the snake’s movement in RESIDENT EVIL feels “fake”), but any given media isn’t necessarily improved by being more “realistic”. As always, it’s a matter of choices and intent: Does the choice to depict this snake (or whatever other animal) this way serve this piece of media, given what it intends to communicate at this particular moment? ANACONDA is a schlocky horror movie that wants to have a powerful and malicious monster to terrorize its cast, so their creature design should ultimately serve that intent.

But, like with any other choice made in a piece of media, there is a cost. And the tendency toward “anthropo-speculo-morphism” is so common that it’s easy for creators to assume these choices as the default, and become oblivious to those costs. Terryl Whitlach, a scientific illustrator and paleoartist who has done creature design for projects as big as the Star Wars movies, explains this very well in a passage from her book PRINCIPLES OF CREATURE DESIGN, where she encourages artists to practice drawing real animals in the wild to help them design fictional creatures:

While anthropomorphism can be an effective way to help a human audience understand a non-human character, it isn’t the only way. Our ability to interpret a creature’s inner emotional state is extremely powerful, even when dealing with a creature as un-human-like as a snake. For instance, consider the following image of a real ball python (Python regius) - with no eyebrows, eyelids, or ability to frown/smile/etc.:

Even if you don’t know anything about snakes, and even though this snake is “gesturing” solely with distinctly non-human anatomy…

I bet you have a pretty solid guess about what this little fella is thinking/feeling.

Let’s look at one last example of a snake in media to see this principle in action. In 2019’s SEKIRO, you also have to deal with an enormous snake - but it’s very different from RESIDENT EVIL. In particular, notice how it “wiggles” its lower jaw every now and then. Like real snakes, this beast can move the left and right sides of its jaws independently. While real snakes do that to help them swallow food, this video game enemy does it constantly, almost as a tic. The goal here isn’t “realism” per se, but characterization. Even if you’re not familiar with this aspect of real-world snake anatomy, and even though this tic is made-up anyway, and even though you might not be consciously aware of its meaning, the impression probably comes across clearly anyway. That is: It’s a big predator searching for you while adjusting its mouth constantly - in other words, it’s “licking its lips”, a menacing gesture that communicates lethal intent and imminent danger.

Not only is this inventive little bit of character animation effectively building up the tone of the scene, it’s made more memorable by drawing from how this type of animal actually moves. This isn’t verisimilitude just for its own sake - it’s verisimilitude for narrative purpose. Real snakes don’t actually lick their lips, but neither do they hungrily adjust their mouths. And yet, the latter works well here because it evokes specifically snake-like features, and thus deepens the characterization of the snake as a snake. (Which, in turn, makes the player feel much more like a mouse themselves.)

When your depiction of a creature stays within the confines of familiar intuitions about movement/behavior based on human experience, the creature itself becomes as relatively unmemorable as a random nameless villainous henchman from any given action movie. Even if there’s only one snake/wolf/dragon/whatever in your movie, a lack of characterization makes it just another snake/wolf/dragon/whatever.

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ decision to make King Kong behave indistinguishably from a man in a (very fancy) gorilla suit is consequential not because it’s “unrealistic”, but because it leads him to characterize Kong as an uninteresting human instead of as an interesting gorilla.

The perks of Zoomorphism

The narrative function of monsters in media is usually to attack people. A lot of the time, that’s where their characterization both begins and ends: as just a pile of teeth and claws that makes a scary sound as it chases someone.

Once again, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing - sometimes your narrative basically just needs a particularly noisy shopping cart with a scary mask and a knife taped to it that you shove at your other characters.

But if your monster has a bigger role to play, you’ll find that “spiky and screaming” is not a whole lot of characterization. In fact, it’s so common and so narrow that it can make monsters with otherwise interesting and distinctive designs into forgettable, interchangeable balls of teeth.

Consider the Tyrannosaurus rex from JURASSIC PARK and its sequels.

This is an excellent monster design. From the phenomenal special effects assembled by Stan Winston’s crew to the brilliant cinematography lead by Dean Cundey, there are many reasons why this creature became part of the gold standard for verisimilitude in media depictions of dinosaurs. It’s undeniably impressive.

But lemme ask you something:

What does this creature look like when it’s not trying to terrify and eat people?

In the five Jurassic Park movies to date, the closest we come to seeing a placid T. rex is for a couple minutes in 2018’s JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (which is still a “We have to be careful or it will wake up and kill us” that ends with it waking up). The rest of T. rex’s screentime consists of it loudly trying to kill stuff.

So, take a look at these images from the original movie that started it all. Look at how this creature is built, especially the face, and try to imagine other behaviors from an animal with this design.

Like a ball python, Tyrannosaurus would’ve been unable to emote with its eyebrows and lips (as far as we know, anyway). But unlike a ball python, this version of Tyrannosaurus is built with a design that nonetheless emotes. With small eyes set high in black rings, sharply-angled brows crests, and always-exposed teeth, it has a permanently angry expression.

Now, don’t get me twisted: I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to design your creatures with certain moods and narrative functions in mind (in fact, just the opposite - it’s often vital). In JURASSIC PARK, T. rex is primarily a horror monster, and I’m not saying we needed to be able to imagine it sleeping for it to be scary and awesome. It’s designed with clear intent, and the design achieves its goals.

But I am saying that this portrayal offers a very narrow characterization.

And while that works fine in the first movie, it becomes a problem if we try to tell a story where T. rex isn’t just a horror monster. The first sequel, 1997’s THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, features a plotline that revolves around evil rich people kidnapping a baby T. rex from its parents, who want to be reunited with it - but these creatures can’t express things like “mourning” or “fear” or “relief” on-screen, and even in the scenes about rescuing their kid they’re still trying to eat people. Two decades later, FALLEN KINGDOM wants us to consider them as majestic wildlife that we have an obligation to protect and respect, but after decades of these portrayals this makes about as much sense as declaring the killer xenomorphs from the Alien franchise an endangered species.

In the book ALL YESTERDAYS, paleontologist Dr. Darren Naish and artists John Conway & C.M. Koseman set out to challenge common depictions of dinosaurs, both in media and academia, with alternatives that are both speculative and naturalistic. When it comes time to show the awe-inspiring Tyrannosaurus rex, the book offers a two-page spread of it sleeping peacefully on its side in a quiet forest glade, with the following explanation:

In movies, T. rex roars all the time because that’s what looks exciting to humans. To imagine a T. rex not roaring, then, is to imagine what its life is like without humans - i.e. to picture a more comprehensive image of what your T. rex is as a more fully fleshed-out character.

This isn’t sophistry about “realistic” depictions of extinct animals, though - figuring out what your critter looks like when it’s napping is often a good practice when designing media monsters in general, even if your end goal is to make something to terrify and threaten your characters.

This is similar to a common writing exercise, where an author will figure out details of a character that never make it to the page (like their favorite cereal or what time they wake up in the mornings) in order to better understand them, and it’s something that monster designers like Ray Harryhausen and Guillermo del Toro have been doing for decades. According to del Toro, Harryhausen would often strive to capture the diversity of personality that you can see in living animals with his creature designs.

As it turns out, figuring out what Tyrannosaurus could’ve looked like in repose is a tough question.

It’s easy to forget just how different the non-avian theropods (i.e. dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, and Velociraptor) are built from modern avian theropods (i.e. birds). Unlike birds, creatures like Allosaurus had a center of gravity that was much further forward from the hips, balanced between huge heads and long well-muscled tails. Their hips are also built very differently, which affects a whole range of leg motions and postures. We still don’t know how these animals did something as basic as sitting or lying down - which means that each time an artist wants to depict this minor movement, they are making a creative choice about how to characterize this animal.

And when there are no living examples of the animal to reference, we do what paleoartists like Whitlach and Conway have been doing: draw inferences and inspiration from animals we can reference.

Zoomorphism is the assignment of specifically animal-like traits to something else - whether it’s people, objects, or other animals. In narrative media, this often takes the form of making a less-familiar animal resemble a more-familiar animal, so that the audience can better understand and relate to it. Most audiences probably aren’t familiar enough with marine gastropod molluscs to be able to read their behavior, but if you show them a sea snail meowing and using a litterbox, they’ll be able to follow along.

This is exactly how the 2019 animated series PRIMAL addresses the question of resting therapoda, as is immediately apparent to almost anyone watching the show who has a pet dog:

PRIMAL is a dialog-less show about a caveman (named Spear) and a dinosaur (named Fang) who end up wandering the wilderness together. Because one of the lead characters is a wild animal of a species that no human has ever interacted with, PRIMAL leans a lot on zoomorphism to help us understand Fang. At the same time, though, if too many of her behaviors match those of a dog too closely, then the audience might see her as just a dog (which is what happens with many animals in Disney movies, like Maximus the horse from TANGLED and Sven the reindeer from FROZEN and Blazey the dragon from ONWARD and…). Collapsing your creature’s depiction down to “just a dog” has most of the same consequences as collapsing it down to “just a human in a _____ suit”: It makes the creature more familiar and less interesting. On top of that, Spear and Fang’s struggles to understand each other are central to a lot of the show. So there’s a balance to be struck here between understanding and uncertainty.

Genndy Tartokovsky - PRIMAL’s creator and director - achieves this balance through a series of motivated choices about how Fang behaves. Fang frequently acts like a modern domesticated dog in scenes when the show is trying to endear us to her, and less like a dog when the show wants to portray her as threatening or inscrutable. This means there will be adorable moments where Fang does stuff like pace in a tight circle before laying down on her belly in a sunbeam, and other moments where she does scary things like eat huge quantities of meat in a single bite.

What impresses me the most about Fang’s portrayal in PRIMAL is the way that the show conveys the general concept of a wild animal. Fang roars and rips prey into bloody chunks same as the dinos from JURASSIC PARK, but that doesn’t communicate “wild animal” - it communicates “movie monster”. Remember, roaring constantly is not actually thing a wild animals do, so we’re more likely to associate it with movies and shows. (Besides, everything in PRIMAL roars constantly, even the caveman.) Instead, Tartakovsky establishes a “wild animal” as “a creature that we don’t fully understand, but that is understandable.” Fang has a coherent personality and intelligible motivations, it’s just hard for us to figure out what they are sometimes.

Visually, this involves a lot of shots that linger on her face and eyes - which don’t have expressive eyebrows or eyelids (unlike a human or dog), but also aren’t permanently angry-looking.

Spear will put an animal pelt on Fang’s back to protect her from the cold, and she’ll stare at him for a moment. Does she understand what he’s doing?

Moments later, she’ll throw a piece of animal meat in Spear’s face. Is she trying to respond in kind (“I don’t know why this dude put some animal parts on me - maybe I should just return the gesture”)?

These frequent sequences where we see Fang paying attention to something but not clearly emoting using a familiar template invite us to wonder what she’s thinking about, and to scrutinize her behaviors to try to understand her. Her dog-like attributes connect us to her, and her un-dog-like attributes distance us from her. Having to figure her out makes her a more compelling character.

You don’t need to spend a whole show to get this sort of characterization across with your design, though - you can do it with bite-size snippets of behavior, and to illustrate, I’ll give you one last bite-sized example of a well-designed tyrannosaurid in modern media.

This is Anjanath.

Official renders of Anjanath being regular-mad and extra-mad, from MONSTER HUNTER WORLD and RISE, respectively

Anjanath is a fire-spitting theropod from the Monster Hunter games. When it gets mad, this funky crest pops up from its nose and these weird sails unfold above its hips. There’s no plot here - Anjanath is just a video game monster for you to fight, while it roars and charges at you.

Pretty standard dino stuff, mostly, right?

But.

Like any monster in the game, if left to itself, Anjanath will wander around. Usually it just looks for food, maybe picks a fight with another monster, that sort of thing.

Recently, though, I spotted an Anjanath that hadn’t spotted me yet, and it was doing something else, something I hadn’t seen in my hundreds of hours playing these games.

Before I saw this, the pelvic sails felt like the most goofy and superfluous element of this creature’s design (they’re not even relevant to the mechanics of fighting it), but now I love them. Normally, you only see Anjanath’s sails when it’s enraged and attacking you. But they can’t just be a symbol for when it’s extra mad, because here it is - wiggling them while relaxing on a comfy patch of mud and grass.

Aren’t you even more curious what those things are for, now?

Don’t you wonder what it’s doing?

Doesn’t the way it gently twitches them while yawning give you the suggestion of its mood?

These questions draw you more into the design, making it more than just another ball of teeth. The Monster Hunter games are pretty good about this stuff, and it’s one of the reasons their creatures are so engaging. Yes, the games are full to the gills with toothy predators roaring at you - but each monster also has little glimpses of character beyond just “KILL YOU!” They feel just a bit more like plausible animals. There are dragons that lick their wings clean the way fruit bats do. There are sea serpents that swim on their back and crack shells on their stomach like otters.

And if you’re lucky, you can even spot a vicious, fire-spitting Tyrannosaurus in quiet repose.

Empathy and fascination

We’re not just talking about monster design - these are principles of character design in general. Not only can they be applied to any type of monster, they can also be applied to people too. A lot of the work put out by Studio Ghibli showcases this stuff masterfully.

In their films, you see everything in the frame lovingly rendered in naturalistic detail - from the way a breeze ripples over grass in a meadow, to the way almost gentle-seeming blobs of orange and red from an open flame flutter around an iron pan as someone cooks breakfast, to the way a steamed dumpling sags with broth as a hungry father lifts it to his mouth with chopsticks. (Incidentally, eating is both intimate and a mechanically complex action - full of little maneuvers that can be shaped by personality, anatomy, and mood. It’s no accident that Ghibli films often feature prominent scenes of characters making and eating meals.) All of this information helps the artists characterize everything in the screen, from the locations to the people.

These details are often inspired by reality more than being actually realistic - for instance, you will see cartoonishly large trails of tears streaming down a crying child’s face, but the tears themselves will be animated in a recreation of fluid physics that still manages to scan as “realistic”. This is the same basic approach we saw with the mandibular wiggle on the Great Serpent from SEKIRO: an invented, fictionalized gesture made out of realistic parts.

This allows Ghibli’s animators to make anything endearing, whether it’s a living flame, a little girl, or a weird tiny spider - specifically, a diving bell spider (Argyroneta aquatica), the star of the 2006 Ghibli short MONMON THE WATER SPIDER. Monmon has some clear anthropomorphic features to get us in the door, but his personality and thoughts are primarily conveyed by his movements, which draw from the real anatomy of spiders rather than just mapping human movement into a spider “costume”. We relate to Monmon by learning to read motions that are specific to spiders, like the way he grabs and manipulates things with his rearmost legs, or the way his mouth-adjacent limbs articulate. When he first performs an overtly non-spider gesture, it isn’t humans he’s imitating - it’s the graceful strokes of another arthropod, a water strider bug (family Gerridae). Like the viewer, Monmon is captivated by the distinctive movement of something fundamentally different from him.

While Ghibli films are famous for being almost endlessly endearing, they’re also judicious with audience empathy - they withhold easy connection to a character as deliberately as when they invite it. Their cast often includes characters that are largely unreadable, like the elk in PRINCESS MONONOKE, No-Face in SPIRITED AWAY, and the scarecrow from HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE - but the starkest example is probably the gigantic insectoid ohmu.

The ohmu are the creation of Hayao Miyazaki, a co-founder of Studio Ghibli who created them first for his 1982 manga NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND, then adapted them to screen in the 1984 film of the same name.

(Quick aside: Technically, both the manga and the movie pre-date the founding of Ghibli in 1985. However, since the movie had the same production crew as Ghibli’s first film, released later in 1986, it’s often considered part of the same body of work.)

The ohmu are massive, powerful, long-lived, and intelligent. When angered, even a single ohmu becomes a living natural disaster capable of destroying human settlements by itself. At other times, they can offer unparalleled gifts to humans, such as valuable natural resources from their shed exoskeletons. They are deities, in practice if not in name, and the heroine of the story is distinguished partly by her reverence for them.

Their design is also meant to resist empathy, according to Miyazaki - not that you need him to tell you. Most of their body consists of similar-looking segments, giving us few footholds to understand their “body language”, and their multitude of eyes are spread out such that you can barely tell what they’re even looking at, much less what they’re thinking. The only lifeline that Miyazaki offers is their eye color: Ohmu have eyes that usually glow a faint blue, which turns into a brighter red if they’re enraged, and fades entirely if they’re stunned or dead - a feature they possess only for storytelling convenience. Even the most thorough writing I could find on the speculative biology of the ohmu, by entomologist Zachary Griebenow, threw its hands up at this feature, stating that they “know of no biochemical mechanism that would enable this, and it must be regarded as narrative license, humanizing a species that has nothing in the way of anthropomorphism.”

And yet, we can understand them, to some degree.

Just like we can understand any real-world animal, eventually.

In the story, the heroine learns how to interpret the ohmu over years - but as audiences we have the additional benefit of being able to pay attention to how they’re designed, framed, and presented by the storyteller. For example: When the blocky, chitinous ohmu get up close to someone they can extrude thin, flexible glowing appendages with soft tips - a design choice that suggests the capacity for nuanced and delicate examination, which further suggests that the ohmu are capable of consideration. Or, check out another moment later in the film: After the heroine has finished shepherding a wounded animal to safety, she notices a single ohmu in the distance, facing towards her. The next shot is from her perspective, centering the creature facing directly at her/us. This shot lingers for a moment, until the ohmu gradually turns away and leaves.

Technically, we don’t know for certain what the ohmu was actually looking at with any number of its 14 eyes - but the filmic conventions used here, just like the ones used in the shots of Fang’s face from PRIMAL, make a very clear implication that the creature was looking at the heroine and paying attention to what she was doing.

The part we don’t know is: What does it think about what it just saw?

Studio Ghibli’s films are rightly lauded for evoking a sense of childlike wonder. Oftentimes, though, this praise is paired with images of children’s faces, of pastoral meadows, of smiling woodland creatures and dresses fluttering in the wind - easy, familiar images. I think that perspective misses the underlying genius at work here, which is much more evident in the stranger and more opaque images - water spiders looking up at the sun, mostly-mute faceless phantoms, house-sized arthropods. For Miyazaki, this sense of wonder comes from a deep-seated longing for a presence that is “not easily understood, a presence beyond our current framework or whose origins are prehistoric.”

Miyazaki himself has been fascinated with the alienness of bugs since childhood (in one interview, recounted in the book STARTING POINT, he recalls having his young mind blown when a teacher told him spiders have eight eyes - “How can they see with so many eyes?”). PONYO, a 2008 Ghibli film made specifically for young children, constantly features imagery of strange extinct creatures like trilobites and eurypterids (a.k.a. sea scorpions). And the eponymous protagonist of NAUSICAÄ is partly inspired by a twelfth-century Japanese story about a lady who loved insects. It makes sense to me that the creators famous for “childlike wonder” would gravitate towards creatures often considered disgusting or horrific. There’s a connection between the enduring appeal of Ghibli’s films and of horror movie monsters:

It’s all about fascination.

There’s no single best way to design a monster, just as there’s no best way to tell a story. Hell, I don’t even have a single favorite way to do either of those things, and I’m just one person. All the various elements in this small realm of media that I’m focusing on here (i.e. monster design) - from the visual look to the speculative anatomy to the narrative function - have circumstances that can favor one variation over another. Just like selective pressures on the evolution of real animals.

But we often feel a pull towards making things swiftly-recognizable - so often, in fact, that we can fail to consider alternatives. For Miyazaki, the feeling that something is “bigger than ourselves” has less to do with its size and more to do with how little of it we understand. Jordan Vogt-Roberts said he wanted to make King Kong seem “like a god”, so he made it more human, and made it the biggest it had ever been on-screen - but the resulting characterization is small, and fits entirely within what we already know. When we don’t escape the gravity of familiarity, even an ingenious visual design for a monster can collapse into a forgettable, simple little thing. Just another interchangeable narrative device with teeth.

While humans in monster costumes absolutely have their place (personally, I stan Godzilla over Kong all day long), I’m always happy to see media where - instead of inviting a shallow, explanatory sort of empathy - we’re inviting a complex, engaging sort of fascination.