VOX POPULI: Oscar for special effects showcases what Japanese films can achieve

In its 1954 debut film, Godzilla goes on a rampage in Tokyo’s Ginza district, setting the Matsuzakaya department store ablaze and knocking down an iconic clock tower.

For this scene, special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya (1901-1970) and his team made as many as 500 miniature buildings that were one/25th scale models of the actual structures.

To ensure the models broke easily, cracks were put into them and then painted over.

But after one month of painstakingly meticulous work, the team was told the models “did not look real enough” and had to remake everything from scratch.

This episode just goes to show how passionate everyone must have been about honing their special effects skills.

Without this sort of commitment, nobody would have thought to reject the first set, nor would anyone have agreed to scrap it all.

And this very ardor must have been kept alive by generations of Japanese filmmakers through the next seven decades.

Seventy years after the first Godzilla movie, director Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One” won this year’s Academy Award for Visual Effects.

I watched footage of this film in the making, and I was amazed.

Godzilla attacks Ginza again, but this time, the entire scene was meticulously computer generated, from the forest of buildings to people fleeing in panic.

In a filming studio with a stationary set of a boat, an actor plays being tossed by huge waves.

After this scene was edited by adding computer-generated splashes of water to it, you would swear the actor couldn’t have been anywhere else but on a perilously rocking boat, heading toward Godzilla.

Were this a Hollywood movie, the above scene would have been shot in an entirely different manner, noted Yamazaki.

Thanks to ample funding, he said, the film’s producers would simply have built a massive set that could be mechanically rocked.

In Yamazaki’s case, I wonder if the small budget and limited manpower he had to work with made him feel like a passionate samurai charging into the enemy camp with a single sword.

At the Oscar awards ceremony, Yamazaki said, “We did it.”

Yes, indeed, you did it. My heartiest congratulations to you all.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 14

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.