"The biggest star in the world": re-animating the king in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Fig. 1 - Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Michael Dougherty, 2019).

Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was the thirty-fifth feature to star the giant kaiju (the Japanese word generally used to refer to giant movie monsters)[1]. Although it was the latest in a series of films spanning 65 years, it was only the fourth time that “the Big G” had appeared as a fully digitally animated creature, discounting the anime series on Netflix (2017/8). In addition to the Japanese reboot Shin Gojira (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, 2016), Godzilla has been fully CGI created in all three American-produced films: Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998), 2014’s remake (directed by Gareth Edwards), and Dougherty’s more recent sequel [2] (Fig. 1) The recreation of Godzilla and other kaiju in King of the Monsters, poses a number of questions about the animation of fantastical characters, the embodiment of the physicality and personality of the monsters, not to mention their ontology as performances. The end credits of Godzilla: King of the Monsters includes a dedication to Haruo Nakajima, which emphasises the significance of embodied monster performances [3]. Nakajima, who died during the film’s production, was the original performer in the Godzilla suit between 1954 and 1972. The dedication draws attention to matters surrounding the latest film’s connections with tradition, its primary appeals and the digital performances of its monsters. Given this focus on the ‘performances’ of the monsters, this editorial explores spectacle and resultant questions of performativity and indexicality in the monsters in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Much more so than the earlier Hollywood incarnations, this 2019 sequel places a strong emphasis on the performances and anthropomorphised emotions of the monsters. Edwards’ film portrayed Godzilla as more instinctive than characterised through humanism. That the film also featured none of their more traditional foes (they weren’t licensed) meant the battle was less motivated by long-standing grudges than it was by territorial disputes. Dougherty’s sequel takes this up a notch by pitting Godzilla against three of their oldest enemies: Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah, the three-headed hydra (also known as Monster Zero in reference to its second film appearance in 1965). The much-denigrated plot of the film sees the action picked up five years after the events of Edwards’ film. It revolves around Dr Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), a palaeontologist who has developed a device that can mimic sonic frequencies to affect the behaviour of the monsters (renamed as ‘titans’). Russell uses the device to awaken Mothra, setting in motion of a series of events that leads a group of eco-terrorists to awaken King Ghidorah in order to use the titans to negate humanity’s impact on the planet. Pursuing them are the shady government organisation Monarch (introduced in 2014, and developed in Kong: Skull Island [Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2017], which established Legendary’s shared MonsterVerse), as the four monsters are brought together in a battle royale to determine who is the king of the monsters, Godzilla or the alien invader, Ghidorah.

Fig. 2 - The ‘ShodaiGoji’ suit from 1954’s Gojira defines the non-realist body.

The development of the monsters in Dougherty’s film employs performance capture in ways that allude to the previous “suitmation” techniques utilised in the old Japanese films in the series. Suitmation is the term that has been given to the techniques pioneered by Eiji Tsuburaya from the production of Gojira (1954) onwards. The performances, of Nakajima in particular, brought an embodied sense of physicality to the monsters. A Toho-contracted stunt performer, Nakajima describes in Steve Ryfle’s Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star (1998) how the bulk of the suit made it difficult to walk more than 10 metres before falling down (he professes that he was chosen because he could walk the farthest), but the physical ordeal of moving the costume gave the sense of heft and bulk to the characters (Fig. 2). Aaron Gerow has argued that the monster body came to reflect a “sutured national body” that ultimately reflected intertextual references to contemporary discourses of nationality (particularly from professional wrestling) and the knowing fictionality of such a body that ultimately resists realist interpretation (2006, 78-79). To consider such performances through realist lenses is inherently problematic, although the modern CGI monsters straddle realism and performativity. The digitally-animated monsters retain the lower body bulk of the suitmation costumes, as well as the upright posture, echoing the performer in the suit, even though photo-realistic animation has attention to facial expression and musculature impossible in the analogue process. When Godzilla was designed for its 2014 iteration, designer Andrew Baker remarked that the process was more to do with developing a realist look that retained the iconicity of the kaiju without the cuteness of the 1970s design: “If you go too much in one direction, he looks like a dragon; too much in another direction, he looks like a kitty; and too much in a third direction, he looks like a dinosaur.” The final chiselled cheekbone facial design was influenced by the Skeksis from Jim Henson’s earlier fantasy film The Dark Crystal (1982), themselves a combination of performers in suits and animatronics (Murphy 2014).

Whereas processes such as stop-motion are also indexical processes, the embodiment of bodies onscreen in suitmation (supplemented with in-camera effects such as puppetry and over-cranking) reminds us of the materiality of the image in ways that digitally-animated bodies sometimes do not. As Vivian Sobchack argues, digital presence “can ignore the lived body that not only once imagined its techno-logic but gave it substantial grounding, gravity, and value”, while “devaluing the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world” is a slippery slope to oblivion (Sobchack 2004: 162).  Grounding and gravity speak strongly here to the very value of the presence of the body in the kaiju film’s history. The dedication to Nakajima at the end of the film confirms a commitment, at the very least, to the memory of the body in the monster. Therefore, the design and animation of the monster bodies in Godzilla: King of the Monsters do speak to a memory of the body, in their designs and in their performances through the motion capture.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters - King Ghidorah motion capture.

The reflection of bodies and the historical memory of suitmation in the use of performance capture echo what Tanine Allison has described as “digital indexicality, a paradoxical amalgam—combining the fantastical possibilities of CGI with traces of actual events… Instead of positing a break between celluloid index and digital icon, motion capture prompts us to reevaluate the continuities between “old” and “new” media, investigating both as fusions of historical record and visual illusions” (Allison 2011: 326). Allison’s point here about “continuities” is substantially manifest in the embodied “performances” of Godzilla and King Ghidorah in particular. With the exception of Mothra, all the creatures in the film were created using performance capture techniques. As he did in the 2014 film, T. J. Storm “played” Godzilla, while the combination of Richard Dorton, Jason Liles and Alan Maxson performed as Ghidorah, each one taking on the role of one of the monster’s heads. As the behind-the-scenes footage shows, the three heads each take on different personalities, so while the body of Monster Zero is wholly digitally created, the Three Stooges (as one of the humans in the film refers to them) of the heads are shaped through performance capture that gives the creature a more human personality (see left). Therefore, as Allison says of King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake, the monsters do not “derive [their] external appearance from an indexical process” (2011: 335), but there is the trace of materiality in the anthropomorphisation of the monster’s personalities that remind us of the performers ‘inside’ the creatures, just as suitmation did several years previous.

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. In the introduction to Camille Mustachio and Jason Barr’s collection Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, Jamie MacDonald comments that “the human-like elements of kaiju are not necessarily confined to productions which use suitmation…Godzilla (2014) depicted the titular kaiju as a much more humanoid biped than in the 1998 iteration, and while it isn’t exactly suitmation the performance capture techniques used on the film allowed human performers to shape the digital Godzilla’s movements” (Mustachio & Barr 2017: 15). Storm’s performance in both films gives Godzilla’s body strongly human qualities, upright and powerful in the upper body, while the characterisation in the sequel is more expressive. There is more interaction in this film between Godzilla and the human characters, which gives scope for what Dougherty describes as a more “curious and intelligent creature”. Scenes of the motion capture processes also give us insight into Storm’s own suitmation performance, moving with tail strapped to his body and a headpiece that echoes the shape of Godzilla’s neck and shoulders (the suit has tape stuck to it that reads “Big G”). This evokes the historical manifestation of the embodiment of the monsters’ performances more directly. It gives gravity to the character’s physicality in a similar way, a reflection of digital indexicality in the merger of motion capture and digital animation (see below).

Redesigning and performing Godzilla in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Yet, while performance capture is so central to giving the monsters a sense of the lived body that was evident in the indexicality of suitmation, the performers are not given significant profile, unlike Andy Serkis’ performance as King Kong. As Allison argues, emotional range and complexity are atypical for giant monsters:  “[p]roviding motivations, complex emotions, or psychological depth for a creature like this is far from the norm” (2011: 326). While behind-the-scenes featurettes highlight the labour of the performers (who are well known to fans of the films), no such luxury is given in the film’s credits, which lists only the four monsters as ”themselves,” the performers listed separately. Therefore, the monsters gain autonomy onscreen, stars in their own right, and more typical of CGI-created monsters than the more ‘actorly’ creations of Serkis, or Josh Brolin’s performances as Thanos in The Avengers films. Nakajima and other suitmation performers were typically credited for their onscreen roles, though they reflect Phillip Auslander’s observation about how the “PerfCap figures we see on screen do not appear as performances by individual actors but, rather, as techno-dramatic phenomena brought forth through a complex process of production that includes actors alongside writers, designers, animators, and many others, working together” (Auslander 2017: 21-22). Suitmation performances were created by the labour of a similar collection of performers, designers, wire-work technicians and directors who created the characters. They do not however “[i]n their ability to affect audiences, […] have their own agency” (Crafton 2012: 68). The labour of their construction is more visible (sometimes literally with the presence of wires, painted backgrounds, and occasionally threadbare suits), although the different processes share a sense of embodiment and materiality in their reference to the human bodies that helped create them. This echoes Gerow’s comments about the acceptable fictionality of the national body reflected in the absence of realism in the earlier films. While the newer bodies intertextually reference those older bodies, they exhibit a more autonomous sense of their own creation (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 - The autonomous ‘performer’ Godzilla in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Finally, it’s important to reflect upon the transnationalism of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The suitmation process is one that is very heavily connected with Japanese cinema (for good or bad, given some of the perceptions of its difference from Hollywood norms, and often its ‘cheesiness’), and the monsters themselves have close associations with national identity. They are icons of Japanese cinema. Although many of the films from the 1960s had associations with American co-producers (including UPA and American International Pictures), Toho retains close oversight of the copyright of the monsters (only the four starring kaiju were licensed, so the titans depicted at the end of the film have no basis in Toho’s films), and Godzilla is a Japanese citizen whose statues adorn Tokyo parks and skylines. This reflection of national cinema is encoded in the monsters’ bodies and their anthropomorphised characters. Hye Jean Chung reminds us that “digitally constructed bodies (despite their apparent weightlessness and mobility as mediated images) are quite firmly anchored to physical bodies that are, in turn, still firmly attached to national identities” (Chung 2012: 34). This is a shared characteristic of the Chinese-owned Legendary Pictures Godzilla films, where the digital bodies reflect a specific national lineage, but in a transnational context, with international settings (from Antarctica to Mexico and the US), casting (including British, American and Japanese actors), and crew. There is also a specific appeal to the Chinese market, part of the film is set in China, and with the casting of Zhang Ziyi; while there is a retention of Japanese cinematic heritage reflected in digital bodies, her casting as twin scientists reflects a shift. The twins are implied to be the Shobijin, the miniature priestesses (originally played by The Peanuts, Emi and Yumi Ito) linked to Mothra, now recast as Chinese. So, while the animation of monsters in the film echoed specific histories connected with national cinema, there are elements that reflect shifting transnational ownership of the series.

**Article published: April 10, 2020**

Notes

[1] Discounting cameos in other features, such as Yamazaki Takashi’s Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (Always Zoku Sanchōme no Yūhi, 2007).

[2] The second most successful Godzilla film at the Japanese box office in terms of tickets sold, behind 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla.

[3] Alongside Yoshimitsu Banno, the director of Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) who was instrumental in the getting the 2014 version into production.

References

Allison, Tanine. 2011. “More than a Man in a Monkey Suit: Andy Serkis, Motion Capture, and Digital Realism.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28, no.4: 325-341.

Auslander, Philip. 2017. “Film Acting and Performance Capture: The Index in Crisis.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 39, no. 3: 7-23.

Chung, Hye Jean. 2012. “Kung Fu Panda: Animated Animal Bodies as Layered Sites of (Trans)National Identities,” The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 69: 27-37.

Crafton, Donald. 2012. Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gerow, Aaron. 2006. “Wrestling with Godzilla: Intertextuality, Childish Spectatorship, and the National Body,” in In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Cultures Icons on the Global Stage, eds. William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito, 63-81. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Murphy, Mekado. 2014. “Face-Lift? Well, You Still Look Like Hell,” The New York Times (May 9., 2014), available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/movies/godzilla-in-his-many-incarnations.html.

Mustachio, Camille D.G. and Jason Barr. 2017. “Introduction.” In Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, eds. , Camille D.G. Mustachio and Jason Barr, 1-15. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Ryfle, Steve. 1998. Japan’s Favorite Mon-star: The Unauthorized Biography of "The Big G". Toronto: ECW Press.

Sobchack, Vivian. 2004.Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Biography

Steven Rawle is an Associate Professor in Media Production at York St John University. He’s currently working on a monograph about the transnationalism of the kaijū eiga and its standing as a prominent non-Hollywood genre. His most recent book was Transnational Cinema: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2018), and his research has focussed on various aspects of Japanese cult cinema, performance and remakes