Hey kaiju fans, Titano here.
It's been just over two years since our very first Kaiju Profile.
Wikizilla's videos and writing staff have grown quite a bit since then,
so we thought we'd give our most popular video a reboot.
Let's take a new look at Shin Godzilla!
SKREEEONK!
"Shin Godzilla," directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi,
introduced the eleventh incarnation of the King of the Monsters to appear on film.
This version is a completely new species spawned by nuclear waste dumping,
rather than an ancient creature awakened or mutated by nuclear testing.
His role in the story evokes the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima,
a disaster made worse by the Japanese government's sluggish response.
Able to mutate his own DNA to adapt to new situations, he takes on five distinct forms before the credits roll.
At the time of his film's release, he was the tallest, longest, and heaviest cinematic depiction of Godzilla,
only to be surpassed by Godzilla Earth the following year.
When Toho announced Shinji Higuchi as the co-director of "Shin Godzilla"
he promised to deliver audiences "the greatest worst nightmare."
Mahiro Maeda, who had previously worked with Higuchi on "Ultraman Powered" and the Heisei Gamera trilogy,
designed the new Godzilla.
Originally, Anno and Higuchi wanted a conventional Godzilla to mutate over the course of the film,
resulting in some of the wildest concept art in the entire series, but Toho vetoed the idea.
However, they found they could still get away with unusual designs
so long as they evolved into a more traditional form.
Still, this form possessed unique details, namely the splitting lower jaw which had no tongue,
and a "spare head" on the end of the tail.
They also enjoyed relative freedom in giving Godzilla new abilities.
According to VFX supervisor and lead editor Atsuki Sato, the design team initially wanted
to make Gojira feel more like a living creature, but Anno decided that the monster
should have the texture of rubber instead.
Takayuki Takeya sculpted the maquettes for Godzilla's second, third, and fourth forms.
He would turn out to be the first Japanese Godzilla depicted primarily through CGI,
as Higuchi feared that modern audiences would find a suitmation Godzilla "boring."
CGI also gave them more freedom with Godzilla’s tail, as it would no longer have to be operated with wires.
Still, Higuchi wanted to pay tribute to the previous films with motion-capture.
Mansai Nomura, an actor he had directed in "The Floating Castle," played Godzilla.
Nomura is best-known for his work in kyogen, a traditional form of Japanese stage comedy.
Though it was unnecessary for the motion-capture process, Nomura asked to wear a wooden mask,
as he would if he was playing an inhuman character in the theater.
The only physical Godzilla prop in the film appears in the cryptic final shot,
sculpted by Takayuki Takeya.
The prop, in addition to depicting the humanoid Godzilla 5th forms splitting off from the tail,
revealed human jaws within the mouth of the spare head.
In addition, a bluescreen prop of Godzilla's second form was used for a shot involving miniatures.
Leaked set photos revealed the existence of an animatronic puppet, but it ultimately went unused.
Anno and Higuchi also shot footage of eyeballs and fangs sprouting from pieces of Godzilla's
flesh blasted off by the stealth bomber attack, which didn't make the cut either.
Toho's marketing campaign for "Shin Godzilla" was extremely secretive, showing only his
fourth form and holding back on footage of his atomic breath in action.
Even Bandai toy solicitations concealed his second and third forms,
calling them "Kaiju A" and "Kaiju B."
When the Japanese Coast Guard investigated a small yacht floating in Tokyo Bay, it found
the craft abandoned with no sign of a struggle or the owner's whereabouts.
Suddenly, the water began to erupt and steam as a strange red liquid flooded the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line.
The Japanese government concluded that the disaster was due to an underwater volcanic eruption,
but assistant cabinet secretary Rando Yaguchi proposed it was a gigantic living creature,
citing footage he had found online.
His colleagues dismissed his claims until a huge tail burst out of the bay.
As Prime Minister Seiji Okouchi assured the populace that the creature would not surface,
he made landfall in Tokyo's Kamata district, stumbling around on his hind legs
and pushing himself forward with his tail.
After toppling an apartment building, he suddenly reared up on his hind legs and sprouted arms.
Okouchi deployed helicopters to attack the beast, only to call them off when he learned
civilians were still evacuating the area.
As they flew away, the monster returned to the sea.
The government immediately began formulating strategies to deal with the monster should it return.
An informal group including Yaguchi made up of...
"lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, academic heretics, freaks, and general pains in the butt of the bureaucracy,"
discovered increased radiation levels in the areas Godzilla had rampaged through.
An American presidential envoy, Kayoco Anne Patterson, soon contacted them, offering intelligence
in exchange for help locating a professor named Goro Maki.
The National Police Agency couldn't find him,
but discovered that he was the owner of the abandoned yacht.
Patterson revealed that Maki was researching the creature for the U.S. Department of Energy
when it was still living on the seafloor.
The name he gave it read as "Gojira" in Japanese and "Godzilla" in English, meaning "God incarnate"
in his hometown of Odo Island.
Godzilla, an ancient species of marine life, had mutated after feeding on barrels of nuclear waste
deposited in Tokyo Bay in the 1950's.
This helped confirm Hiromi Ogashira's theory that he sustained himself through nuclear fission.
As a result, he had overheated on land and dove into Tokyo Bay to cool off.
Yaguchi's group brainstormed a potential way to defeat him - by shutting off his internal cooling system.
They began to develop the Yaguchi Plan, revolving around a coagulant.
Shortly afterward, Godzilla surfaced in Kamakura, now evolved into a new form twice as large as before.
The JSDF attacked him from the land, sea, and air, but none of their weapons had any effect
as he continued heading north toward Tokyo.
With the Prime Minister's approval, the United States sent three B-2 Spirit stealth bombers
to drop bunker buster bombs on Godzilla, visibly injuring him.
In response, Godzilla's dorsal fins began glowing purple, and he unleashed an atomic beam
from his mouth, obliterating the bombers, the helicopter carrying the Prime Minister
and many of his Cabinet members, and large swaths of Tokyo.
After expending such a huge amount of energy, Godzilla stopped moving near Tokyo Station
and entered a state of hibernation.
Yaguchi and his team, all lower-ranking officials evacuating by cars and eventually on foot, survived.
Though Godzilla shot down any drone that approached him,
JSDF members were able to obtain cell samples from the bombing run to test the coagulant on.
Labs analyzing the samples discovered that large pieces of Godzilla were capable of evolving
and potentially taking on lives of their own.
Earth could be overrun by a horde of Godzillas if he wasn't stopped in his present form.
With this revelation, the United States gave the Japanese government two weeks to evacuate Tokyo,
after which they would drop a hydrogen bomb onto Godzilla as part of a United Nations task force.
Yaguchi's team scrambled to execute their plan, renamed Operation Yashiori,
before this could come to pass.
Apart from the help they found throughout Japan, they also obtained Chinese tank trunks,
French diplomatic stalling, German processing power, and American firepower.
Operation Yashiori woke up Godzilla a few hours early by detonating trains full of explosives at his feet.
From there, waves of drones drew his fire until he ran out of energy.
Cruise missiles and planted explosives dropped nearby buildings onto him,
knocking him to the ground.
Using concrete pump trucks, JSDF troops force-fed Godzilla the blood coagulant.
Though he fought back, they were able to freeze over his entire body just in time,
leaving him in a state of suspended animation.
With Operation Yashiori a success, the Americans called off their nuclear strike,
though they warned they would resume their countdown if Godzilla reawakened.
Scientists concluded that the half-life of his unique radioactive isotope was only 20 days,
allowing Tokyo to recover quickly from the nuclear fallout.
As Godzilla stood frozen in the streets of Tokyo, several humanoid creatures
sprouted from the end of his tail, reaching out to the sky.
Godzilla is able to spontaneously modify and mutate his own genome to adapt to new situations and threats.
"Its body can evolve, make itself smaller… or even… sprout wings capable of flight."
Early in the film, he simply evolved to walk on land, while his fourth form developed an array of weapons.
The purpose of his fifth form is left ambiguous, but Andrew Whalen provided a clever interpretation
in an article for Player One: "If committees defeated Godzilla, then Godzilla will become a committee."
This Godzilla's signature weapon initially took the form of a cloud of smoke exhaled
from his mouth and then a stream of fire, called the Super Thermal Radiation Particle Belt Flame
or Thermal Flame for short, which is capable of burning through entire city blocks at high speed.
From there, he focused the fire into a narrow purple Radiation Heat Ray,
which sliced through buildings and struck distant targets.
After expending a lot of energy, Godzilla's beam weakened back to a stream of fire before petering out.
Dorsal Plate Beams: Godzilla can also fire over a dozen rays from the dorsal plates on his back.
Each seems to be similar in power to his Heat Ray.
Tail Beam: While the Monster King rested after his rampage through Tokyo, the "spare head"
on the end of his tail opened its jaws in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment.
During Operation Yashiori, this tail-head began firing a ray of its own.
"How the hell can it do that?"
After American stealth bombers injured him, Godzilla developed the ability to pinpoint
the location of objects moving around him.
This ability was precise enough for him to target incoming missiles and even the stealth
bombers in question, which can attack from up to 15,000 meters in the air.
When the JSDF dropped bombs on his head, Godzilla deployed silvery nictitating membranes
to shield his eyes.
He used them again when he first unleashed his Heat Ray.
Godzilla barely reacted to the JSDF's assault,
which included rockets, tank and artillery shells, missiles, and bombs.
However, Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker busters blasted off one of the monster's dorsal plates,
causing him to lose large amounts of blood.
For context, MOPs are designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of hardened concrete before exploding.
While it's rare for Godzilla to be hurt by real weapons, as opposed to fantastical inventions
like the Oxygen Destroyer and Mechagodzilla, these are among the most plausible ways to do so.
Gojira released a superheated red body fluid—assumed to be blood—when he first appeared in Tokyo Bay,
and then in his second form on land through his gills.
In a cut sequence, the third form expelled this fluid from his mouth,
flooding the surrounding ground at his feet with it.
Following his all-out attack on Tokyo, Godzilla was rendered inactive for over 15 days,
having exhausted the majority of his energy.
However, he was still able to shoot down drones if they ventured too close.
After his experience with the Massive Ordnance Penetrators, Godzilla was overly cautious
during Operation Yashiori, shooting down missiles far too weak to affect him.
As a result, he didn't have enough energy left to destroy the concrete pump trucks
which posed the real threat.
The blood coagulant they carried interfered with the monster's blood flow,
which served as the thermal control for his internal nuclear reactor.
With no circulation and thus no nuclear reaction, he was forced to do a reactor scram.
This Godzilla's first appearance wasn't actually in "Shin Godzilla."
One week before the film premiered, he starred in an episode of the long-running anime "Crayon Shin-chan."
His atomic breath had a more traditional appearance, likely to avoid spoiling the surprise.
It did foreshadow the movie in one way, though: Shin-chan defeats the King of Monsters by,
uh, firing a chemical into his mouth.
All of Godzilla's roars in "Shin Godzilla" are culled from previous films.
While his first two forms are mute, his third form utilizes roars from the original 1954 film
while the 4th primarily uses roars from "King Kong vs. G" through "Terror of Mechagodzilla."
His final roar, just before he freezes solid, is from "The Return of Godzilla,"
and the Heat Ray's sound effect is the same as Destoroyah's Micro-Oxygen Beam.
Though the filmmakers experimented with new sounds, they found they couldn't surpass the older ones.
On the day "Shin Godzilla" arrived in Japanese theaters, Twitter user @pasinpasin nicknamed
Godzilla's second, third and fourth forms based on what parts of Japan they landed/first appeared in.
They dubbed the second form Kamata-kun, after the Kamata district in Tokyo, the third form Shinagawa-kun,
after Shinagawa ward, and the fourth form Kamakura-san, from Kamakura city.
The following month, Tumblr user Jimpluff introduced the first two names to the English-speaking fandom.
The ugly-cute Kamata-kun in particular has enjoyed incredible popularity, with merchandise & fan art galore,
plus one of only five Godzilla-themed pages on Know Your Meme.
(Even trending on the main page for a day!)
The appearance of Godzilla's first form hasn't been officially revealed,
although you can still buy a toy of just the tail.
At his G-Fest panel in 2017, Higuchi claimed to have left an image of the full design at home.
He might have been kidding.
Two shots from certain home video versions of "Shin Godzilla," including those sold in
Japan and the United States, differ from the theatrical release.
A shot of helicopters approaching Godzilla features more heat shimmer, while a shot of
Godzilla walking was completely redone.
Shin has been the subject of three consecutive April Fools jokes by Toho's Godzilla Twitter account.
In 2016, it announced a Godzilla/Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover film,
only to come clean a few hours later and launch the real merchandise collaboration between the two franchises.
In 2017, it advertised a Kamata-kun smartphone,
while in 2018, it revealed plans for a roller coaster near Tokyo Station.
In 2019, that Godzilla/Evangelion film will become a reality,
in the form of an attraction at Universal Studios Japan.
As for the other two pranks, well, we can hope!
"Shin Godzilla" was a massive success in Japan, selling more tickets than any entry in the series
since "King Kong vs. Godzilla" in 1962.
Accordingly, Toho often uses this version of the character in their efforts to promote the franchise.
He's been featured in a Universal Studios Japan attraction, a PlayStation VR demo,
a baffling browser game made in collaboration with the horse race Arima Kinen,
the mobile games "Eternal Linkage" and "Pocoron Dungeons,"
a guitar, the Aqua Panorama at Canal City Hakata,
and NHK's New Year's Eve countdown.
Most symbolically, a Shin Godzilla statue was installed in Hibiya in 2018,
with the previous statue of the Heisei Godzilla moved inside to Toho Cinemas Hibiya.
That's all we have for Shin Godzilla.
Thank you for watching, and for your continued support!