Do you have any information about the props and the effects of the early Godzilla movies? I have got a few friends who are in the industry, and almost all of them praised the Showa Godzilla movies for its practical effects.
Yes! When 1954′s Gojira was first conceived, Tomoyuki Tanaka, the producer for the film wanted to use stop motion animation as he was a huge fan of Willis O’Brien’s work on 1933′s King Kong. However, there was no one on the Toho staff really versed in the technique who could get it done in the amount of time they needed to release the movie in less than several years. So, they decided to create their own effects technique that would come to be called suitmation.
Eiji Tsuburaya, who had been working in the Japanese film industry since 1919 and was known for his amazing effects work. This work included a recreation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor for World War II propaganda films that was so realistic the US Occupying forces accused him of espionage. The Americans thought the only way Tsuburaya could have gotten the details so right is if he had been to Pearl Harbor before the attack.
This attention to detail was Tsuburaya’s hallmark and the model work he perfected during the 1940s would serve him well in creating the city destruction scenes in his science fiction films. For Gojira, he and his team had to create accurate models of parts of Tokyo, including the Diet (Japanese Parliament) building and the harbor. They tried to rely on blueprints of the city and buildings but where that failed, visual effects production designer Akira Watanabe had to send a full team out to measure and plot out actual streets and locations to recreate in the studio, only in 1/25th scale.
Later, they would learn that you could create an illusion of greater depth by making building in different scales, using the larger scaled models in the front and the smaller ones behind them to create the look of distance. You can see these techniques used in the later Showa Godzilla films and especially in Tsuburaya’s other works including Ultraman.
As for Godzilla himself, the monster was realized by a pair of talented stunt actors; Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka inside of a rubber suit. Sadly, the suit was so heavy and hot the actors could only wear it for a few minutes at a time. There were times they passed out inside the costume and every day, the production staff would have to drain a cup of sweat from the suit. Nakajima lost 20 pounds during the filming due to the weight and heat of the suit. Later movies would have lighter, more maneuverable and less dangerous suits as they learned what they could and could not do with the costumes. The suit was so cumbersome, for some scenes that just required Godzilla’s legs to be seen, they used a half suit which was actually the originally designed suit cut in half which was even heavier originally than the 220 lb. full suit!
They also used some puppets for certain scenes, especially the scenes with Godzilla using his atomic breath. Unlike the later films, which would eventually switch to optical animation for the effect, in the first few, it was an on set creation utilizing a spray of steam and mist.
One thing Tsuburaya learned in his films was how to hide the strings on things like Godzilla’s tail and the airplanes. There was no post production wire removal at the time, so they had to use very thin wires or film the airplane scenes upside down with the planes suspended from beneath. Audiences wouldn’t be looking for the wires on the bottom of the planes, so it helped hide them. Although in the very first film, the wires were pretty visible.
The films had to be shot on sound stages so the backgrounds were matte paintings expertly created to look like the outdoors. This wasn’t such a big issue when filming in black and white but for the later films, they really had to go above and beyond to hide the false nature of the backdrops.
To give the monsters a real sense of scale, they were often filmed from a low angle and with the camera overcranked, meaning it was moving faster to take more pictures per second which, when played back at normal speed made the actors in suits seem to move more slowly and ponderously. This would also make the model buildings fall apart more slowly giving them a sense of weight and substance.
All of these techniques are still used today in everything from Ultraman to Super Sentai and other films that need to create a sense of scale using miniatures. This was the true origin of tokusatsu as we know it and we owe so much to Tsuburaya and his expert team of craftsmen, artists and stunt performers.
This is a REALLY brief overview of what went into the making of the early Godzilla movies. A lot of it was drawn from a few books that I cannot recommend enough for more details and those are Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters by August Ragone and Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo by Stuart Galbraith IV.
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