Why Godzilla Minus One Is Such a Monster-Sized Success…and It’s Not about the Kaiju

Is it surprising that Toho’s Godzilla Minus One lumbered into the 96th Academy Awards as the Best Visual Effects nominee underdog and took home the gold? Not if you’ve seen director Takashi Yamazaki’s film, which is a master class of underdog storytelling as it frames the beleaguered Japanese survivors of WWII against the relentless kaiju staking its claim on what’s left of the country.

There’s plenty to get excited about with Godzilla Minus One’s impressive Cinderella-story win. Inspiring global and Western audiences to actually turn up at theaters in droves to support a Toho Godzilla film, to the tune of $107 million globally, is unprecedented in the franchise’s 70 years of existence. The film’s stunning 610 visual effects shots, created in toto by 35 people, is a reminder of what decisive and comprehensive vision in your storytelling can accomplish on the post-production side when committees using a sliding scale of indecision aren’t dictating the end results. Finally, Godzilla Minus One’s pristine black-and-white edition, Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, will also go down as one of the best examples of how to embrace a monochromatic print, as it accentuates the bleakness of bombed-out Tokyo and enhances the period feel to the entire picture.

But more important than all of that is that audiences around the world responded to the emotional story at the heart of Yamazaki-san’s monster movie. While Toho’s Godzilla films have had plenty of stories and characters that have pulled at the heartstrings across 33 titles, it’s mostly the kaiju’s path of destruction that keeps everyone coming back. Even the Western iteration of the license—aside from the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—the four theatrical releases in the Legendary MonsterVerse are about an amped-up Godzilla laying waste to human enclaves and fighting other MUTOs. While the films may boast plenty of esteemed actors, from Bryan Cranston to Sally Hawkins, the MonsterVerse films aren’t about the humans. Even with Kong: Skull Island giving us John C. Reilly as series-best character Hank Marlow, the rest of the characters have been mostly exposition dumpers, mourners or comic relief. 

But Yamazaki-san’s script for Godzilla Minus One flips that dynamic and spends its abundant non-kaiju time building up the characters around the guilt-ridden, former kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki). As Shikishima wrestles with his choices amongst the detritus of a decimated Tokyo, he’s surrounded by reasons to live through his shame and sorrow. From the selflessness of Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) and her choice to raise the orphaned infant Akiko (Sae Nagatani) with him, to his forgiving neighbor (Sakura Ando)—not to mention his ragtag minesweeper crew—Yamazaki-san’s script is about the resilience and humanity that is awoken in the disheartened Japanese people after the war. 

In a recent one-on-one with Yamazaki-san during his pre-Oscar press rounds, the director and VFX supervisor told Paste that while he loves the spectacle of the film, the character arcs are what he poured himself into crafting.

“One thing I did try to keep in mind was seeing how low we could push these characters, throw everything at them and make them feel like an absolute loser,” Yamazaki-san explained. “And that’s where the character arc starts. So it’s almost a V-shaped character arc, if you will.”

“I see character arcs like a roller coaster,” he said. “So before I throw them into the absolute pit, I wanted to bring them up a little bit before they go down. Like, there was one moment where Shikishima said, ‘Is it okay for me to be happy?’ And then bang!” Godzilla’s devastating attack on Ginza quickly followed our hero’s question. “I think audiences like seeing characters as they crawl their way back to a certain mindset, or state,” Yamazaki-san said.

Godzilla Minus One is precisely paced spectacle in service of the emotional story, which builds upon what directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla introduced in the other best-reviewed Toho Godzilla film of the modern era. Both films are about repercussions and what is borne out of human decisions. And Godzilla Minus One errs on the more hopeful side of the two, using the kaiju as an impetus of core change in the war-weary Japanese. Having suffered the callousness of its own government, and now the political apathy of the global community, those still alive (especially Shikishima) use Godzilla’s indeterminate destruction as a rallying point. Defeating the monster that has bested him over and over is his opportunity to finally make a better world for Akiko, support his beloved colleagues and honor Noriko. 

In fact, Yamazaki-san is candid in saying that, of all the things his film accomplishes, he’s most proud of the journey Shikishima goes through from start to end in Godzilla Minus One: “I don’t know if there’s any one scene as much as the journey of the movie-going audience’s experience through Shikishima’s lens.” 

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the upcoming The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen.