Godzilla made quite the comeback when Legendary Pictures resurrected the world's most famous monster for a worldwide audience last summer. The film's success prompted Godzilla's Japanese owners, Toho Studios, to once again make Japanese Godzilla films, the first of which will land in Japanese theaters in 2016.
That's all we've known about the first new Japanese Godzilla film since 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars, but now there is some exciting news. Toho recently announced the two directors who will be working to bring this Japanese Godzilla to life, and they are two names that should be well-known among anime fans.
Directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi will be collaborating on the new, still untitled, film, with Anno writing and directing and Higuchi handling visual effects. The two men are most well known for their work in the anime world. Both worked on the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, widely regarded as one of the defining works of Japanese animation.
Higuchi is no stranger to working with giant monsters either. He has helped create the special effects for multiple Godzilla films in the past, and also served as the visual effects director for the Gamera trilogy of the 1990s, considered some of the best kaiju films outside of Toho's own Godzilla franchise. Higuchi is also the director of the upcoming live-action Attack on Titan films.
"Ever since Hollywood announced that ‘Godzilla' was to be resurrected, the expectation for another Japanese Godzilla grew," Toho says in a statement to Variety. "And if we were to newly produce, we looked into Japanese creators who were the most knowledgeable and who had the most passion for Godzilla."
Those creators turned out to be Anno and Higuchi. Check out the short "Giant God Warrior Appears In Tokyo" for a small-taste of what these two men can bring to the table.
SUNDAY SHORTS #16: Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo from MONOLITH MAGAZINE on Vimeo.
This new film will be a mixture of CGI and the miniature, man-in-suit style of Japanese special effects known as tokusatsu. In addition to the director announcement, Toho debuted the first teaser image for the next Godzilla - a footprint of the Big G himself. If you look closely (and I mean very closely) at the right side of the footprint, you will see what looks to be a trilobite.
This is a throwback to the original 1954 Godzilla film, when one of the prehistoric creatures was discovered in a footprint left by Godzilla shortly after his first appearance.
No word yet on whether or not this new film will see a theatrical release stateside, but given the success of Gareth Edwards' Godzilla it wouldn't be too surprising.
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