Nearly a year after it stomped into box office history, Godzilla Minus One is still living its success story. It made a huge splash at the Oscars this year, the digital release saw even more people flock to one of the greatest monster movies of the last decade, and now, as the King of All Monsters prepares to turn 70, it’s heading back into theaters next month. The key to all this success that director Takashi Yamazaki still wants to talk about, one year on? His cats.
Yamazaki has been doing a whirlwind press tour across the world last year to promote the movie’s meteoric success, and has fielded a lot of questions about just how he crafted one of Godzilla’s biggest movies. But speaking at a panel at New York Comic Con this weekend to celebrate the Godzilla franchise’s 70th anniversary, Yamazaki said that there is one thing he wished more journalists asked him about.
“So after watching Godzilla Minus One, a lot of people came up to me and said, ‘Wow, that Godzilla, it looks like my cat sometimes’,” Yamazaki said via translator at the panel. “But that’s when I realized, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s not your cat, it’s actually my cat!’”
“So whenever media outlets ask me, ‘Well, why does the movement look so much like a cat,’ I’ve smirked a little bit and said, ‘Oh, that’s my cat.’ So afterwards I think, ‘Wow this is my chance, I get to talk about my cat now for like five minutes!’ And then the interviewer just says, ‘Okay, thank you, next question’,” the director jokingly added.
Yamazaki has several cats, and their precocious nature and movement were apparently key to inspiring how Minus One‘s Godzilla moved. “Whenever the animators showed some shots to me like ‘Hey look Yamazaki, this is the latest take on Godzilla’s movement,’ and especially when Shikishima’s piloting the Shinden airplane at the end, you know… Godzilla’s trying to claw at it.” Yamazaki continued. “Every take that I gave the okay sign off on, I think it was subconscious, but it looks a lot like my cat when I’m playing with it.”
Cat ownership is a kinship he shares with another recent Godzilla director too: Adam Wingard, who helmed the last two “Monsterverse” films Godzilla vs Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. “I had the opportunity to have this one-on-one talk with the director, Adam—I don’t know if you guys remember the scene [in New Empire] where Godzilla takes a sleep in the Coliseum. Adam was looking at it and said ‘Ah, reminds me of my cat’,” Yamazaki laughed. “And then I looked and said, ‘I see, you’re a cat guy too.”
Godzilla Minus One is now available on Blu-ray, digital, and streaming, and heads back to theaters for a limited engagement starting from November 1.
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