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Toho is making their own Godzilla movies again!

About time there was some news on the new Toho movie.

Toho enlisted some high-profile filmmakers. Hideaki Anno, director of the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" anime series, will write the script, and co-direct with Shinji Higuchi, who was responsible for the SFX of the 90s "Gamera" trilogy and directed the upcoming live-action "Attack on Titan" two-part movie.

CBR| Toho's New 'Godzilla' Recruits 'Evangelion' and 'Attack on Titan' Directors
I'm interested to see what Anno will do with the material. Evangelion is more or less an extended commentary on depression set to the backdrop of children piloting robots to fight monsters, then an acid trip happens. It's worth checking out.
 
Really looking forward to this. I love the Japanese Godzilla movies, and I can't wait to see what they do.
I wonder if this is a success too, if there's any chance we'll get a crossover of some kind between this and the American series.
 
I really should watch Evangelion sometime...
The original series and End of Evangelion are amazing. There is also a film series that remakes it and takes it in a very different direction. The first two have been dubbed and released, there is a third that is finished but hasn't been dubbed yet. The final one is still being made.
 
The anime is disgusting and the man Anno is a scumbag. Should be locked up with his disciple Handley and their great defender, Neil Gayman
 
Anno has almost done nothing since the end of Eva other than directing Openings and cheap toku flicks. He has been literally coasting on his fame from Eva for 20 years. Even the Rebuild movies had minimal creative involvement by him and it shows. This is hilarious that Toho is depending on a guy who is pretty much a shadow of what he use to be. Every other major anime director alive is still churning out interesting stuff even Miyazaki and Tomino and they are in their 70s.
 
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ABC News did an interview with Shinji Higuchi.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment...ew-japans-godzilla-director-surprise-32891038

Higuchi, 49, a burly unpretentious man with curly hair, swears he loves all the Godzilla movies, even the bad ones. He knows his Godzilla through and through, he said with a laugh.
"Godzilla had to deliver more and more, responding to calls from the audience, as well as creators," said Higuchi of the series' trappings.
"Godzilla went through these stages, resetting itself, developing and then succumbing to exhaustion, until it just got so big it had to stop."
And so Higuchi plans to keep his Godzilla, in a sense, simple, stripped to the essentials.
...
Higuchi acknowledged he is under strict orders not to disclose details of "Godzilla," set for release next year. But he is promising the most terrifying Godzilla that Japan's cutting-edge special-effects movie-making can muster.
Shooting begins next month, much of it at Toho studios in Tokyo. Animation master Hideaki Anno just finished the script and will help oversee direction.
Higuchi's special-effects techniques were amply demonstrated in "Attack on Titan," a new release received favorably in Japan.
The work combines computer graphics with manipulating a towering doll of rippling red muscle that resembles a giant biological anatomy chart, as well as special-effects filmmaking, using actors moving through miniatures, to depict grotesquely enlarged humans.
Applying to Godzilla that kind of technology, which Higuchi calls "hybrid," has never been attempted in Japan. Higuchi is promising just that.
...
The world has lost too much of its innocence after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., and the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan, with the arrival of "the real monsters of the world," he said.
The happy-go-lucky monsters encapsulate a long-lost era, when the world had enjoyed relative peace, over the decades after World War II, especially in insular Japan.
"That's why I want to make a new Godzilla," Higuchi said quietly.
In movie after movie, people merely ran away from the stampeding monster, and no one tried to face up to the issue of accountability, he said.
 
The world has lost too much of its innocence after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., and the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan, with the arrival of "the real monsters of the world," he said.
The happy-go-lucky monsters encapsulate a long-lost era, when the world had enjoyed relative peace, over the decades after World War II, especially in insular Japan.
"That's why I want to make a new Godzilla," Higuchi said quietly.
In movie after movie, people merely ran away from the stampeding monster, and no one tried to face up to the issue of accountability, he said.

That's an interesting perspective, since the original Gojira was very much a product of an era of lost innocence and demands for accountability. It was an allegorical protest for the American atomic tests on Marshall Island, which irradiated the crew of a nearby Japanese fishing boat, killing one, and which contaminated Japan's soil and water with fallout. The American occupation of Japan at the time meant the Japanese couldn't openly protest, so they did it through the allegory of a fantasy monster driven from his feeding grounds by those selfsame atomic tests and unleashed on Japan as a result. And this provoked a plot that was very much a debate on the ethics of weapons of mass destruction.

That seriousness didn't last, of course, and attempts to return to it in later films have been intermittent. The '84 reboot was an interesting second-world critique of the Cold War, the gung-ho insistence of the superpowers on forcing their nuclear chess game on every other nation without giving them a choice, and featured the wish fulfillment of the Japanese Prime Minister putting the US and Soviet representatives in their place with a scathingly principled speech. And 2001's GMK was both an allegory for how the younger generation in Japan had forgotten or whitewashed the crimes of their forebears in WWII and an allegorical critique of how frivolous the series' past portrayal of Godzilla had become -- though those were the same theme in a sense.

The 2014 American film had pretensions of returning to the original's seriousness, but it ultimately didn't really have much of a theme or statement and was basically just a more solemn take on the '70s formula of a friendly Godzilla saving us from more malevolent monsters. It'll be interesting to see if Toho's new film can bring back a more genuine allegorical bite.
 
Ah, for those innocent care-free days of Japan's involvement in World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
 
I think that is a particular right wing or anti-liberal pov probably championed by the corporate handlers. But then again if they were to turn this into a political piece, it would probably either have to do with nuclear energy or re-armament.
 
That preaching can get old, however. Perhaps having the crew of the Alert find Godzilla instead of Cthulhu might work.

A zilla' immune to nukes--as in the recent film--that I liked. The concept of Godzilla as a walking hellmouth--that I'd like to see.
 
About time there was some news on the new Toho movie.

Toho enlisted some high-profile filmmakers. Hideaki Anno, director of the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" anime series, will write the script, and co-direct with Shinji Higuchi, who was responsible for the SFX of the 90s "Gamera" trilogy and directed the upcoming live-action "Attack on Titan" two-part movie.

CBR| Toho's New 'Godzilla' Recruits 'Evangelion' and 'Attack on Titan' Directors

Interesting Higuchi's Attack on Titan adaptation has been raked over the coals by critics (as one critic put it: “I wished the titans would eat the kids so it would end”) and his own overreaction (to that review) has forced him to apologize on twitter. He has apparently also insulted his own staff.
 
A zilla' immune to nukes--as in the recent film--that I liked.

Godzilla has always been immune to nukes. It was established back in the original film that Godzilla could not be destroyed by hydrogen bombs -- that their only effect on him had been to make him radioactive and drive him from his normal feeding grounds. That's why they needed an even deadlier WMD, the Oxygen Destroyer, to take him out. In the Heisei continuity and the first couple of Millennium films, Godzilla was actually nourished by nuclear radiation and fed on nuclear power plants. Nuclear weapons empower him rather than harming him.

After all, Godzilla has always been an allegory for nuclear weapons or for the perception of nuclear power as a threat. In the words of series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, "Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb.... He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse."
 
About time there was some news on the new Toho movie.

Toho enlisted some high-profile filmmakers. Hideaki Anno, director of the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" anime series, will write the script, and co-direct with Shinji Higuchi, who was responsible for the SFX of the 90s "Gamera" trilogy and directed the upcoming live-action "Attack on Titan" two-part movie.

CBR| Toho's New 'Godzilla' Recruits 'Evangelion' and 'Attack on Titan' Directors

Interesting Higuchi's Attack on Titan adaptation has been raked over the coals by critics (as one critic put it: “I wished the titans would eat the kids so it would end”) and his own overreaction (to that review) has forced him to apologize on twitter. He has apparently also insulted his own staff.
So he's the Japanese Josh Trank?
 
AoT... why are all the kids Japanese when it's clearly stated that Mikasa is the only person of Asian descent left?
 
I think I read somewhere that they changed the setting from Germany to Japan for the movie.
 
AoT... why are all the kids Japanese when it's clearly stated that Mikasa is the only person of Asian descent left?

That is the exact same question the Japanese internet is asking too. These fandoms seem to be pretty much identical despite all the language/cultural barriers.
 
Del Toro wants to have Godzilla in Pacific Rim 3 and fighting Jeagers and aparenty Toho likes the idea.
 
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