Godzilla Minus One

Takashi Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the visual effects himself; the Academy’s interview with his team puts his crew at 35 artists and 610 shots. It shows: the creature sits in two blocks, the long middle given to minesweeping and a patched together household. Kōichi does not come home from a kamikaze run; he breaks off the mission and lands on Odo Island claiming engine trouble; the film’s guilt starts there. The Ginza heat ray takes a named character, not an anonymous crowd, and the final operation is crewed by former navy men on disarmed destroyers and tugboats, not by an army. A full size replica of the Kyushu J7W Shinden was built and later went to the Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum. A black and white version, Minus Color, followed in January. At the 96th Academy Awards it ran in one category, Visual Effects, and won. At the 47th Japan Academy Film Prize it took eight, Picture of the Year among them, though Yamazaki lost Director of the Year to Wim Wenders and Sakura Ando won Supporting Actress. A good fit if you want the monster used as an argument about who pays the war’s debts and can take long stretches without it. Not for anyone who came for sustained city levelling; the wreckage is packed into two sequences.