Post-Biollante Heisei miniture effects discussion: Are they really that bad?

[darthzilla99]

I thought this would be some interesting discussion. For years, I have often read from Godzilla scholars like Steve Ryfle and Ed godziszewski criticize the miniatures work in the post Heisei, saying how it's not detailed, it's sloppy, the showa series did it better, ect.... As such, I would like to hear what everyone's thoughts are on the miniatures work in general for the Heisei series.

Personally, looking back, I don't think it's as bad as some people make them out to be. Sure, we have some shoddy shots like the Bandai destroyahs fighting the ULT lazer tanks in a few shots or some shots with the Battra Larva fighting the Mazer tanks, but we also had some nice detail shots like the whole Yokohama fight with the Ferris wheel, Godzilla stomping through the Baseball stadium in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, Godzilla vs. the Mazer tanks in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and the first spiral grenade missiles sequence shot in Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla. And if we really want to be nitpicky, even some of the Honda Golden age films had shoddy miniature shots like when the wind blows the cars around a lot in Ghidorah the three headed monster and Monster Zero or some of the wheels on the military vehicles getting destroyed by the planet x spaceships, or just the New York City set destroyed by Godzilla in Destroy All Monsters.

But what does everyone think? Am I just naïve? I will admit I was someone that got on the whole "Honda, Tsuburaya, Akira Ifukube, and Tomoyuki Tanaka can do not harm" band wagon for years myself but I have been seeing the Heisei in a new light.

[LSD Jellyfish]

Steve Ryfe and Ed Godwhatever the fuck are nothing more than shit showa fanboys that you shouldn't take seriously. They're lost in a timechamber of self righteousness, and an artifact of an age where it was incresingly difficult to find any info about Godzilla, prior to the modern internet. It's the mentality of HOLIER FANS than tho. I would not take anything they say as either cannon, or relevant.

Moving on, just to show how full of shit they are, the miniatures in the Heisei series are better, or in some cases on par than a majority of the Showa series. Not only were they better, but as set peices they also have more involvement with the monsters.

Take Godzilla vs King Ghidorah for an example. Godzilla is bigger, yet the buildings are also bigger. In the final fight many buildings fall upon Godzilla and there's a lot of rubble. Nothing like this ever happens in the showa series, to that extent. Subsequently the Heisei series has a lot of climactic battles within cities. If you carefully watch the showa series note that I clinaxes occur within a city. A lot of shots of monsters destroying a set in the showa series actually show little footage of monsters interacting and use cutaways. Exceptions with Gigan and MG occur obviously. On top of that, none of the climaxes of the Heisei films occur outside cities beyond Godzilla vs Biollante. I'll elaborate more in a bit, but even if the Heisei sets aren't as detailed (something I viciously disagree with) they're used way better.

[darthzilla99]

I really like your input. Another thing with these scholars, I feel like some of these Godzilla scholars have some sort of vendetta against Koichi Kawakita. To elaborate, one of these scholars who use to come here and spread news back in the day (I won't divulge his name as I do not mean to gossip) talked about why the effects quality dropped after Biollante. He said it was because Kawakita lost motivation after Biollante got mixed reviews and then King Ghidorah comes out and wins an award for SPX, so Kawakita decided to just put in the same low amount of effort the rest of the series (this same scholar also pointed out Biollante had the same production time as the rest of the Heisei movies as evidence that Kawakita got lazy). This was a guy who talked about this fact on the Kaijuphile fourms back in the day.

However, looking back, I'm not sure the effects quality drop was all or mostly because of Kawakita's supposed motivation. I mean I read on a Monster Zero news interview with the man and Kawakita said that Godzilla vs. Destroyah was his favorite Godzilla film to work on since it's rare to get to kill the Big G himself and he also said it was the hardest work he put forward. And lots of these scholars also point out his sloppy effects work in SpaceGodzilla, but again he had to work on Spacegodzilla and Yamato Takeru at the same time so I feel the man did the best he could.

In all, I feel the effects being what they are is not just one factor but lots of different factors (rushed production times, experimenting with new effects, and the fact that nobody's perfect).

[MechaGoji Bro7503]

Nah, they're really good in some shots. Especially battles in cities, like in The Return of Godzilla and Godzilla vs King Ghidorah . 'Though at times it does get a little lazy, but what era doesn't. Now suits, thats a different story....

[Ivo-goji]

Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla and Godzilla vs Destoroyah had some damning special effects failure in a couple of scenes but the effects of the three preceeding movies were anything but lazy. In fact they were much more ambitious than RoG and VsBiollante with the escalating number of kaiju, weapons, environments/sets, etc. in each film.

Honestly the Heisei series gets waaaay more flak than it deserves and mostly because of Showa fanboyism, and I say that as someone who likes the Showa series more than the later movies.

[Mr_Goji_and_Watch]

There's some decent and even great sets, but none of them hit the same highs as the 60's or 80's films as consistently. Not because of a lack of effort (though that doesn't help) but because of an increase in scale. They're inherently less detailed. There's an undeniable drop after Biollante and Gunhed because both movies disappointed financially thus Kawakita drank far more. Again, there's still some decent sets here and there, but they don't match what Biollante or ROG did. If anything, it's the lighting and camera-work that really made it look worse. There's a really flat look that gives the post-80's films a "made for TV" look. The jump from that to G2K or any of the Gamera films highlights it the best.

[tbeasley]

Yeah the difference is that if you want a bigger Godzilla you can't change the size of a guy in a suit, just the environment around him. You're gonna get less detailed sets as a byproduct of emphasizing that increase in scale, and that affects the camera work you can do because you don't want to get as close to the miniature buildings with less detail... that's one of the big reasons why the Millennium series scaled Godzilla back down to the 50 meter range.

So a bigger Godzilla is not always a better Godzilla, at least practically.

[Cybermat47]

Honestly, I think the miniatures have gotten better as the films go on.

Don't get me wrong, I love 54's effects, especially the melting wax powerlines, but it's gotten harder and harder to tell when it's a miniature - I didn't even realise there were any miniatures in Shin Godzilla until I saw the behind-the-scenes footage.

[Zarm]

Honestly, I think the miniatures have gotten better as the films go on.

Don't get me wrong, I love 54's effects, especially the melting wax powerlines, but it's gotten harder and harder to tell when it's a miniature - I didn't even realise there were any miniatures in Shin Godzilla until I saw the behind-the-scenes footage.

Here, here!

[MechaGoji Bro7503]

Don't get me wrong, I love 54's effects, especially the melting wax powerlines, but it's gotten harder and harder to tell when it's a miniature

But shouldn't it be better if we can't tell if it's a miniature? ( about '54)

[Zarm]

Don't get me wrong, I love 54's effects, especially the melting wax powerlines, but it's gotten harder and harder to tell when it's a miniature

But shouldn't it be better if we can't tell if it's a miniature? ( about '54)

I think he meant 'I love 54's effects, especially the melting wax powerlines, but [since that era] it's gotten harder and harder to tell when it's a miniature [and is near-indistinguishable now, a major improvement on 54's effects].'

[darthzilla99]

Thanks for the comments from everyone. To help further illustrate, how are these sets
http://godzilla-rus.narod.ru/GvsMG2/76.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s5odkt-RFWY/U ... oroyah.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--8KldGajmz8/U ... enshot.jpg

less detailed than

http://www.geekedoutnation.com/wp-conte ... 3/DAM6.jpg
http://thumbnail.zype.com/53c0457a69702 ... /00083.png
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hYj4XwxKxL8/U ... ster+3.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UBxYvnaG-CI/U ... saurus.png

these sets? I mean in the first group you still had objects as small as human guard rails visible to the naked eye.

[LSD Jellyfish]

Looking at those photos at first it's easy to agree that the Heisei series has less detailed minatures, but look carefully. All those trees aren't trees, they're part of the miniature. If you look down and carefully you'll see lots of subtle details of things like light posts and other minor details. They might not seem like much, but that's the point, they're realistic details that aren't meant to be flashy or distracting. To give some more credit to the Heisei series, look at MG. While he may seem like he's in a blank space, below him is an intricately designed area with again lots of small lighting and details. The Showa series has a lot of destruction scenes (minus Godzilla vs Gigan and briefly TOMG) to disguise the fact that it's really difficult to light all those minatures up.

And really, is this any less detailed than anything from the Showa series?



The little lights, the Ferris wheel, the partially constructed building etc...

To continue:


Yeah, I will say that due to technology at the time the soldiers seem a little out of place, but the illusion of Mothra's scale here is done really well due to the layering of the city and how it looks realistic.



It's also really hard to find what I'm looking for or high quality images but this set is just as detailed.

Godzilla vs Spacegodzilla, purportedly the lowest budgeted film in the Heisei series would also like to have a word with you:


Also:
Spoiler alert: a lot of Japanese buildings, particularly the modern ones, look very bland. Yes, they look featureless like the big ones in the ending of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah. If you look at the ending of Shin Godzilla, the buildings in the climax, are super bland because the buildings in Otemachi are bland skyscrapers. Meanwhile there's tons of areas in Japan that are much more colorful. Blaming the Heisei series for choice of location is strange and just comes off as just hating it.

And to reiterate, I'm not even saying the Heisei series has perfect effects or minatures, but I do think the miniatures in the Heisei series are overall better. Again keep in mind the Heisei series minus the first half of Godzilla vs Spacegodzilla had a majority of monster action take place in cities or in populated areas. Most Showa films had endings that took place in rural areas or outside of cities. For every big budgeted DAM or GTTHM with their large budgets there were also Ebirah Horror of the Deep, Godzilla vs Megalons. And yeah IOTAM has a cool scene where Rodan, Godzilla and Ghidorah destroy some shit for three minutes, it also has an hour taking place on a lakeside or on Planet X which is just a big rock.

Even if Heisei miniatures were less detailed, a notion I disagree with, there were definitely more cities destroyed and shown for longer.

Mothra vs Godzilla has one quick scene of Godzilla attacking Nagoya. Godzilla vs Mothra has three long sequences of Battra, Mothra and Godzilla destroying shit, each which their own large miniatures, before the big bad climax, and of corse that's not including everything. In between.

[LegendZilla]

If Eiji Tsuburaya lived through the budget cuts that Toho endured in the early 70's, I doubt he would've done any better than Kawakita.

[PitchBlackProgress]

Gamera had THE BEST miniatures of all the Heisei series

[Major sssspielberg!]

I really like your input. Another thing with these scholars, I feel like some of these Godzilla scholars have some sort of vendetta against Koichi Kawakita. To elaborate, one of these scholars who use to come here and spread news back in the day (I won't divulge his name as I do not mean to gossip) talked about why the effects quality dropped after Biollante. He said it was because Kawakita lost motivation after Biollante got mixed reviews and then King Ghidorah comes out and wins an award for SPX, so Kawakita decided to just put in the same low amount of effort the rest of the series (this same scholar also pointed out Biollante had the same production time as the rest of the Heisei movies as evidence that Kawakita got lazy). This was a guy who talked about this fact on the Kaijuphile fourms back in the day.

However, looking back, I'm not sure the effects quality drop was all or mostly because of Kawakita's supposed motivation. I mean I read on a Monster Zero news interview with the man and Kawakita said that Godzilla vs. Destroyah was his favorite Godzilla film to work on since it's rare to get to kill the Big G himself and he also said it was the hardest work he put forward. And lots of these scholars also point out his sloppy effects work in SpaceGodzilla, but again he had to work on Spacegodzilla and Yamato Takeru at the same time so I feel the man did the best he could.

I remember the last time he attended G-fest they screened SpaceGodzilla for like the 100th time. I thought eh, whatever, but went to see it for the 100th time, despite being my least favorite of the series. There were these kids that thought they were on the Satellite of Love talking shit the whole movie and I just came out embarrassed about the whole thing, why would you mock a man's work like that with him in the audience???

When Kawakita passed it was like a month later and it turned out he personally asked the fest to screen SpaceGodzilla because he was so proud of how his fx came out despite the time crunch during production, I was so disappointed at how our fans here in the states treated him. The guy was a fan like us! Then hearing stories like that which you related... Just makes me remember this story and how much I miss Kawakita-san.

Heisei miniatures were awesome. Financial district in GvKG anybody???

[Panther10]

The only minitures that really suffered were the sea faring vessels like boats and warships. Cars and trucks suffered too. Beyond that though I think the practical effects were spot on. Buildings crumbled like real buildings and most importantly, each and every city actually felt like a massive architectural marvel and a sprawling metropolis.