Godzilla Movie Directors Agree That Godzilla Is Basically A Giant Cat

Ever since his debut in 1954, Godzilla has been referred to in a variety of ways. There's Showa-era Godzilla, Heisei-era, Millennium Godzilla, Sexy Sporty Godzilla (okay, maybe I'm the only one referring to the 1998 Roland Emmerich Godzilla by that term), the King of the Monsters, MonsterVerse Godzilla, Big G, and so on. While the character has gone through a number of various comparisons to other species throughout his 70-year screen career, he's generally either referred to as a giant dinosaur or overgrown lizard.

One animal Godzilla has typically not been compared to before is a cat. However, thanks to the directors of "Godzilla Minus One" and the upcoming "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire," that is no longer true. To be fair, one reason this comparison has arrived relatively late in the character's life is because special effects technology has grown exponentially over the past few decades. Where the Showa-era Godzilla was performed by a man inside a suit (that man usually being Haruo Nakajima) and had the same limitations as a human being does, for the past 25-odd years Godzilla has been brought to life via computer generated imagery, allowing him to have a much more unique physicality, including animalistic movements.

Thus, directors Takashi Yamazaki ("Godzilla Minus One") and Adam Wingard ("Godzilla x Kong") were able to partially model their respective Godzillas on their own pets, specifically their cats, a choice that means Godzilla is now behaving in a far more delightfully feline manner than he used to.

I recently had the privilege of seeing an early screening of "Godzilla x Kong" at IMAX headquarters in California, an event that also saw Wingard introduce the film by taking myself and other attendees through his "war room" full of concept art, preliminary mockups, and other such materials. Without giving away too much, "Godzilla x Kong" continues the MonsterVerse's move away from the aesthetic of 2014's "Godzilla" (in which Godzilla was intentionally kept to the sidelines visually) as it grows toward becoming a very American version of the classic Japanese Showa-era kaiju films. That is to say the movie showcases the monsters, or Titans, as the main event, making "Godzilla x Kong" eye-poppingly colorful given the variety of the Titans' designs as well as impressively dialogue-free, as the monsters communicate with each other using everything but spoken language.

As Wingard explained during the event, a lot of the choices for Godzilla's demeanor during the film came from his own pet cat:

"With Godzilla himself in this movie, it's funny. One of my biggest influences is my cat, Mischief. She [inspired], on 'Godzilla vs. Kong,' a lot of the mannerisms of Godzilla. And a couple of weeks ago I had a great conversation with Yamazaki, who did 'Godzilla Minus One.' And I was thrilled to find out that he, too, finds a lot of his influences from his cat as well. So, I don't know what it is about Godzilla, but somehow in the creator's minds — at least the current ones — we're taking a lot of inspiration from our cat. So, there's literally a shot in the film where Godzilla is curled up in the Roman Colosseum [...] It was inspired by my cat and her cat nest."

Between cat-Godzilla taking a nap in the Colosseum, Kong going ape inside Hollow Earth, and the other Titans bringing a variety of new nature-inspired movements to the film, "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" often feels like attending the nature preserve of your wildest fantasies. 

You can check out the menagerie for yourself when the film opens on March 29, 2024.