No one is doing monster movies quite like director Takashi Yamazaki and his team — who not once but twice now, with “Godzilla Minus One” and “Godzilla Minus Zero,” have made Godzilla feel both bigger than Tokyo Bay and extremely emotional and personal, even handcrafted. Much of that comes down to the narrative balance between our human heroes and the King of the Monsters, of course. But it’s also about the grounded, physical ways the monsters are brought to life.
Much has already been made of the fact that both Godzilla’s and King Ghidorah’s roars were recorded by blasting the sound effects against real physical spaces (and probably scaring some hikers in the process) so we wouldn’t just hear something otherworldly. We’d hear the texture of the loudspeakers, the reverberation of the sound on the concrete of a dam (for Ghidorah) or a dome (for Godzilla) — the unreal brought into a real, physical space.
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But that is only the light-up blue tip of the kaiju for the work done by the “Godzilla Minus Zero” sound design team. Sound designer Natsuko Inoue and production and post-production sound mixer Hisafumi Takeuchi constantly found ways to tie the most fantastical moments back to Earth, because that sonic believability keeps the audience invested in the action.
“ When audiences hear sounds that they’ve never heard before too frequently, I think it removes you from the world because it’s too foreign and it’ll stand out,” Inoue told IndieWire. “Once a fantasy-like or fictitious sound goes through the sort of real-world echo, then it becomes a lot more palatable, or we become more receptive to how it sounds because it’s echoing in a way that we recognize. So that was a way that we really tied the visuals to the sound and made it feel more grounded.”
This grounding process is especially important, and especially challenging, when things that should be on the ground take to the air as a part of Ghidorah’s gravity beam. Inoue did an initial pass of the sound effect for the beam that allows Ghidorah to throw whole houses up in the air high enough for our favorite eternally tormented, former Kamikaze pilot Kôichi Skikishima (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) to fly past them. But it wasn’t quite right.
“So I went back into the Foley studio, and I wanted to capture that feeling of something being lifted and rising. I took this very small speaker, and I placed it right next to a bunch of different objects — a sheet of metal or some wood or a water tank — to capture a sound that almost felt distorted,” Inoue said.
That distortion, bounced off different types of objects, captured the sensation Inoue was after: the sonic equivalent of your stomach lifting into your mouth.
“Oftentimes in sound design, when you layer too many sounds or put too much processing on it, it starts to ruin the original material or the original sound that you’ve captured. So this distortion became a very strong foundation. I didn’t add too much post-processing on it,” Inoue said.
What she did do was hand it over to Takeuchi to create the sense of whole blocks caught up in Ghidorah’s gravity beam and preserve the dialogue and add background dialogue, so that we’re always afraid for the human beings in danger during Ghidorah’s rampages.
When Shikishima first flies through Ghidorah’s gravity beam, the sound team really wanted to lean into the character’s emotional response to something that’s mindbendingly horrible. “I added a Doppler effect — so like when an ambulance or a police car drives by and the sound shifts slightly — [to give] the sensation that you’re passing through,” Takeuchi told IndieWire.
It’s that shifting of sound, more than any one particular sound, that adds a scale to the horror beyond what Shikishima or what we can see. “We wanted to be very mindful of the balance and what it was doing and what it was supposed to do for each scene,” Takeuchi said.
“What we were trying to do is take sounds that you would hear in nature and then design and add to it in almost like an extension type of way, and that’s how we make the Kaiju as well as the gravity beam feel more real,” Inoue added.
“Godzilla Minus Zero” is now playing in theaters.