An update to youtu.be/BeNAolORq9E that I've made over the past few months. I'm only sharing this preview because there's no telling how long it will take to complete the whole thing.
I wanted to get deeper into Godzilla as a character, contrasting his past life as a mere animal with his post-mutation monster self. Most kaiju have some kind of character or personality, especially in more comedic media. In serious media, it can be hard to balance characterizing the kaiju while still keeping them monsters, i.e. distant and mysterious to our human understanding.
Many versions of Godzilla portray him as a mutated animal who gained fantastical powers while losing everything else, mainly his "people" and his place in the world. This is my preferred interpretation. He represents a mixture of nature and technology, mythology and science, and the progressive and destructive side of humanity all in one. His transition between the two lives and his loss is a somewhat under-explored side of him, because while he's a monster, he still has animal and human-like attributes that inform both his appearance and behavior.
I like to imagine the nuclear bombs didn't just make him powerful, but gave him a boost in sentience and cognition, enough to realize and comprehend his own tragedy and develop lasting feelings over it, but not enough to understand why it happened and how he could cope. He was thrust into the role of a living symbol, representing forces and events beyond his understanding and control, but a part of him just wants to go back to his old life. So this animation shows him returning to his old island and sea home to relive memories and perhaps pay respects to his bygone life and fellow semi-aquatic dinosaurs.
His dinosaur form was not based on any existing Toho-approved design like the 1991 Godzillasaurus, but more on paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter’s thought experiment from 1998 about what a more dinosaur-like Godzilla could look like, vaguely inspired by the deep-skulled abelisaurs. I also wanted to keep his light-up dorsal plates, which could be used for communication or display, with each specimen having their own light pattern. I added more color to them too, such as display spots on their throats, but it's hard to see because of the water effects.
To further differentiate pre- and post-mutation Godzilla, I gave the dinosaurs slightly more crocodile-like side to side swimming motions, while the mutated Godzilla has a more ungainly swimming technique that looks more like an awkward human, representing that he's not a natural animal anymore suited for a natural habitat.
This animation is still very far from being finished, this is only one third of a work-in-progress animation, with some unfinished shots. Most of the shots from the previous video have been updated to fix some bugs, but certain ones still need to be fixed and re-rendered. There are a couple of animation shortcomings I can't do much about, like the scale and resolution of the ocean waves and the hokey looking droplet effects. These are the best I can do with my hardware.
