1985 saw the return of the iconic dinosaur of science fiction, and despite what Toho considered a financial disappointment they still allowed Tanaka to make another film with the recognition that Godzilla’s success had came from the monster vs monster actions of its spectacle. So, a condition was made to Tanaka that the next film must have another monster in it. So to keep in tune with not having a recognizable creature be the introduction that the Showa series had mainly followed: Tanaka had decided that there should be further fresh faces to bring new life into Godzilla once again. Godzilla II was announced, and at first Shinichi Sekizawa (who previously also worked on the early versions of Revival of Godzilla’s story brainstormings) had submitted a script but had been turned down and sent back by Tanaka himself. And now, Tanaka had decided that they must continue with these boards that lead into the story to be produced.
So in 1987, a contest was announced held called the “Godzilla II Story Submission Contest” and held publicly so that fans from across Japan could send in their story ideas and scriptings for the new entry. Unlike with the previous entry, this board of judges featured prominent creators in the Science Fiction community at the time such as Osamu Tezuka, Baku Yamemakura, Mitsushi Ishigami, Chiaki Kawamata. The contest kept having delays which Toho would apologize for for each given delay made. Some 5,250 submitted stories were made from across the island, with the closure set to October 26th of 1987. The judges settled on four scripts by writers Shinichiro Kobayashi, Ryusuke Agawa, Yoshinobu Sato, and Toshiaki Ota. Kobayashi, the winner, had two proposals in the form of “Blood of G” and “Godzilla vs the Giant Robot Core”. Blood of G ultimately was the chosen onee, as the judges and Toho were impressed by the proposal of Kobayashi to have Godzilla defeated by a supernatural force rather than something like ice, electricity, or the Oxygen Destroyer. In early 1988, the production of Godzilla II was formally announced with Kobayashi winning ¥3,000,000 yen (or ¥3,647,130.56 when adjusted to inflation).
But who is Shinichiro Kobayashi? To many in the science fiction world, Kobayashi was known as the writer for Episode 34 of Tsuburaya Productions’ Return of Ultraman which follows a similar base plot that the final film would ultimately use. Kobayashi was a dentist with a mind filled with creative ideas, and this went even into art as well (we’ll come back to that). Shinichiro Kobayashi had a innate love of science fiction, and would regularly read about it in his free time. These ideas are seen in many aspects of both of his tokusatsu writings, to which you can view for yourself in his RoU episode and Biollante. Kobayashi’s drafting treatments would keep expanding in their lengths, and Tanaka’s view of Kobayashi’s treatments grew more and more negative. In Tanaka’s words: “Every time he wrote, it kept getting worse and worse” so Tanaka would have to search for a screenwriter who could fix the now 375 paged script.
The shopping for a director didn’t come in the way that most Godzilla entries had, and one may have figured that Kazuki Oomori was the first choice reign the director’s chair. However, the events that lead to his eventual choice was not as black and white. Kazuki Oomori was a young aspiring filmmaker at the time of the mid 80s, and had his films screened to positive critical reception from the audiences of them. When Tomoyuki Tanaka met Oomori during the screening of his “Women of Saynonara” film, which Toho had help distribute and he became widely accepted as a real standout of the Toho Youth Directors. Tanaka would contact Oomori to come in and get a script that was not only smaller in size, but also better paced. Oomori would go through Kobayashi’s final treatments as well as some of the finalists of the Committee Contest and take the basic outlines of all of them and start from scratch with Tanaka giving inputs on what he wanted to do.
One of the major aspects of Kobayashi’s script was more or less how self-contained and unreliant it was on the previous film to build on its established tone and canoncity, but Tanaka and Oomori had instead opted to connect the films together and build off the potential that the concepts of the two monsters Kobayashi had written into his treatments. Oomori opted out Deutalios from the script as two monsters in his eyes would be too expensive (the stress of Biollante’s creation shall be explained soon). The biggest input that Tanaka had given Oomori was to bring the concept of “G-cells”, to allow a sort of added intrigue among audiences in a similar vein to how the last film explored Godzilla’s feeding habits and his following of bird calls. Oomori chose to have the central protagonists be “what if my generation had been employed into the military” with their spunky, rebelliousness but have the edge of these almost “self-centered” government peoples that the film Close Encounters had.
Kobayashi’s scripts had a character called “Sayama”, who could hear the words of Biollante’s cries and was a magazine reported. This core idea was altered into Miki Saegusa, with the cries expanded upon with her psychic abilities which were added, to quote Oomori himself: “I really liked the concept of psychics, so I thought it would be a fun addition”. When Oomori submitted the final script to Tanaka, Tanaka had loved it to the point where he offered Oomori the chance of the director’s chair (as by the point in time Tanaka STILL hadn’t chosen one, but for all we know having Oomori in screenwriting duties was a test to see if he could earn that spot). Oomori was initially taken aback by the offer, but Oomori and Tanaka’s relationship was pretty strong. So, with Oomori at the helm the film was ripe to get off the ground but an issue came into light: who would direct the special effects sequences for this movie? Nakano was contempt with not returning to Godzilla, so his student Koichi Kawakita was employed. Kawakita had been working in the industry for a long while now, having worked under both Tsuburaya and Nakano on the Showa Godzilla films as well as had been employed over at Tsuburaya Productions to assist with Ultraman A (1972-1973), he was given the script and when Biollante was described to him, he found the challenge of bringing such a creature to screen to be both enticing and somewhat terrifying. Kawakita would later describe the experience as “the most stressful process he’s had”.
Around the time, Tomoyuki Tanaka had decided to take a step back as the head producer of Godzilla films, and formally retired from it with this movie before the filming began. He would appoint his protégé Shogo Tomiyama to take over his role, to which Tomiyama took quite seriously with how much of a role he had to live up to while also having his own benchmark on it.
And so, Q2 of 1988 saw production beginning with all cylinders from the location scouters, creature design department, and casting go underway. As the film went along, some rewrites were done with inclusions such as Osaka to keep in tune with the Showa era in that Godzilla would not attack the same location twice, and to set the major sites such as “Lake Ashinoko, Kansai Airport” to give Kawakita leg room for more special effects sequences and for the obvious benefit of tourism. Both directors got along extremely well, with many photographs of the two together when Oomori would visit the set. The cast was rather well balanced in the same vein as the previous entry: with experienced and newer actors in the industry, and all spoke highly of their experience on set. Newcomers included Megumi Odaka (who had won the 2nd Grand Prix Cinderella Contest, which was previously won by Yasuho Sawaguchi who also appears in this film), Masanobu Takashima, and Manjot Bedi with veterans such as Yoshiko Tanaka, Koji Takahashi, Toru Minegishi to round out a central cast of characters. A key aspect that Omori wanted to explore with the film was the international reaction to Godzilla’s 1984 rampage, so he included international actors to play characters from the USA, as well as casting South Asian and Middle Eastern actors to represent the fictional country of Saradia, which enters almost an arms race with the US and Japan to acquire the G-cells for personal use in science and potential weaponry.
But what about Kawakita and co.? What was the process of creating Biollante and this new version of Godzilla?
It’s best to save the easiest one and less lengthy first, so our first discussion will be about Godzilla, aka the BioGoji design:
For Godzilla’s new design, Kawakita decided that Godzilla must convey a sense of power and mass. So Kawakita requested returnees Nobuyuki Yasumaru and Tomomi Kobayashi to design and construct this “new Godzilla”. The first decisions came with the desire to reduce the head in proportion to the body, give Godzilla a body that emphasized a more human-like definition of muscle at the chest and shoulders, with the addition of adding feline features to bump up the aggressiveness factor of this new design and emphasize Godzilla being a form of theropod dinosaur (A majority of these touches were also added by Tomomi Kobayashi such as the two rows of teeth that were mentioned in Shinichiro Kobayashi’s screenplays) as Yasumaru was off doing other work while the design process was done. To add onto the addition of such mammal-like features, the irises were enlarged and filled the sockets more which almost obscure the white sclera present (but can still be noticed in several set screengrabs, and the film itself) on the eyes. A major upgrade from the previous design was now building the suit to fit Satsuma, which had made Satsuma very happy despite the overall weight of the suits being the exact same at 242 lbs. The first built was the Sea Suit (Type A), which had a thick neck and slimmer build compared to the more robust build of the Type C (Osaka) suit that would inhabit most of the footage in the land sequences. Contrary to popular belief, there was a third suit dubbed the NG suit (No-Good) which was originally meant to replace the Sea Suit once the effects of age, water, and the heavy use in the fight sequences filmed to that point. This suit was built with a slimmer neck, a flatter head, and the proportions of the legs were overall less stocky than the Sea suit or the Osaka suit, however, this suit was seen as too difficult to maneuver in for Satsuma thus it would only end up being used in the scenes where Godzilla was at the skyscrapers that Gondo eventually dies in (don’t think this is the last you’ll hear of it).
As a natural evolution of Nakano’s cybot and the animatronics/puppets employed in the Showa era, Kawakita had decided to build a mechanical upper half designed to be used for close-ups. Unlike with the cybot, this one was built closer to the suits that it was being utilized in close-ups (going as far as using the same molds). The animatronics of the Heisei era honestly vary from how close they are to their suits, but after this film they get significantly better and getting them near 1:1 (as prominent when we reach the end of the series, where it is really hard to tell the differences).
Another new prop that was introduced was the Godzilla swimming prop, used in the shots where we see Godzilla’s underbelly while he is submerged in the sea. This prop is hollow, with only molded detailing to it and made of clay with only the eyes and teeth painted.
Moving onto our starring newbie we have Biollante, who surprisingly had a rather sizeable involvement from her creator Shinichiro Kobayashi:
Biollante’s original design sketches by Kobayashi depict her as this rose creature sporting a human-like head at the base of the rose pedals, further design showed an almost kabuki like mask sported with a horn jutting above the face. Almost giving Biollante this Japanese mythological creature appearance, this was used as a basis for the Rose form we see her take upon in her first appearances.
As production further, designs by some of Kobayashi’s colleagues such as Kako Yodane, Studio Nue, Studio OX, and the Monster department of Toho Studios such as Shinji Nishikawa submitted designs. These designs vary from Ultra Kaiju inspired designs of the ROU kaiju that Yodane and Kobayashi created, to Graboid inspired designs, and several other unconventional designs that leave the reader wondering how any of these designs would have been tackled had they had been chosen as the final design, some even got as far as maquettes. Personally, I’m a big fan of the Graboid and Pestar inspired designs, they are so unconventional for Godzilla designs that I personally would like to see more fanart of these.
The final designs we see were designed by Shinji Nishikawa, who took elements of Yodane’s designs of the Rose Form and his Leogon-inspired design to generate a rose form that lacked a human face but kept the central features of said design, the final form removed the legs present in the art and opted to keep design consistency by translating the root-like body of the Rose form but had the vines jutting out of the base in ways that could theoretically provide mobility should Biollante need to move (which Kawakita would ultimately want in the final form as filming went on).
Despite the final design being produced, the finalized puppet we see on screen had to go through some changes beyond the aforementioned being able to “move”. One of the main curiosities was how the heads on the vines would look, should they evoke more of Godzilla? or should they retain a relative plant-like look. A few concepts were produced in model form of what the heads should look like, with a more theropoda inspired Godzilla head stuck on the vines that shared similar characteristics to the main head of the body as one such example. It was decided to just have them look more like a venus flytrap with a more broader head shape.
And we reached our final form’s design, balancing its roots of being inspired by Ultra kaiju with the ideas presented by the concept artists, Shinichiro Kobayashi, Koichi Kawakita, and the model makers. Elegant, monstrous, and probably one of the most impressive pieces of special effects work only rivaled by fellow plant monster Audrey II, the Spinosaurus of Jurassic Park III, and the Werewolf of American Werewolf in London. The puppet was a real challenge, providing the largest team to operate it than any Tokusatsu creation. Kawakita stated that the number of people operating it exceeded the likes of anything he has worked on before and after, with Ghidorah of the following entry not even coming close to the number it took.
But, there is something else. How should the encounters between Godzilla and Biollante go down? Several ideas were presented and tested, ranging from stop motion animation to hand drawn animation. The Rose Form fight in Ashinoko was planned to include clay models fighting to allow more diverse movement in the tendrils and a more animalistic fight but it was too much of a stark contrast to really work with the live action on-set suits. For the finale when Godzilla succumbed to ANEB, Biollante was intended on devouring Godzilla before whisking herself off to space but this too was rejected. One of the most well-known scenes that was deleted was the Pollination sequence after the Ashinoko fight, where Biollante’s spores would have produced flowers across the landscape.
There is also the deleted sequence of Godzilla approaching Ashinoko, where Godzilla is seen crushing through trees and stepping past them as he went along with the camera providing FOV of it. However, this was rejected due to the sense of scale being sabotaged with the FOV that made Godzilla look way smaller than he was in the rest of the shots. Kawakita would, however, return to this idea in the next film to where it made more logical sense for such an FOV.
Reeling us into the next section, we come to our composer. Despite the strong tightness of continuity, there was not a return of Reijiro Kuroku as our composer. Ifukube was once again not approached to compose, and instead Koichi Sugiyama was contracted to be the composer for Godzilla vs Biollante. Sugiyama had a long history in composing for film, television, and video games and by now had received a lot of acclaim for his work on Dragon Quest. Sugiyama was no stranger to the tokusatsu world, however, composing for Return of Ultraman (1971-1972) and even helping record and conducting parts of Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) with Riichiro Manabe. Sugiyama was also Kuroku’s mentor, and in many ways Sugiyama’s score for his foray into Godzilla is not too dissimilar to his student’s. Sugiyama was classically influenced by Western European composers and would take notes from them over Ifukube who was more influenced by Middle Eastern composers. Sugiyama’s own studio Sugiyama Kobe would work on the music producing, bringing in all his crews from his works on Dragon Quest to assist (which would explain some similar motifs present in the compositions if you’ve ever played through the Dragon Quest franchise). The big priority was finally bringing the classic Ifukube score back after being absent since his last compositions in Terror of MechaGodzilla (1975), so Ifukube gave the consent to use the Ostinato recording of the Godzilla theme under the condition that it would “not be turned into a pop track”. Well, it ended up being turned into one (Bio Wars) and when Tomiyama eventually caught wind he returned to Ifukube and stated “well…we turned it into a pop song”. Ifukube was stated in a 1992 interview that he was “not a fan” of Sugiyama’s score for the film, and criticized his more European influence.
For marketing, the Godzilla 1984 cybot was employed once more to hold boards, as well as a new promotional suit was produced for the film as the 1984 one would no longer need to be utilized. A photoshoot of this suit was done alongside the Osaka (type C) suit, as well as a 35th Birthday photoshoot on the set. Biollante’s marketing was about as equal as 1984’s, if not more so. The Godzilla vs Biollante Completion catalogs nearly double that of 1984’s, Toho was really banking on the film being a big cash cow for them, especially with the clear push of Biollante and promotionals of Godzilla and Biollante in combat.
Godzilla vs Biollante opened with 2-2.5 million tickets sold in December of 1989, closing at 1.04 billion yen in 1990. While it was the 8th highest grossing in Japan in 1990, it performed well below Toho’s expectations. Toho attributes the failure to Biollante not being an established kaiju, and led them to determine that they need to look to the younger audiences’ for who should be the next kaiju to be brought to the big screen during the 2 year hiatus. During this period, two films were proposed and scrapped: Mothra vs Bagan and Godzilla vs King Kong. The former was rejected for the same reasons Toho believed Biollante failed, and the latter due to the rights shakeup for King Kong in the USoA.
What would the next Godzilla film be? And would Omori return to it after viewing that he may not get the chance to make another due to Toho’s view of the success of the film? Would the younger generation choose a familiar foe for Godzilla to fight?
Tune in next time for the Retrospective History of…: Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
Special Thanks go to ShinRobjira, TitanGoji, & Jhatzia for providing their services to this article.
Sources:
Godzilla vs Biollante Completion Book
Godzilla vs Biollante Theatre Pamphlets
Godzilla vs Biollante on Japanese Wikipedia: ゴジラvsビオランテ – Wikipedia
Koichi Kawakita Interview I on Kaiju Conversations
Shogo Tomiyama Interview on Kaiju Conversations
Akira Ifukube Interview I on Kaiju Conversations
