Light the set! Stomp the tanks! Play the game! Happy 114th Birthday, Tsuburaya Eiji

Today marks the 114th birthday of Japanese filmmaker Tsuburaya Eiji, best known as the creator of kitsch-horror classic Godzilla and the Ultraman superhero series. He pioneered the art of tokusatsu, or special effects involving the use of miniatures and scaled-down city sets—that remarkably is still being used by his studio that continues to create movies.

As an homage to this filmmaker’s legacy, Google is celebrating Tsuburaya with an interactive doodle that gives you a taste of what it’s like to make your own tokusatsu movie. Based on how nimble you are with harnessing Ultraman or swatting the UFOs, you’ll get a very different film at the end of your ten tasks. Go to the Google homepage to try it out yourself!

Read on for a glimpse behind the curtain with Googler Shun Ikeda and doodler Jennifer Hom, on the creative process behind this doodle.

How did you come up with the concept for this doodle?
Jennifer: Having grown up loving the genre of kaiju or Japanese monster movies, I had pitched the idea of doing a Tsuburaya doodle to my team last year. When I visited Japan to do field research in Tsuburaya’s film studio, which is in the process of releasing the latest Ultraman X movie, I realized that Tsuburaya’s legacy was much more than just the monsters he had created—he had pioneered this whole way of making movies that was still being used today. So we decided that the more unique and educational approach to take was to make the doodle about the tokusatsu movie making process.

What was the doodle team most inspired by?
Shun: When we visited the studio, the doodle team was impressed with and surprised by the analog nature of the tokusatsu film technique. So we really wanted to pay homage to that in our doodle. Computer graphics nowadays make it relatively easy for film creators to make epic special effects. However, when Tsuburaya came up with these techniques in the ‘50s, there was a real art to making the effects look believable on the big screen.

Today, tokusatsu film crews continue to respect the way Tsuburaya created films five decades ago: with handmade props and model buildings, piano-wired monster tails, powder and paper fans to make smoke look real, and amazing teamwork to make a miniature city come to life through the camera’s viewfinder.

A crew sets up a shot in the miniature studio—one shot can take up to 20 minutes just to set up. Through the viewfinder and with the right lighting, these models can look like a bustling metropolis.

Jennifer: We worked closely with the Tsuburaya studio team to stay close to the spirit of the filmmaker, and also designed unique monsters that evoke the look and feel of Tsuburaya monsters. The Tsuburaya team was so helpful and cooperative—they have a great sense of humor, and they gave us a lot of helpful feedback along the way as we made sure their filmmaking process was accurately portrayed.

When Google meets kaiju monsters: an early development sketch

With a complicated game doodle like this, there must have been a host of technical challenges. What was the hardest part about bringing this doodle to life?
Jennifer: This doodle certainly required a large team effort! Normally for animated doodles, we have one doodler and one engineer working on them. In this case, I had another doodler’s help, plus two animators, plus one engineer, and I spent nearly six months just focusing on this project, which is quite unusual! Kudos to our engineer, Corrie Ann Scalisi, who incorporated four artists’ work into code, and made everything work seamlessly on Google’s homepage around the world, in dozens of languages.

Shun: We also made sure that playback and interaction for this doodle was compatible on mobile devices, so you can enjoy this on any screen, anywhere.

Posted by Jennifer Hom, Doodler, and Shun Ikeda, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Japan