No one makes monster movies quite like the director Takashi Yamazaki and his team – who not once but twice now, with “Godzilla Minus One” and “Godzilla Minus Zero,” made Godzilla feel both bigger than Tokyo Bay and very emotional and personal, even hand-made. A lot of that comes down to the narrative balance between our human heroes and the King of Monsters, of course. But it’s also about the established, physical ways in which the monsters are brought to life.
It has already been widely reported that both Godzilla’s and King Ghidorah’s seals were recorded by blasting the sound effects against real physical locations (and possibly scaring some pedestrians in the process) so that we wouldn’t just hear something else in the world. We could hear the texture of the loudspeakers, the repetition of the sound on the concrete of a dam (for Ghidorah) or a dome (for Godzilla) – the unreal brought into a real, physical space.
But that’s just the light 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 always find ways to connect the most dramatic moments back to Earth, as that sonic credibility keeps the audience engaged in the action.
“When an audience hears sounds that they’ve never heard too often, I think it takes you away from the world because it’s too foreign and it stands out,” Inoue told IndieWire. “As soon as a fantasy-like or false sound goes through the echo in the real world, it becomes much more palatable, or we become more accepting of how it sounds because it appears in a way that we recognize.”
This basic process is especially important, and especially challenging, when things like that ought to be on the ground take to the air as part of Ghidorah’s gravity transport. Inoue made an original pass of the beam sound effect that allows Ghidorah to throw entire houses up in the air high enough for our favorite, eternally tortured former Kamikaze pilot Kôichi Skikishima (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) to pass them. But it wasn’t quite right.
“So I went back to Foley’s studio, and I wanted to capture that feeling of something building and rising. I took this very small speaker, and I put it right next to a bunch of different materials—a sheet of metal or wood or a water tank—to capture a sound that almost felt distorted,” Inoue said.
That distortion, which removed different kinds of objects, captured the feeling Inoue was after: the sonic equivalent of your stomach rising in your mouth.
“A lot of times in sound design, when you put too many sounds over it or put too much processing on it, it starts to distort the original material or the original sound that you captured. So this distortion became a strong foundation. I didn’t add too much post-processing,” said Inoue.
What she did was give it to Takeuchi to create a feeling of whole blocks caught in Ghidorah’s gravity beam and save the conversation and add a backstory, so that we are always in fear of the humanity that is in danger due to the rampages of Ghidorah.
When Shikishima first traveled through Ghidorah’s gravity bearing, the sound team really wanted to tap into the character’s emotional response to something so terrifying. “I added a Doppler effect – like when an ambulance or a police car drives by and the sound moves a little – [to give] the feeling that you’re going through,” Takeuchi told IndieWire.
It is that movement of sound, more than one particular sound, that adds dimension to the horror beyond the Shikishima or what we can see. “We wanted to be aware of the balance and what he was doing and what he was supposed to do for each scene,” Takeuchi said.
“What we were trying to do is to hear sounds that you would hear in nature and then design and add in almost like an extension, and that’s how we make the Kaiju as well as the gravity behavior feel more real,” said Inoue.
“Godzilla Minus Zero” is now playing in theaters.