Kaiju

Its widespread contemporary use is credited to tokusatsu (special effects) director Eiji Tsuburaya and filmmaker Ishirō Honda, who popularized the kaiju film genre by creating the Godzilla franchise and its spin-offs.

When developing it, Honda and Tsuburaya drew inspiration from the character of King Kong, both in its influential 1933 film and in the conception of a giant monster, establishing it as a pivotal precursor in the evolution of the genre.

[2] During its formative years, kaiju movies were generally neglected by Japanese critics, who regarded them as "juvenile gimmick", according to authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski.

After sakoku ended and Japan was opened to foreign relations in the mid-19th century, the term kaijū came to be used to express concepts from paleontology and legendary creatures from around the world.

For example, the extinct Ceratosaurus-like cryptid featured in The Monster of "Partridge Creek" (1908) by French writer Georges Dupuy[6] was referred to as kaijū.

[7] It is worthy to note that in the Meiji era, Jules Verne’s works were introduced to the Japanese public, achieving great success around 1890.

[9] The 1925 film The Lost World (adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name), featured many dinosaurs, including a brontosaurus that breaks loose in London and destroys Tower Bridge.

This influential achievement of King Kong paved the way for the emergence of the giant monster genre, serving as a blueprint for future kaiju productions.

Its success reverberated in the film industry, leaving a lasting impact and solidifying the figure of the giant monster as an essential component in genre cinematography.

[13] Tanaka aimed to combine Hollywood giant monster movies with the re-emerged Japanese fears of atomic weapons that arose from the Daigo Fukuryū Maru fishing boat incident; and so he put a team together and created the concept of a giant radioactive creature emerging from the depths of the ocean, a creature that would become the monster Godzilla.

The origin of kaijin goes back to the early 20th Century Japanese literature, starting with Edogawa Rampo's 1936 novel, The Fiend with Twenty Faces.

After the Pacific War, the term was modernized when it was adopted to describe the bizarre, genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced evil humanoid spawn conceived for the Kamen Rider Series in 1971.

[citation needed] Eiji Tsuburaya, who was in charge of the special effects for Godzilla, developed a technique to animate the kaiju that became known colloquially as "suitmation".

[13] Kaiju films also used a form of puppetry interwoven between suitmation scenes for shots that were physically impossible for the suit actor to perform.