Toho first approached Takashi Yamazaki with an offer to direct a Godzilla film around 2005, while he was making Always: Sunset on Third Street. Yamazaki declined, saying the technology hadn’t yet caught up with what he’d want to do. Asked several more times over the years, he kept saying no.

He said yes around 2019, after Shin Godzilla renewed his motivation and his team’s techniques had matured. His work on Godzilla the Ride: Giant Monsters Ultimate Battle for Seibuen Amusement Park became a proving ground for the team’s evolving toolkit, preparing them for the scale of a feature film.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023) is set in the rubble of postwar Japan, where survivors face a Godzilla attack with no military and no safety net left to call on. Ryunosuke Kamiki stars as Koichi Shikishima, a former kamikaze pilot haunted by his failure to complete his mission, alongside Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, a woman he shelters amid the wreckage.

Yamazaki wrote, directed, and supervised the visual effects himself, bringing the film in for roughly $10–15 million. Kōzō Shibasaki’s cinematography and Naoki Satō’s score, which folds in fragments of Akira Ifukube’s original Godzilla themes, give the film a weight that treats the monster as an extension of a country’s unhealed wounds.

It won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the first Japanese film ever to take that category. A filmmaker who waited nearly two decades for the technology to catch up with his vision, working at a fraction of a typical Hollywood budget, took the Oscar home.