Takashi Yamazaki

Takashi Yamazaki Born June 12, 1964 Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan Occupation Director, screenwriter, visual effects supervisor First work A Taxing Woman's Return (1988) Notable work Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005)

“	My childhood dreams are coming true one after another… If I could tell my younger self, I would definitely cry tears of joy from the overwhelming happiness.	„
	— Takashi Yamazaki, on getting to work on both Godzilla and Ultraman projects

Takashi Yamazaki (山崎 貴,   Yamazaki Takashi) is a Japanese film director, writer, and visual effects artist. Inspired to enter the movie business after seeing Encounter with the Unknown (1972) and Star Wars (1977) at the age of 13, Yamazaki began his career in the late 1980s, working in the special effects department at Shirogumi. His earliest jobs included Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman's Return (1988) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Sweet Home (1989). He made his directorial debut in 2000 with the science fiction film Juvenile.

Yamazaki's third film, Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005), won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture and was followed by two sequels. The first of them, released in 2007, featured Godzilla in an imaginary sequence. In 2021, he directed the short film Godzilla the Ride: Giant Monsters Ultimate Battle for a motion simulator ride at the Seibuen amusement park. Yamazaki was finally selected to helm a mainline Godzilla film with Godzilla Minus One, which was released in 2023. He also wrote and directed the 2022 fantasy film yokaipedia.

Yamazaki is the VFX supervisor of all of his own movies, continuing to work through Shirogumi to this day. He also works frequently with production company ROBOT COMMUNICATIONS, which has been involved with shooting/animating all but one of his films, and Toho, which has (co-)financed all but one of his films and distributed all of them. Yamazaki is married to fellow filmmaker Shimako Sato, with whom he had previously collaborated on K-20: Legend of the Mask (2008) and Space Battleship Yamato (2010).

Selected filmography

Director

• Returner (2002)
• Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007)
• Space Battleship Yamato (2010)
• Godzilla the Ride: Giant Monsters Ultimate Battle (2021)
• yokaipedia (2022)
• Godzilla Minus One (2023)
• "Foodlossla: What Should Humanity Do!?" (2024)

Screenwriter

• Returner (2002)
• Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007) [with Ryota Kosawa]
• yokaipedia (2022)
• Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Visual effects supervisor

• Returner (2002)
• Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007)
• Space Battleship Yamato (2010)
• yokaipedia (2022)
• Godzilla Minus One (2023)
• "Foodlossla: What Should Humanity Do!?" (2024)

Miscellaneous

• K-20: Legend of the Mask (2008) - Associate writer / VFX associate
• Godzilla the Ride: Giant Monsters Ultimate Battle (2021) - Storywriter / designer
• yokaipedia (2022) - Storywriter / character designer
• Ultraman the Ride: The Great Duel of the Century (2023)
• Godzilla Minus One (2023) - Godzilla designer [with Kosuke Taguchi]

Selected bibliography

Author

• Novel: yokaipedia (2022)
• Novel Version: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Gallery

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Shinji Higuchi

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Keizo Murase

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Hideaki Anno

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Gareth Edwards

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Adam Wingard

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  Yamazaki on the red carpet of the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival

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  Takashi Yamazaki and Steven Spielberg

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  Yamazaki (second-to-last row, second from left) holding a Godzilla figure in the Oscars nominees luncheon class photo

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  Yamazaki (second from left) with Masaki Takahashi, Kiyoko Shibuya, Tatsuji Nojima, and their Oscar statuettes

Videos

Conversation with Adam Wingard and Takashi Yamazaki Takashi Yamazaki and Gareth Edwards

Trivia

• Yamazaki has named Shusuke Kaneko's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack as his favorite Godzilla movie.
• In 2008, Yamazaki told Kadokawa Shoten that he intended to direct a remake of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, though the project has yet to come to fruition.
• Takashi Yamazaki is the first director since Stanley Kubrick in 1969 to receive an Oscar for visual effects, with no other director even nominated in the category during that span.

References

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