The Best New Godzilla Movies Are Computer-Animated

After Godzilla Minus One‘s epic Oscar win on Sunday, everyone needs to be aware that there are a number of different Godzilla universes. I propose calling that number a “godzillion”, for convenience’s sake. There are the various Japanese versions of the kaiju ranging from the dramatic to the comedic, there’s the American MonsterVerse Godzilla, the 1998 American one we’ve agreed to never talk about and the surprisingly good cartoon based on it, plus a few more. But one take on Godzilla has managed to distinguish itself from the rest by doing all-new things with the world’s most famous giant monster: the 2017-2018 computer-animated Godzilla trilogy.

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017), Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018), and Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018) are the creations of directors Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita, as well as writer Gen Urobuchi, who have taken Godzilla to new heights, literally. The original 1954 Godzilla was about 50 meters/164 feet tall. MonsterVerse’s kaiju is roughly twice that at 108 meters/354 feet. 2016’s Shin Godzilla is the biggest in the whole live-action family, clocking in at ~118 meters/387 feet. The CG Godzilla dwarfs them all, standing at 300 meters/984 feet tall like a living, atomic volcano. He’s not why the computer-animated movies are so impressive, though.

See, since its inception, the Godzilla franchise tended to introduce something original with each new movie like, twist, a nice kaiju (Mothra vs. Godzilla) or, triple twist, aliens (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.) In recent years, though, we have been seeing that less and less. Shin Godzilla gave the title character a decayed, horror-esque make-over while Godzilla Minus One (2023) turned the kaiju into a nuclear pistol with dorsal-fin-cocking action. But underneath it all, both movies were essentially homages to the 1954 original: Absolutely phenomenal, but nothing we haven’t seen before in some shape or form.

The computer-animated Godzilla trilogy, on the other hand, tells a gripping 280-minute-long story about how a rampaging Godzilla forced humanity to escape Earth with the help of aliens: the tech-geek Bilusaludo and the religious Exif. The three species wander around space for 20 years looking for a place to stay before ultimately deciding that Godzilla might be the original owner of the planet but, dammit, humans have squatters’ rights, or something. So, they turn their spaceship around and get slapped slack-jawed by the ghost of Einstein when, because of relativity, it turns out that 20,000 years have passed and the Earth has been thoroughly Godzilla-fied.

Almost as if showing submission to the new alpha casually stomping its face daily, the planet started to imitate Godzilla, giving birth to new fauna and flora like mini-Godzilla dragons and razor-sharp knife-plants. Now, the fight with the king of the monsters is on to reclaim a home that, frankly, has outgrown humanity.

The movies were an atomic breath of fresh air amidst the godzillion franchises that have long stopped surprising us. Take Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, which has gone the way of Fast and the Furious. They started simple with Godzilla (2014), whose title is also its premise, before amping the spectacle and finally pairing up two of its biggest stars and having them battle an evil cyborg. (It’s a little eerie how closely Godzilla vs. Kong matches up with Hobbs & Shaw.) And that pretty much eliminates all mystery from the upcoming Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

We can say for sure that Big G and Double K will face a new monster and ultimately win because this is now a fun but predictable action franchise that’s all about continuity and branding, like how every MonsterVerse movie is released in a month starting with an M. Seriously, that can’t be a coincidence.

Planet of the Monsters, City on the Edge of Battle, and The Planet Eater actually surprise us with fascinating new ideas like a total reimagining of classic kaiju like Mechagodzilla that I guarantee you will NOT see coming. But as with the best Godzilla movies, where the trilogy really shines is the message. Godzilla (1954) was a visceral commentary on the horrors of atomic weapons while the computer-animated trilogy warns against humanity’s mistreatment of Earth, and it’s really unsentimental about it. The movie’s message isn’t about how we should cherish and love “Mother Earth” but rather about how if we bring some kind of global catastrophe on ourselves (the Exif view kaiju like Godzilla as punishment for a species’ hubris), then EARTH itself will be fine. Earth will adapt. Humanity, on the other hand, will be screwed.

The giant scale of the animated Godzilla underscores how tiny humanity really is in the grand scheme of Nature, and how we need to stop enforcing our will on it because if Earth/Nature start fighting back, we will lose badly and, worst of all, slowly. There’s a fascinating bit early on in the movie when humanity is still out in space, running low on supplies and sacrificing some of its people to try and survive for a little while longer amidst everyone losing hope and killing themselves.

With no safe place to call home, things like pride, justice, or dignity cease to exist but without the benefit of disappearing all at once. It all happens at a punishingly slow pace, stripping away our humanity in layers, prolonging our suffering before our inevitable demise. In the animated trilogy, the solution is to fight a demonic-looking monster. In the real world, the solution is more complicated but also easier to implement, so maybe we should do that?… is what the movies are saying, while sprinkling the message with some amazing sci-fi dogfights with hoverbikes and ultra-sonic mechas. Hey, no one said that action in Godzilla movies is a bad thing.