Setting aside the book is already in need of an update with the release of last year’s Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus Zero, Shinji Nishikawa’s Godzilla: The Encyclopedia covers the lizard king from its debut in Ishirō Honda’s original 1954 movie through to the 2021 animated series, Godzilla Singular Point, skipping over the character’s American-produced movies.
Buy Godzilla: The EncyclopediaIn his Afterword, Nishikawa, who “did design work for Godzilla vs, Biollante in 1989” and “has been active in monster in monster and mechanical design for the Godzilla series and the Heisei Mothra series,” explains the book is based on his “illustration column Godzilla Grand Dissection, which appeared in “DeAgostini’s Creating Godzilla Weekly for two years starting in 2019.”
The book is broken down into different eras. Color-coded banners for each era run across the top of the pages, and movie titles run down the right side of the two-page spreads with bold highlighting which movie is being covered, making it an easy-to-use reference book as a reader can quickly find what they may be looking for.
Each section opens with “Godzilla Anatomical File,” which offers thumbnail images of Godzilla and his co-stars, such as Anguirus in Godzilla Raids Again, along with very brief synopses of the movies. Then, each character gets a few pages of illustrations and annotations, which makes the book not only beneficial to fans who want to learn more trivia about the monsters and their creation but also artists who would like to draw them.
After covering Godzilla Singular Point, Nishikawa provides a lecture on how to draw Godzilla’s face. He starts with the basic structure and then points out through text and illustrations various details for the different iterations.The book concludes with two pages of drawings of the “heroines deeply involved with the monster,” from the Shobijin twin sprites who communicate with Mothra to Miki Saegusa, who appeared in six movies from the Heisei Era (1984-1995).
Godzilla: The Encyclopedia from Titan Books is recommend as a valuable resource about the franchise.
