A 2.44 Million-Ton Food Waste Kaiju Terrorizes Tokyo In New Ad From Oscar-Winning ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Director/VFX Artist Takashi Yamazaki

Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One director and vfx artist Takashi Yamazaki has put his considerable talents to positive public use in a new ad about wasted food from Japanese food and biotech company Ajinomoto.

The spot is familiar territory for the Godzilla director, as it features a civilian population terrorized by a 2.44 million-ton skyscraper-height monster made of wasted food. That figure represents the amount of edible food that is wasted by Japanese households each year.

Earlier this month, Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One won eight Japanese Academy Film Prizes, including the award for best film. Two days later, he won best vfx at the Academy Awards, becoming the first director to win a vfx Oscar since Stanley Kubrick did so in 1969 for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

According to Yamazaki, one of the biggest challenges in working on the new food waste ad was creating the cg design for a monster made of millions of pieces of organic waste, as any accurately sized piece of food used would be too small to recognize. In an interview with Ajinomoto, he explained:

In order to express the fact that a lot of food loss occurs, it is important that the monster is a huge collection of ingredients. Under such circumstances, if I drew the ingredients at their actual size, each one would be too small to convey that it was an ingredient, so it was very difficult to strike a balance between being huge and realistic.

With downcast eyes and a perpetual frown, there is more sadness to the food waste kaiju than there is malice. The beast almost has a reluctancy to its movements, which Yamazaki said was intentional:

I think it’s not just that the monster is attacking people but that it’s also carrying the sadness of food loss. I tried to make the viewer feel both fear and pity.

By the end of the video, it’s abundantly clear that we’re watching an advertisement. But that doesn’t make the experience any less entertaining, especially given the ad’s overall positive message.