Takashi Yamazaki

Takashi Yamazaki supervises his own visual effects. That one fact explains most of his filmography. Japanese cinema does not have Hollywood's budgets, and a director who can personally plan, shoot and finish a shot removes the most expensive negotiation in the process, which is how a Japanese production ends up holding an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

That was Godzilla Minus One in 2023, a postwar monster film that treats the creature as a consequence of the war rather than a spectacle, and it also won him a Bram Stoker Award for its screenplay. He had been building towards it for more than twenty years. Returner in 2002 was a science fiction pastiche; Always: Sunset on Third Street in 2005 rebuilt postwar Tokyo digitally and grew into a trilogy; The Eternal Zero and The Great War of Archimedes are both arguments about the Pacific War, a subject he keeps circling back to.

The other half of the career is adaptation, and it is the risky half. He has directed the beloved and the untouchable: Stand by Me Doraemon and its sequel, Space Battleship Yamato, Parasyte in two parts, Lupin III: The First, Dragon Quest: Your Story. Some of those went down badly with the fans of the source material. His answer has generally been to go and make the next one, with Godzilla Minus Zero due in 2026.

The shelf beyond the Oscar runs to eight Japanese Academy Awards, five Nikkan Sports Film Awards, two Hochi Film Awards and an Asian Film Award, against a worldwide gross above 523 million dollars.