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.
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— Takashi Yamazaki, on getting to work on both Godzilla and Ultraman projects[1]
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,[2] 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 (2023). Critically lauded, the film won eight Japanese Academy Awards and was the first entry in the series to win an Oscar, with Yamazaki sharing the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects with Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi, and Tatsuji Nojima. Yamazaki will return for the film's follow-up, Godzilla Minus Zero (2026). 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).
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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Takashi Yamazaki and Shinji Higuchi
Takashi Yamazaki and Keizo Murase
Takashi Yamazaki and Hideaki Anno
Takashi Yamazaki and Gareth Edwards
Takashi Yamazaki and Adam Wingard
Yamazaki on the red carpet of the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival
Takashi Yamazaki and Steven Spielberg
Yamazaki (second-to-last row, second from left) holding a Godzilla figure in the Oscars nominees luncheon class photo
Yamazaki (second from left) with Masaki Takahashi, Kiyoko Shibuya, Tatsuji Nojima, and their Oscar statuettes
