This is a beautifully made short film, totally computer-generated, and animated by basically one man. Negadon is a homage to sixties Japanese ‘kaiju’ monster movies. It's 2025, a giant creature from Mars is awakened by human’s terraforming the planet. It comes to Earth, specifically Tokyo, to wreak havoc. The Army and Air Force can’t bring it down, but maybe an old scientist’s experimental robot can do the trick...
The visual achievement of Negadon is the constant impression that you’re looking at an old Japanese film. It's taken over two years to make, and director Jun Awazu has meticulously taken pains to make it look like an old print. Like Japanese sci-fi films used to be, the widescreen is 2.35 extra-wide, outer space looks like a royal blue painted backdrop, and spaceships look like they run on wires.
The monster’s design is very original-looking - a sort of armour-plated jellyfish with energy-weapons instead of tentacles! I give full marks to the script for not letting the characters refer to it by name – how would they know?
The frame of reference is at times inconsistent – most shots try to look like a sixties Toho film, other shots (like the tanks and jets) are obviously based on recent real-life footage. They really should have looked like models. On the other hand, the recreations of actual objects and animals look astonishingly real.
My other quibble is with the soundtrack. Although the pictures have been aged with faded colour and film scratches, the soundtrack is crisp and clear, and uses recent sound effects – it never sounds like the older films, and the voiceover and dialogue sound brand new. Also the music is, annoyingly, synthesised when it should really be an orchestra, but I guess that this was a problem of time or budget.
Unlike the sixties, the mood of the piece is also very downbeat, and less a celebration of the optimism of those films, more of a reflection of the more anguished mood of the original Godzilla (in 1954), or maybe it’s the mood of the present?
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