For a long time it seemed like Godzilla would never be scary again. While the most famous of giant movie screen monsters to stomp around a metropolis began as a sober, menacing metaphor for the dangers of nuclear weapons in Ishirō Honda’s 1954 masterpiece that started it all, the Big G soon became a creature of adoration and even humor for generations of children.The way that Shinji Higuchi tells it when he steps into our studio at San Diego Comic-Con, the filmmaker was even asked constantly by friends and colleagues who Godzilla was going to fight next after Higuchi earned the chance to co-direct the first Japanese Godzilla movie in over a decade.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“Whether it’s King Ghidorah or Mechagodzilla, there is going to be some kind of antagonist for Godzilla,” Higuchi says of the conventional wisdom in the 2000s and 2010s. “This almost becomes a formula, and I wanted to break that mold.”The break occurred brutally and spectacularly in Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno and Higuchi’s deliberate throwback to the 1954 original wherein Godzilla represented a metaphor for something much more recent and scarring to the cultural Japanese psyche: institutional paralysis and inaction in the face of catastrophe. Deliberately inspired by the tragedy of the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, and the inadequate response to the disaster thereafter, Higuchi and Anno made Godzilla feel modern, urgent, and chilling—paving the way for the rebirth of monstrous Godzilla in new films like the searing Godzilla Minus One.However, there is one element that did not go the way Shin Godzilla’s directors intended: everyone fell in love with a constantly evolving Godzilla when he was still in a quasi-adolescent state. After rising from the Japanese sea and making landfall in Tokyo Bay, the still-growing kaiju revealed he had the most unexpectedly precious of big googily eyes. To this day, children fall in love with wild-eyed Godzilla, which Higuchi admits with a laugh was never their intention with the imagery.“It’s evolution, it’s not growth,” Higuchi tells us. “There’s a difference. So I wanted to really follow an almost Darwinism [form] of evolution. So we don’t get to see it in the film itself, but I imagine before we see the first version of Godzilla, [there would be] some kind of sea creature who then becomes reptile and then becomes what we see.”He continues, “So when Godzilla goes from fish to the version you’re talking about, you see there are still gills because it’s still mid-transition. It hasn’t quite become a reptile yet. It’s still between sea creature and reptile, but there’s another issue, which is that director Anno doesn’t like fish and doesn’t like meat. So director Anno hates when you go to a fish market and you see the eyes, the way they look at you. So that was what we decided. Let’s give him those eyes! So Anno is kind of confused because he thought he made the scariest creature imaginable, but all the kids love it and everyone says it’s super cute, so there is this gap.”Intentional or not, we imagine Toho Studios wasn’t too upset to discover they had a new and very merchandisable alternative look to Godzilla’s design.Stay tuned to Den of Geek for more of our conversation with Higuchi about all things Godzilla.The post Shin Godzilla Director Reveals Why Those Eyes Are So Adorable appeared first on Den of Geek.