Friday, October 28, 2011

Godzilla


Left hand
Right Hand

It's my last semester in college, and one of the awesome classes that I am taking is a Godzilla film class. I decided to make these nails as a tribute to the original Godzilla film, usually referred to as Gojira. I hadn't realized before taking this class how tragic the Gojira was. It is nothing like the stereotype that Godzilla films usually get of being cheesy and a B-movie. It's directed by Ishiro Honda, who famously worked on many of the Japanese monster movies. But more interestingly, he worked with Akira Kurosawa a lot. Some of my favorite collaborations of the two include: Stray Dog, Kagemusha, and Ran. I think probably my favorite work of Honda's on a Kurosawa film is The Tunnel sequence in Dreams (one of Kurosawa's more recent films). It is haunting in many of the same ways that Gojira is.

Anyways, enough of the film talk. On these nails is the famous scene from Gojira in which Godzilla breaks down a bunch of power lines, which everyone is hopeful will kill him so that he stops his reign of destruction. If you look closely you can see his radioactive breathe (he didn't get fire breathe until later). On my thumb was a distinctive bridge that, let's say, doesn't survive. My right hand was the logo for Gojira and, in Japanese characters, it says (obviously) Gojira. Yay.

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