Takashi Yamazaki

Takashi Yamazaki (山崎 貴) is a Japanese filmmaker and visual effects supervisor.

Known for his blockbusters with advanced visual effects, Yamazaki is considered a leading filmmaker in the Japanese film industry.

He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, eight Japanese Academy Awards, five Nikkan Sports Film Awards, two Hochi Film Awards, and an Asian Film Award.

His films have collectively grossed over US$523 million worldwide.

At the 29th Japanese Academy Awards, the film won twelve awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Yamazaki was born on June 12, 1964, in Matsumoto, Nagano.

Yamazaki was first introduced to film by the "Umbrella Program" as a child; in 2023 he reflected that Ishirō Honda's Matango (1963) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) may have been among the first movies he ever saw.

Yamazaki developed an interest in filmmaking and visual effects after watching Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977).

Growing up, Yamazaki was influenced to work in the film industry by the 1977 American science fiction films Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

He filmed his directorial debut on 8 mm film with the assistance of a friend during his third year at Matsumoto Shiritsu Shimizu Junior High School.

This 1979 science fiction short, entitled Glory, was lost for 43 years until it was rediscovered in 2022 and screened in the director's hometown.

In 1984, Yamazaki began working as a miniature builder for Tatsuo Shimamura.

Starting his career in the industry at Shirogumi in 1986, he later made his feature film debut with Juvenile (2000).

Following his graduation from Asagaya College of Art and Design in 1986, he officially became an employee at Shimamura's animation and special effects studio Shirogumi in Chōfu, Tokyo.

After working on the Eko Eko Azarak series and Parasite Eve (1997), Yamazaki and his team at Shirogumi started pre-production on their feature NUE.

The team spent two years preparing the project in collaboration with Robot Communications and they even went location scouting in Australia.

Yamazaki, who was still heading the visual effects for up to three commercials monthly at this point, concluded that the film would require him to create the film on a relatively enormous budget of ¥2 billion, well above the average budget of ¥100 million usually given to first-time directors.

Thus, Robot president Shūji Abe deemed NUE too expensive and requested that Yamazaki scrap it and attempt to make his directorial debut with a smaller scale.

Shortly after abandoning NUE, Yamazaki converted the idea for his debut feature film, Juvenile (2000), which he directed, wrote, and headed the visual effects for.

A science fiction film, Juvenile is about a group of elementary school students who find a talking alien robot while camping in the woods and soon discover that it is their only hope in saving the planet from incoming evil alien invaders.

Initially, Juvenile was to be shot on entirely on location by Kōzō Shibasaki under Yamazaki's direction on a budget of roughly ¥100 million, with Kiyoko Shibuya directing the visual effects on a budget of ¥50 million under Yamazaki's supervision.

However, Abe decided to increase the film's budget to ¥450 million in order to allow Yamazaki to make it a "proper movie for the summer vacation lineup".

Toho distributed Juvenile in July 2000 and it grossed ¥1.1 billion, making it the fifteenth highest-grossing Japanese film of that year.

After directing Returner (2002), Yamazaki gained recognition with his third film, Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005), which won twelve awards at the 29th Japanese Academy Awards.

His next film, the science fiction actioner Returner (2002), follows the story of Milly, a young woman living in a war-torn future, who is recruited by a mysterious time traveler named Miyamoto.

The film was distributed by Toho in Japan on August 31, 2002 and was later in American theaters in October of the following year, where it was critically savaged.

Lou Lumenick of New York Post wrote in his review: "Returner was a huge hit in Japan, but this would- be sci-fi epic is soporific, shamelessly derivative and barely coherent by American standards."

After its release, Yamazaki proposed a sequel to Returner but Abe asked him to make a film set in the Shōwa era instead.

Yamazaki's breakthrough came when he departed from the science fiction genre to create his third directorial feature, Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005), an adaptation Ryōhei Saigan's manga series Sunset on Third Street.

Set in Tokyo during postwar Japan, this film tells the "heartwarming" story of the residents living at Third Street: Ryunosuke, a writer from the countryside; Norifumi, an auto mechanic; and sake bar owner Hiromi.

Always: Sunset on Third Street – starring Hidetaka Yoshioka, Shinichi Tsutsumi, Koyuki, Maki Horikita, and Kenta Suga – was released to overwhelmingly positive reviews and grossed ¥3.23 billion, ranking fifteenth at the Japanese box office.

In 2005, film critic Tadao Satō regarded the film as a milestone in the usage for computer-generated imagery and acclaimed Yamazaki's direction.

Yamazaki next directed, co-wrote (with Ryota Kosawa), and headed the visual effects for Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007), a sequel to Always: Sunset on Third Street also based on the manga series.

The film opens with an "imaginary sequence" of Godzilla attacking Tokyo before returning to the story of the residents of Third Street.

Yamazaki stated that he is a lifelong fan of the Godzilla franchise and incorporated the opening scene in order to "start with something fresh from the first film" and added that "having Godzilla destroy Tokyo Tower with his oral beam was a great way to surprise audiences".

He also noted that the "two minutes (in which Godzilla appears) required a tremendous amount of work", with half of the crew having to work on the sequence over the course of six months.

He then moved onto direct several film adaptations of popular anime, novels, and manga, including Space Battleship Yamato (2010), Friends: Mononoke Shima no Naki (2011), The Eternal Zero (2013), and Stand by Me Doraemon (2014) respectively; the latter two films earned a total of nine awards at the 38th Japanese Academy Awards.

In April 2012, Yamazaki married fellow filmmaker Shimako Satō, whom he had been friends with since his years at Asagaya College of Art and Design.

These were followed by Parasyte (2014), Fueled: The Man They Called Pirate (2016), The Great War of Archimedes (2019), Dragon Quest: Your Story (2019), Lupin III: The First (2019), and Stand by Me Doraemon 2 (2020), Yokaipedia (2022). Yamazaki's acclaimed latest film, Godzilla Minus One, was released in Japan in November 2023 and in the United States the next month.

In 2024, he and his team became the first Japanese production crew ever to receive an Academy Award nomination for, and win, Best Visual Effects.