ULTRAMAN: RISING - With Tokyo under siege from rising monster attacks, baseball star Ken Sato reluctantly returns home to take on the mantle of Ultraman. But the titanic superhero meets his match when he reluctantly adopts a 35-foot-tall, fire-breathing baby kaiju. Sato must rise above his ego to balance work and parenthood while protecting the baby from forces bent on exploiting her for their own dark plans. In partnership with Netflix, Tsuburaya Productions, and Industrial Light & Magic, Ultraman: Rising is written by Shannon Tindle and Marc Haimes, directed by Shannon Tindle, and co-directed by John Aoshima. Cr: Netflix © 2024
Courtney Howard // Film Critic
Even if you haven’t seen ULTRAMAN: RISING yet, you’ve definitely been treated to VFX Supervisor Hayden Jones’s stylings before. He’s worked on blockbusters, indie movies and beloved TV series’, casting his magic spell on LOST IN SPACE, ARMAGEDDON, two Bond movies (THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH and DIE ANOTHER DAY), BLACK MIRROR (“Metalhead”), DOCTOR WHO and a little show called THE MANDALORIAN. And now, he reunites with LOST OLLIE’s adapting creator/ writer Shannon Tindle for a thoroughly entertaining, emotional journey of superhero proportions.
The animated film tells the story of a family in flux; Famous baseball player/ prodigal son Ken (Christopher Sean) returns home to Japan to pick up the superhero mantle left by his retired father, Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe). It’s there, while out on a mission, Ken unwittingly becomes a surrogate father to baby kaiju Emi, whose mother has perished at the hands of overzealous Dr. Onda (Keone Young).
On this project, Jones and his team strived to include Manga textures with a veneer of realism, “down to the level of line work – how broken up it should be. It became part of the DNA of the shots.” They embraced lens flares (a la AKIRA) and speed lines – so much so Tindle dubbed Jones “The Emperor of Lens Flare.” They also took to heart something they called “The Otomo Moment,” which visually connotes heightened emotions within the sequences.
You’ve done a litany of really cool projects in varying film projects, like the virus sequence in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II and, well, I could go on and on, but IMDB is there. How does ULTRAMAN: RISING stand out for you?
“This has been one of the best moments in my career. I’d already worked with Shannon on LOST OLLIE, which was an amazing experience bringing that to life. But I think the biggest challenge of bring full feature animation to the screen was that it was the first feature animation I’d worked on and it was just such an amazing project with an amazing cultural heritage that we’re working with. It’s also such a brilliant team of people, both Netflix and Industrial Light and Magic. We never felt like it was two sides – it was always the ULTRAMAN team and we were all on the same page, pushing it forward to make the film”
I loved all those “Otomo Moments” you have sprinkled throughout this film. You and your team were able to connote emotional depth with such a distinct texture. When in the process did you and your team start fleshing that out?
“It came from the art director, who had put together these fantastic visuals. And Shannon always knew he wanted to connect some of the emotional beats non-verbally. He wanted these moments that show how the characters were feeling without having to verbalize it or do anything traditional. It’s one of the things you can do with animation that’s much more difficult to do in any other form of filmmaking. It was a real challenge. It all came from artwork. We always respect the artwork coming from the art department and then we talked through it and then break down the Photoshop file, asking, ‘How is this artwork been put together? What was this artist thinking?’ You can see it as you break the layers down and then we start thinking, ‘How can we bring this to life?’
Sometimes you’re making such a wild difference in the image that you have to think about not only ‘How do we make it,’ but also ‘How do we transition in and out of it?’ You don’t want to jar the viewer. You want the viewer to get the emotion. The best one is where Ultraman meets Emi for the first time. We knew we wanted this moment of connection and there was the beautiful artwork, but it was the clouds parting. It’s almost like a child’s mobile where the moon is on a string. Even though we questioned, ‘Is this right? Is this gonna work?’ As soon as you see it all come together, you get the emotion and that Ultraman is seeing her as a parent for the first time – through a parent’s eyes. A moment we all fell in love with.”
What was your most challenging sequence, in that maybe the technology wasn’t there yet, or you’re pushing things too far?
“Probably the hardest sequence was the end battle because you’ve got scale and all of your Ultras and all the kaijus and the destroyer robot all in the ocean, which changes from relatively calm to stormy to rain pouring down, and then you have to have them fight. You’ve got to make sure everything is readable. The story is still that core of the sequence. The visuals have to play to the story. That was a really hard sequence to balance. There’s strong lighting cues throughout that have to build and build until we get the dénouement where everyone is blasting the destroyer together. It’s incredibly colorful and we had to balance that and carry it through to the climax. That was a tough artistic and technical challenge. We were so lucky to have a great creative team at ILM all pushing towards this.”
I know you were looking at this with fresh eyes since ULTRAMAN never aired in the UK. How did you go about deploying the visual motifs and homages to the previous series’?
“You start off doing a lot of research. You get yourself a box of DVDs and start working through them, one at a time. I loved some of the themes that run through all the series – like balance is a huge theme for ULTRAMAN. It transitioned from excitement to a huge culturally important property and we had to get it right. We had to pay attention and make sure we were very detail orientated. But we got the entire team got lots and lots of reference. We had a reference of every single Specium Ray that Ultraman has ever made and we knew that it got to the time we had to create ours, we were paying homage to it, but we were giving it an ULTRAMAN: RISING spin so we could give it our own twist and style.”
In terms of visual effects, when I went looking through your resume, there were movies listed that it never occurred to me would use such things – like AMERICAN HONEY and THE YOUNG POPE. As someone who works in that area, is it a compliment to say, “I didn’t notice your work in that?”
“No, no. That’s fantastic. When we’re doing work that should be invisible, the fact that no one knows we’ve been there is what we strive for. People shouldn’t know we’re there. What I always love is there are so many talent VFX artists worldwide and sometimes people have negative connotations about Visual Effects and actually everyone in this industry is supremely talented. They put the love, care and attention into every frame. I really hope it gets noticed for being the art form that it actually is.”
ULTRAMAN: RISING is now streaming on Netflix.
