Tohl Narita Gejiru

(ACTOR’S VOICE) TAKAHIRO OKUWAKI:

My name is Takahiro Okuwaki. I am a curator at the Aomori Museum of Art.

Tohl Narita was a sculptor, illustrator, and art director. He is known for his live-action special effects on movies and television shows. He is best known, however, as the designer for the Ultraman television shows. His designs for heroes, monsters, and aliens had a major influence on postwar Japanese culture.

Narita studied sculpture at Musashino Art University. While he was still in school there, he took a production job for the film Godzilla. His need to earn a living led him to the world of film art.

While working on film sets, Narita met Eiji Tsuburaya, who was later known as the father of live-action special effects. Narita designed monsters and aliens for one of Tsuburaya’s television productions. During this period, he created the superhero Ultraman.

The screenwriter for the show asked Narita to create an alien unlike anything seen before. He wanted the character to stand out as visually striking and beautiful. For Narita, this meant that the design had to be simple, so his first step was to remove everything but core essentials from the character’s form.

For his character designs, Narita was constantly thinking about the best ways to combine elements. He carried a thick illustrated encyclopaedia of living creatures with him wherever he went. He was always searching for unique biological forms and shapes.

The natural world was an important resource for his monster designs. He looked at dense leaf patterns, fish scales, shells, and beetles’ hard outer skeletons.

By incorporating familiar forms from plants and animals, Narita created designs with a distinctive visual appeal. He used motifs that everyone could recognise, but he combined them in new ways. Each of his character designs highlighted unexpected possibilities of form.

The title of this watercolour drawing on paper is Gejiru. Tohl Narita created it in the 1970s. Displayed in portrait orientation, it measures about 52 centimetres high and 36 centimetres wide.

Gejiru is a monster from outer space. Narita designed this character for a Japanese television series that used live action and practical special effects. Gejiru is shown here standing in front of a city in flames.

From the painting, we see that Gejiru has a monster’s head on a human body. The top half of its face appears to be a pair of big, pointed ears opening to each side, forming a V-shape. Its eyes are hidden inside the hollows of its ears. It has a short, flat nose above a big mouth full of jagged teeth. From the neck down, it appears to be wearing combat armour. The armour has irregular stripes in red, blue, and yellow. On its torso, gold stripes form an inverted V-shape along its breastbone and ribs. Gejiru clenches its right hand in a fist and holds it out chest high. The left arm seems to end in a clamp. The monster’s armour-clad legs also feature inverted V-shaped sections of golden yellow, green, blue, dark blue, and red. It is wearing a pair of short, silvery white boots with low heels.

The monster has stiff, straight hair in shades of black and grey growing in dense clumps on the sides of its body. The hair extends from its ears down the side of its neck, from its armpits to its waist, and from its hips to the back of its knees. The monster looks enormous, nearly as tall as three skyscrapers. One of the buildings behind it has broken in two and threatens to collapse. Others lean to the side. White smoke billows from several buildings in flames, rising towards a patch of brown and black that blocks the sunlight and part of the blue sky.