The Cutest Combat Roars: Rie Ota, The Superwoman on the Set of Godzilla
There are enough monsters that appear in TV series and movies to recolonize the planet and reboot it, and we know so much about their fictional worlds and powers.
What we know less of, is the people stuck inside those costumes, especially when CGI wasn’t as sharp as it is today. sabukaru’s favorite happens to be Rie Ota, an incredibly skilled Japanese stuntwoman who was the one dressed in those thick, reptilian costumes.
For the last few decades, Japan has had a love affair with monsters and all their sci-fi accessories: just think of the series Ultraman, a superhero TV show which had an encyclopedic array of monsters and evil aliens. This industry was male-dominated, most of the time, which makes Rie Ota exceptional as she was the first woman to portray a monster, or kaiju, in the long-lived Japanese Godzilla franchise.
Born on March 30th, 1978, Rie Ota has a fruitful career in acting, though she’s not as known as the red carpet starlets. One clip of hers embodying a creepy crawler went viral, while she was on set for Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack [200].. Because of the technology at the time, Ota wore a full-body costume of a dinosaur-like monster and waddled on set for a particular scene. Though sounds get edited on later, Ota, absorbed by her performance, often roared to intricately mimic the creature; but instead of skin-crawling screams, it was the cutest roars you could possibly hear.
This is just an example of what it was like to work on sci-fi movies just two decades ago. It took a team to put together the makeup and the costume, and the outfits were solely made for the scene in question, so it was often poorly ventilated, heavy, dark, and overall restrictive. People like Ota were essential pieces to the puzzle when creating such movies, which only fortifies the argument that regular actors cannot do what stuntpeople do.
Beyond the adorable roars, her work is remarkable as her performance is equivalent to a workout, and weak knees should abstain.
About the Author:
Mizuki Khoury
Born in Montreal, based in Tokyo. Sabukaru’s senior writer and works as an artist under Exit Number Five.
