Godzilla's Pink Makeover In Godzilla X Kong Is The Hottest Reveal Of CCXP
Wake up, babe, Godzilla is pink now!
Yesterday's big reveals from Brazil's Comic Con Experience (CCXP) included a first look at "House of the Dragon" season 2, but another powerful lizard stole the show today. The first trailer for upcoming MonsterVerse movie "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" teased a team-up between the two titular monsters, and both of them are sporting a hot new look.
King Kong acquires a mechanical brace on his arm, presumably due to a run-in with monster ape villain Skar King. But Godzilla won the prize for best-dressed kaiju by emerging from his frozen hibernation with pink energy lighting up his spines, gills, and eyes. Did Godzilla spend the summer watching "Barbie" and find himself infused with atomic Kenergy?
In combination with the blue that's also featured in the trailer," "Godzilla X Kong" continues the cinematic trend that's come to be known as "bisexual lighting" — an aesthetic marked by the strong contrast of pinks, blues, and purples. So named because those are the three shades found in the bisexual flag, bisexual lighting blossomed over the last decade in films like "Blade Runner 2049," "The Neon Demon," "Atomic Blonde," and "Birds of Prey" — sometimes with deliberate bisexual implications, and sometimes just because it looks cool.
The pink energy makes sense for Godzilla, a creature conceived out of the unnatural horrors of the atom bomb. Pink is a color rarely found in nature, and there's even been some debate over whether "pink" actually exists or whether it's just an invention of the human mind. (As clarified by Scientific American, pink is just an invention of the human mind, but so are all other colors).
Okay, but seriously, why is Godzilla pink?
This is the first time we've seen Godzilla charged up with pink energy in the MonsterVerse, but the wider Godzilla canon has been flirting with pink for a while. 2016's "Shin Godzilla" featured a unique new Godzilla, created by the dumping of nuclear waste, who has a red glow under his scales. When Shin Godzilla is attacked, he charges up his atomic energy and the red transitions to pink and then violet as Godzilla expresses his displeasure by blasting a pink-purple beam that destroys a significant portion of Tokyo and kills the Japanese prime minister.
From a creative standpoint, the pink energy beam probably has something to do with "Shin Godzilla" being co-directed by "Neon Genesis Evangelion" creator Hideaki Anno and art director Shinji Higuchi. Pink and purple energy beams were a prominent feature of "Evangelion," and Anno and Higuchi brought that aesthetic influence to the "Godzilla" franchise. The Toho Animation/Netflix anime series "Godzilla: Singular Point" (pictured above) featured a new Godzilla design by Studio Ghibli animator Eiji Yamamori, and also showed Godzilla unleashing a pink energy blast, along with other powers.
Visually, pink doesn't exist on the visible light spectrum (hence the "pink isn't real" debate); it's the color we see in combinations of violet and red light, which are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There may well be a scientific explanation for Godzilla's new hot pink energy in "Godzilla x Kong." Perhaps it's something to do with being frozen in the ice. Perhaps this is actually the MonsterVerse's take on Shin Godzilla, and is an entirely different creature from the one that Kong battled in "Godzilla vs. Kong." Or perhaps Godzilla simply chose to go pink because it looks cool. That's a good enough reason for me.
"Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" releases on April 12, 2024.