Godzilla Coloring Pages

Most Godzilla pictures show a city being flattened. These Godzilla coloring pages show the other side of the monster: the huge animal in its own world of sea, shore and mountain, doing what a very large creature does when nobody is filming.

Godzilla wades through shallow sea with his dorsal plates raised, swims with only his spiked back above the water, stands on a rocky island while gulls circle, and roars from a ridge against a bank of clouds. He curls around a tall rock with his tail wrapped twice, sleeps on a sandbank with seagulls perched on his plates, drinks at the foot of a waterfall, reaches up for a branch, stands still in the pouring rain and climbs a scree slope as rocks tumble behind him. He wades through a lagoon of leaping fish, swims over a coral reef, steps over an arched stone bridge, walks up a river bed between cliffs, stands among sea stacks at low tide and in deep snow among pines, and looks down at a small fishing boat. Seen from behind, he looks out over a calm sea. A trail of giant footprints leads along the beach, and one footprint is so big that a person stands inside it with room to spare.

The portraits are the ones fans ask for: Godzilla facing forward with a toothy grin, and a detailed profile where every scale is drawn, plus his tail curling across the whole page. A baby Godzilla stands on the shore beside a grown one, and two Godzillas face each other across a bay.

The other monsters of the films have their pages too. Mothra, the giant moth, rests on a mountain ledge and flies over a forest. King Ghidorah, three-headed and winged, perches on a sea stack. Anguirus stands on a plain in his spiked shell. Godzilla and Mothra face each other across a valley. And for small fans there are chibi Godzilla pages: sitting with a big smile, hugging a fish, and sharing a rock with a chibi Mothra.

A monster born in 1954

The first Godzilla film was made in Japan in 1954, by the studio Toho, and the monster's Japanese name is Gojira, a blend of the words for gorilla and whale. The original film was a serious one. Japan had lived through the atomic bombings less than ten years earlier, and that same year a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in the fallout of a nuclear test in the Pacific. Godzilla was imagined as a creature woken and scarred by those tests, which is why he comes out of the sea and why, in many films, he breathes a beam of atomic fire.

Over the decades he changed from a frightening disaster into something closer to a hero, the King of the Monsters, who fights the creatures that threaten people rather than people themselves. He also grew. In the 1954 film he was about 50 meters tall; in some of the recent American films he stands well over twice that.

How to color Godzilla

Godzilla has been every shade of charcoal, gray and dark green across the films, so a dark gray or a deep green are both right. Color the body in that dark tone, pressing harder on the back and lighter on the belly and the inside of the arms, which makes him look round instead of flat.

The dorsal plates are the detail that makes the page. In many films they glow blue just before he breathes fire. To get that effect, color the plates a pale blue, leave a thin edge of white paper at each tip, and keep the plates noticeably lighter than the dark body around them. The contrast does the glowing for you.

Mothra is the colorful one: her wings are usually orange, yellow and brown with big eye spots, so the concentric rings on her wings take a different color each. King Ghidorah is gold, with golden wings, and Anguirus is a sandy brown with pale spikes.

Which pages for which fan

Most of these monster pages are quick to finish. Godzilla is a big, simple silhouette, and many pages keep him large against sea or sky with little around him, which suits a young fan who wants a finished monster in one sitting. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Person standing in a giant footprint
• Godzilla portrait facing forward
• Godzilla looking out to sea

The detailed pages are the ones with a whole landscape, a coral reef, a forest under Mothra's wings, a field of tall grass. Lots of detail shows them:

• Mothra flying over a forest
• Godzilla in tall grass
• Godzilla and Mothra over a valley

Monster scale and a movie night

The footprint page is a good way to make size real. Put a child's own shoe next to the printed footprint and ask how many shoes long it would be in real life. The little person inside it shows the answer better than any number. The page of Godzilla looking down at a fishing boat does the same from above.

For a monster movie night, print a different monster for each guest, Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah and Anguirus, and color them before the film starts; the chibi pages are the right choice for the youngest viewers. Pinned in a row, the finished monsters make a poster for the evening.

Printing the monsters

Each page is a free PDF on A4 at 300 dpi. On A4 it prints at full size; on US Letter, "fit to page" makes the monster about six percent smaller, tail included. The printing guide covers the option. Tap Add to pack to line up several pages and print them together. The dinosaur coloring pages have Godzilla's real-world cousins, the dragon coloring pages more winged giants, and the monster coloring pages a much friendlier kind of monster.