The Studio Behind Godzilla Minus One Killed Fox McCloud

A photo has been floating around the internet for years: a young Takashi Yamazaki, hand inside a Fox McCloud puppet, operating the character for a Japanese in-store promo video sometime in the early '90s. Yamazaki would go on to direct Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 film that won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The studio where he's spent his entire career, Shirogumi, has been around since the 1970s. And according to a new investigation by Time Extension, that studio is also where the original Star Fox puppets met their end.

The photo of Yamazaki first surfaced publicly back in November 2021, and fans had long suspected Shirogumi's involvement based on it. But nobody had confirmation until Time Extension contacted the studio directly. Shirogumi's response was blunt: "The Fox puppets created at our company were made by gluing fur and feathers to natural rubber, so they deteriorate simply by being exposed to air. Because of that, we had to destroy them after production was finished."

There's poetic about the Oscar-winning VFX house behind one of the best monster movies in decades also being responsible for killing Fox, Falco, Peppy, and Slippy. I love that this is the answer to a 30-year mystery. Not a warehouse fire, not a corporate move gone wrong. Just natural rubber losing a fight with oxygen.

Two Sets, Two Fates

The puppets Shirogumi built were specifically for a Japanese promo video, where Fox was fully animated and puppeteered for store displays. These were functional props, not display pieces, and they clearly weren't designed for longevity. A separate set of puppets existed for the SNES game's box art, print ads, and strategy guide. Those had a different origin, and their fate is less definitive.

Star Fox programmer Dylan Cuthbert told Time Extension that the last time he saw the box art puppets was "about 15 years ago in a storage kind of room within Nintendo." That would place his sighting around 2011, give or take. Whether they're still sitting in that room or have since been relocated, discarded, or quietly deteriorated on their own is anyone's guess. Nintendo hasn't commented.

The fact that there were multiple puppet sets at all speaks to how central those designs were to Star Fox's identity in the early '90s. Fox McCloud as a fuzzy, slightly unsettling physical puppet was the face of the franchise before polygonal Arwings took over. Nintendo clearly understood the appeal, because the company revisited the puppet concept for Star Fox Zero's reveal on Wii U. That presentation featured the late Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé transforming into puppet versions of the Star Fox crew. It remains one of the more charming moments in Nintendo's E3 history.

What makes this whole story land differently now is the context around Shirogumi and Yamazaki. In the early '90s, Shirogumi was a Japanese effects house doing contract work for Nintendo. Yamazaki was a young staffer puppeteering a fox made of glued-on fur and feathers. Decades later, that same person directed a Godzilla film that beat Hollywood blockbusters at the visual effects Oscar. The from Fox McCloud puppet operator to Academy Award winner is wild, and I don't think any amount of Nintendo lore-digging could have predicted it.

Star Fox itself has been dormant for years, though rumors have been circulating about a new entry potentially coming to Nintendo Switch 2. Leaker MyTimeToShineHello posted on X that a Star Fox movie could also be in the works as part of Nintendo's expanding film slate, with a speculative 2030 window. That account's track record is mixed enough that I wouldn't plan your calendar around it, but between a possible new game and a possible film, the franchise feels closer to a revival than it has in a decade.

If Nintendo does bring Star Fox back in a big way, somebody should commission new puppets. Maybe even ask Shirogumi to make them again. Just use better materials this time.