Takashi Yamazaki

is a Japanese filmmaker and visual effects supervisor. Known for his blockbusters with advanced visual effects, Yamazaki is considered a leading filmmaker in the Japanese film industry. The recipient of multiple accolades, he has been nominated for six Japanese Academy Awards, six Nikkan Sports Film Awards and three Asian Film Awards. Yamazaki developed an interest in filmmaking and visual effects after watching Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977). Starting his career in the industry at Shirogumi in 1986, he later made his feature film debut with Juvenile (2000). Yamazaki gained recognition with his third film, Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005), which won twelve awards at the 29th Japanese Academy Awards. He then moved onto direct several film adaptations of popular anime, novels, and manga, including Space Battleship Yamato (2010), Friends: Mononoke Shima no Naki (2011), The Eternal Zero (2013), and Stand by Me Doraemon (2014) respectively; the latter two films earned a total of nine awards at the 38th Japanese Academy Awards. These were followed by Parasyte (2014), Fueled: The Man They Called Pirate (2016), The Great War of Archimedes (2019), Dragon Quest: Your Story (2019), Lupin III: The First (2019), and Stand by Me Doraemon 2 (2020), Yokaipedia (2022). Yamazaki's highly-anticipated latest film, Godzilla Minus One, will be released in November 2023. In April 2012, Yamazaki married fellow filmmaker Shimako Satō, whom he had been friends with since his years at . Early life Yamazaki was born on June 12, 1964, in Matsumoto, Nagano. Growing up, Yamazaki was influenced to work in the film industry by the 1977 American science fiction films Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He filmed his directorial debut on 8 mm film with the assistance of a friend during his third year at . This 1979 science fiction short, entitled Glory, was lost for 43 year until it was rediscovered in 2022 and screened in the director's hometown.