Godzilla: Rage Across Time
Animation for Topps Digital’s Godzilla: Rage Across Time collection, bringing wildly different interpretations of the King of the Monsters to life through motion.
Kaiju Across Time
Godzilla: Rage Across Time reimagined Godzilla and his fellow kaiju across different periods of history, from feudal Japan to ancient Greece and beyond. For its digital collectible release, Topps focused on artwork inspired by the comic series and brought together several very different visual approaches, from traditional Japanese-inspired illustration to bright, surreal character art.
I was brought in to animate selected pieces for the collection, including several of its limited Legendary releases. Rather than forcing every card into the same motion style, I treated each illustration differently, building the movement around the artist’s original line, composition, and personality. The result was a set of animated collectibles that felt connected by Godzilla, but still unmistakably belonged to the artists who created them.
CLIENT
Topps NFTs
STUDIO
Weirdo Works
YEAR
2021
ROLE
Animation
Justin Gammon
ILLUSTRATION
Takeshi Murai
Masashi Takeda
Risa Ikami
FEATURE ART
Cory Smith
HEADER ART
Jeff Zornow
RESULTS
Animated the Legendary tier — the lowest-mint, highest-rarity
NFTs in the release Two became collector challenge rewards
Release sold out
Brought back by Topps on the strength of the GPK work
Kaiju Space Trip
Illustrator: Takeshi Murai | Animator: Justin Gammon
Rewarding Collectors with Rarer Animation
Topps’ Digital Collectibles
Topps was expanding its digital collectibles program when Rage Across Time launched, giving longtime Godzilla collectors a new way to chase different artists, card types, rarities, and animated pieces. Following the work I had done for Topps’ Garbage Pail Kids collection, I was brought back specifically to create motion for several of the higher-rarity Godzilla releases.
The animations appeared in the original packs, while select pieces later became rewards for collector challenges. Completing specific sets unlocked limited cards that weren’t available through the normal release, and two of my Godzilla animations ended up among those Legendary rewards. Animation became part of what separated these pieces from the rest of the collection rather than simply an effect added on top.
Distinctive Art Deserves Distinctive Motion
Custom Kaiju Battles
The collection featured Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Mechagodzilla, Rodan, and plenty of unfortunate bystanders interpreted by artists with very different visual styles. That variety was one of the things I liked most about the project, but it also meant there couldn’t be one animation approach applied to everything.
A flatter, folk-art-inspired illustration called for simpler, choppier movement, while a stranger, more psychedelic piece could support smoother motion and bigger character reactions. I separated and rebuilt elements from the finished artwork, imagined how the monsters and environments might move, and then brought everything back together as seamless loops. The goal was never to make the artists’ work look like mine. It was to figure out how their version of Godzilla would move.
Camp Kaiju
Illustrator: Masahi Takeda | Animator: Justin Gammon
Kaiju Beach Party
Illustrator: Risa Ikami | Animator: Justin Gammon
Limited Rewards for Dedicated Collectors
Sold Out? So What!
The original Rage Across Time release sold through its packs, but collecting didn’t stop there. Topps later introduced challenges that rewarded people for assembling specific combinations of cards, turning the collection into more of an ongoing hunt than a one-time release.
Two of the animations I created eventually became limited Legendary challenge rewards, giving the motion work another life beyond the original packs. The technology and marketplace around digital collectibles have changed since then, but the part of the project I still like is much simpler: I got to take wildly different Godzilla artwork and figure out how to make each monster move without losing the hand of the artist who drew it.