I love the way you put this. The way you phrase this and the video that SHINOBI03 kindly posted of Anno describing Ultraman's alien nature really excites me. I love the notion of exploring the otherness of the character, and the distance between us and him.

It sure does add to the otherworldly quality he is pushing for. Now I kinda wanna see Ultraseven and the other four Ultra brothers at the least in this style. I bet if Taro went dynamite in this universe he would combust and just splatter around a certain radius as magma-like biogoop, then after some time said biogoop would gather together instinctively like the blob at ground zero and form Taro again. That would be cool. Or maybe in the case of Seven, the eye slugger would be flung and never come back, having Seven go all the way to fetch it or after flinging it it will grow back if it is not placed back onto his head, etc.

I love Seven, he's my favourite character in the whole of the franchise, but after how they just turned him into a jerk in the comic/cartoon reboot, I want them to leave him alone, haha.

Having said that, I implicitly trust everything Anno, even if I'm not that convinced about Higuchi's work and didn't initially warm to Shin Godzilla, so I would be willing to entertain the introduction of other Ultras, but to be honest, I think it's kind of good that we don't get to see the "expanded universe" right away. Just having Ultraman alone restores some of the mystery to the setting, I feel.

I mean I can see they were going with that very "alien" look, since the first image dropped some time ago and yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing, I guess I'm still getting used to the design. Part of me would have been all for them making him an EVA, with the slim build and otherworldly appearance, since it looks a little weird how his body looks "normal" compared to his limbs. Because he looks fine in the trailer and some of the models for the design, I guess, to me at least, the design translated a little off for the figures, than again I was also referring to the articulation. But I should probably stop now, don't want to go on too long. I'm still looking forward to this movie.

Well remember, this is a budget toy of the design. The articulation is basic enough to make it playable.

If we were to see something like a Figuart (Will be shocked if we didn't) or other higher-end piece, the articulation would obviously look more streamlined and work with this version of Ultraman's more lanky, alien-ish proportions a lot better.

That's not necessarily it. Ultra Action Figure especially recently have gotten very good at nailing body proportions and details -- Ultraman Z's figures in particular looked fantastic. Just for a quick comparison (and the size may be sliiiightly off because it's hard to tell when resizing), here's Shin next to Dyna, who's releasing at the same time. At the very least it feels like the torso and forearms are longer than usual.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...96/unknown.png

I don't have a problem with how they're adapting the figures, since I'm probably one of the few people who don't have the budget to collect figuarts and just gets the vinyl figures, so long as the paint job is decent, though I'd love to. And that's not a bad thing, I was just stating how it looks to me, I don't hate the design or anything, or have anything against the figure makers, after all, the design is growing on me, much like how it did with Shin Godzilla, which at first, I wasn't sure how to feel about the design, and then it grew to the point of me loving it. I do plan to get figures from this, either figuarts, depending how it looks, or stick with the sofubi. Besides, I don't own any Ultra Action Figures to really compare and who knows, maybe the physical figure will actually look better than what we have of the one image.

I'm really excited for this, and I thought the CGI looked pretty good. Some of the comments here had me expecting tv series-level quality.

Aaand the SH Figuart just got announced

Do you think Neronga and Gabora will be the only enemies we will see in the film? I expect they'd throw in Bemular as the first kaiju, and for aliens it'd be Baltan as the final advisory.

Or in case there would be Shin Ultraman 2 they make the first one kaiju-exclusive and make 2 all about the aliens.