protector of an ancient forest threatened by Desghidorah. One of her seedlings, a dryad-like character named Erika, ends up on Godzilla-kun's island and recruits him, Little Godzilla, and Minilla to help fight the three headed dragon. Development Biollante was first conceived by dentist Shinichiro Kobayashi, who was the winner of a story writing contest for a sequel to The Return of Godzilla. In developing the character, Kobayashi kept in mind how he would feel if his daughter died, and combined this with a mental image he had consisting of Godzilla being consumed by a flower. His idea of Biollante's origins was not too different from those of the final film, though the creature was portrayed in his submission as having no direct link to Godzilla, and of having human-level intelligence, as well as maintaining the memories of Erika. The draft's portrayal of the character had her psychically communicating with a reporter via images of flowers with human faces, and the final Biollante creature had a woman's face. Kobayashi had previously created a plant-animal hybrid kaiju named Leogon for a similar story writing contest held for 1971's Return of Ultraman series. Koichi Kawakita, who had previously worked for Tsuburaya Productions, was assigned to designing and realizing Biollante by Toho after the company became impressed at his work in Gunhed. Kawakita made use of Gunhed'''s special effects team Studio OX, though designing and building the Biollante props proved problematic, as traditional suitmation techniques made realizing the requested design of the creature's first form difficult, and the resulting cumbersome model for Biollante's final form was met with disbelief from the special effects team. Biollante's first form was performed by Masao Takegami, who sat within the model's trunk area on a platform just above water level. While the creature's head movements were simple to operate, its vines were controlled by an intricate array of overhead wires which proved difficult for Godzilla performer Kenpachiro Satsuma to react to during combat scenes as they offered no tension, thus warranting Satsuma to feign receiving blows from them, despite not being able to perceive them. Creature designer Shinji Nishikawa originally designed Biollante's head as much more flowerlike, with four petal-like jaws, though the film's producers insisted on a more reptilian head. Biollante's final form proved even more difficult to operate than the previous model, as its vine network took hours to rig up on set and required 32