Tsuburaya chose suitmation to build a more detailed miniature city, not because he couldn't afford stop-motion

The standard account is that suitmation — an actor in a creature suit filmed against miniature sets — was a budget compromise. Stop-motion was the prestige technique (King Kong, Harryhausen); Toho couldn't afford it. That's true but incomplete.

Tsuburaya preferred suitmation because it freed up budget for the miniatures. A more detailed, more accurate miniature Tokyo could be built when you weren't sinking money into frame-by-frame puppet work. The monster was a delivery system for the city. The city was the point.

His method — a man in a half-cement suit, lit harshly, filmed at high speed so the creature moves with ponderous slow weight on playback — is suitmation as aesthetic, not suitmation as limitation. The entire grammar of giant-creature staging (high-speed filming for weight, optical compositing for scale) was his invention. It wasn't a workaround for what he couldn't do; it was a solution to what he actually wanted to show.

[!NOTE] This inverts the usual prestige ranking. Stop-motion in Kong produced a more expressive, fluid creature. Suitmation in Godzilla produced a more convincing destroyed city. Tsuburaya optimized for his actual subject.

Source claim: Tsuburaya chose suitmation over stop-motion because it let him allocate more budget to detailed miniature sets — the destruction of the city, not the creature, was his actual subject.