How tall is Colossal Titan?

The Colossal Titan's height: 60 meters

The Colossal Titan, called the Colossus Titan in Kodansha's English manga, is 60 meters (197 ft) tall. This is the figure in the Attack on Titan Character Encyclopedia (page 143, cited by the Attack on Titan Wiki's manga article), and it is the size the anime gives in its very first episode, when the Titan appears over the edge of Wall Maria. This site stores it as 6,000 cm, which makes it the largest entry in the Attack on Titan character hub by a factor of four.

The Japanese name, Chō ōgata Kyojin, means roughly "super-large Titan." The difference between "Colossal" and "Colossus" is only a translation choice. The anime's English subtitles and dub use the first, and the manga's English edition uses the second. Fans also use the in-universe nickname "God of Destruction," which the anime gives it.

The scene that defines the number: looking over a 50-meter Wall

The 60-meter figure matters because of what it's compared with. According to the manga's first chapter, the Walls that protect humanity are about 50 meters high. For a century, nothing had been seen above them. Ordinary Titans range from a few meters to about 15, so a 50-meter wall is more than three times the height of the biggest normal Titan. The whole society inside is built on the assumption that the Walls can't be overtopped.

The Colossal Titan breaks that assumption in one image. A 60-meter body standing at the foot of a 50-meter wall has its head and upper chest above the parapet, with roughly 10 meters to spare. That is the moment in the opening chapter and episode when a skinless face appears over the top of Wall Maria, and it's why the number is so central to the story. The Titan then kicks in the outer gate of Shiganshina District, which lets the smaller Titans flood in. The guidebooks never needed a larger number. Sixty meters is the number that beats the Walls.

Who becomes the Colossal Titan, and how tall are they?

The Colossal Titan is one of the Nine Titans, powers passed from one human host to another. Two holders appear in the series, and both are much smaller in human form.

Bertholdt, the tallest member of the 104th Training Corps at 192 cm, is the holder for most of the story. Armin, at 169 cm, inherits the power later. The human-to-Titan ratio therefore ranges from about 31 to about 35, depending on the holder. By comparison, Eren Yeager's 15-meter Attack Titan is about eight times his adult height of 183 cm.

The infobox height applies to the power rather than to a single holder. Armin's Colossal Titan has a different face and a thinner build than Bertholdt's, but it is drawn at the same tremendous scale.

Powers that come with the size

The wiki's manga and anime articles describe several abilities tied directly to the Titan's bulk:

• Explosive transformation. Every Titan shift releases heat and energy, but the Colossal Titan's is on another scale. Its holders can control it, producing anything from a blast of wind to an explosion that wipes out a city district or a naval port.
• Steam emission. The Titan can release scalding steam from its body to keep attackers away. The more it uses this ability, the more muscle it burns off, until in extreme cases only the skeleton is left.
• Raw strength. In the manga it kicks open the outer gate of Wall Maria, throws houses through the air and kicks the 15-meter Attack Titan onto the top of the Wall.

The weakness is the flip side of the size. A 60-meter body is slow, and frequent use of the steam ability leaves its muscles stiff and immobile. Soldiers using vertical maneuvering equipment are tiny enough to slip past it. The battle in Shiganshina District turns on exactly that size difference, when a human-sized soldier gets close to the Titan's nape while it is focused on a larger target.

Colossal Titan versus the other Nine Titans

Most of the Nine Titans are about the size of an ordinary large Titan. The figures below come from this site's data, sourced to the guidebooks and the manga.

The gap between the Colossal Titan and the second-tallest standard Titan, the Beast, is 43 meters. That is larger than the Beast Titan itself. The series does show bigger things in its final arc, but no guidebook gives those forms a single official height, so this site doesn't list one.

How 60 meters compares with real landmarks

Sixty meters is easier to picture next to buildings you know. The landmark heights below come from this site's landmark data.

A few of these comparisons are worth picturing. The Colossal Titan would peer over the top of the Arc de Triomphe by about the same margin as it clears the Walls. It would stand about level with the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Standing beside the Statue of Liberty, its head would reach about two-thirds of the way up the monument, only a little above the point where the copper statue begins, even though the statue by itself is shorter than the Titan. And it is twice as tall as Rio's Christ the Redeemer.

In building terms, 60 meters is about a 16- to 20-story tower, depending on floor height. You can load the Titan next to any landmark or skyscraper in the height comparison tool to see it to scale, and the landmarks hub lists more structures for comparison.

The Colossal Titan in human terms

Another way to picture 60 meters is to count people. Using the average heights on this site, from the NCD-RisC estimates for adults born in 1996, and the official heights of the cast, here is how many people standing on each other's heads it would take to reach the top of the Colossal Titan:

Put the other way, a 1.7-meter person standing at the Titan's feet would barely reach its ankle. The 15-meter Attack Titan, a quarter of its height, would come up to roughly its knee. That size gap explains how the fight in Shiganshina plays out. The Colossal Titan kicks Eren's Attack Titan onto the top of the Wall, and the human soldiers rely entirely on their maneuvering gear to get anywhere near its nape, which sits more than 50 meters above the ground.

The conversions are easy to check. One meter is 100 cm, and one foot is exactly 30.48 cm, so 60 m equals 6,000 ÷ 30.48 = 196.85 feet. In feet and inches that is 196 feet 10 inches, usually rounded to 197 feet. The 50-meter Walls convert to about 164 feet, so the Titan clears them by about 33 feet, which is roughly the height of a three-story house.

Is a 60-meter Titan physically possible?

The series doesn't try to obey real-world biology, and its Titans run on their own rules. Still, the size has been analyzed for fun. The wiki cites a book by Rikao Yanagita, the Japanese author known for analyzing the science of manga and anime, that used dimensions from the novel Before the Fall to estimate the number of Titans sealed inside the Walls. He assumed each Wall Titan was about 45 meters tall and 13 meters wide at the shoulders and estimated hundreds of thousands. The manga later says there are tens of millions, which shows how loosely the story treats exact sizes outside the official figures.

The square-cube law is the usual objection. A creature scaled up to 35 times human height would weigh about 35 cubed, or more than 40,000 times as much, while the cross-section of its bones would only grow by about 35 squared. Real bone wouldn't hold that weight. Attack on Titan sidesteps the problem with its own rules, which is why canon heights like 60 meters are best treated as design statements rather than engineering specs.

Real-world builds of the Titans

People have tried to recreate Attack on Titan's giants at real scale. Wikipedia notes that a Universal Studios Japan attraction in 2015 included a life-size Eren Titan about 15 meters tall and a Female Titan about 14 meters tall. We know of no attempt at a full 60-meter Colossal Titan, which would be four times the height of those figures. That gap between a buildable 15-meter Titan and an almost unbuildable 60-meter one is a good sense of how big the Colossal Titan is.

Spoiler note: this page names both holders of the Colossal Titan, which is revealed partway through the story.