The folding alone took 40 hours

Here's an origami dragon made from a single sheet of square paper, two meters on a side. Look at those scales. According to this article, it would take 40 hours just to fold the thing, assuming you knew how; imagine the effort required to design something like that.

In the final minute of this video, you can see a little bit of the creator, Satoshi Kamiya, folding the dragon. This one provides a pretty good overview of him folding a phoenix. (It looks like the phoenix takes a mere ten hours to fold.)