Tokyo Godfathers is director Satoshi Kon's third animated film, after the highly-acclaimed films Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress. Coming after the heels of those two films, mature, psychologically-complex works that pushed the boundaries of animated storytelling, Tokyo Godfathers, a Christmas movie loosely inspired by John Ford's 3 Godfathers, could arguably be considered the director's slightest work; but that would hardly be doing it justice. Wiser men than me have pointed out that creating great comedy is as a hard as creating great drama. Tokyo Godfathers has both in spades, and is deft enough to go from one to the other, sometimes in the same scene, without once missing a beat.
The film revolves around the titular godfathers: Gin, a middle-aged homeless drunkard who lives for his next bottle of alcohol, Miyuki, a cynical teenage runaway, and Hana, a sharp-tongued transvestite fallen on hard times who is both the source of the best lines in the film as well as its heart and soul. The characters are unusual (how often do we see grimy homeless men as heroes in a film?), but the story is standard: this motley trio comes across an abandoned baby in a trash heap and sets out on a journey across Tokyo to find its parents, surmounting various dangers and bonding with each other in the process.
The same premise you see in a dozen syrupy, sentimental Hollywood Christmas films, each more disposable than the one before it- but what elevates Tokyo Godfathers above and beyond that dross is the way it grounds its string-of-coincidences plot in its characters, who are more more vivid and real, more three-dimensional (hehehe), than most characters in live-action films, and its setting- the city of Tokyo, so meticulously captured as to be a character in and of itself. The film shows us a Tokyo that we rarely see, not the glowing neon-lit city of the future popularized in films like Lost in Translation, but Tokyo as it is experienced by the outcasts of society, a city of back-alleys, public parks turned slums, and rotting tenements. It gives the film a sense of weight and verisimilitude that is rare to see today.
The question that remains is this- why is the film an animation? There's nothing in the film that couldn't technically be achieved in live-action (though some scenes would play out as markedly more absurd in such a setting). Indeed, some critics have taken this up as an issue, while failing to appreciate that the film's achievements- its wonderfully expressive characters and its carefully-controlled mis-en-scè ne- are precisely the result of it being an animation. Satoshi Kon gathered some of the best animators in Japan to make this film, and it shows. One of the film's most memorable scenes (I won't spoil it, but you'll know when you see it) is a monologue, delivered with passion and animated with equal intensity. In this one scene, an animator's ink, together with superb voice-acting, produces a performance on-par with an Oscar-winning actor. It's a validation of animation as a theatrical artform, and to me puts to rest the question that began this paragraph. Indeed, a better question would be this: why aren't there more animated films like this (or even live-action films, for that matter)?
I originally wrote this review in 2005, after seeing Tokyo Godfathers at the Singapore International Film Festival (it's quite sad that local distributors didn't see fit to give it a wider release, despite the film being very well-received at its two sold-out festival screenings), but since lost it in a dark and dusty folder of my iBook. Upon re-discovering it today, I felt compelled to re-write the entire thing before posting it. The film deserved better than the short three paragraph (and a line) treatment that I gave it. It's a superb example of the best of Japanese animation, and a wonderful Christmas movie (a phrase I never thought I'd say/write) as well.
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