released 30 may 04 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of Satoshi Kon's full-length animated feature TOKYO GODFATHERS, it's Japanese Christmas -- that most peculiarly contrary of Japanese customs -- in Tokyo, and a family of sorts of three losers is trying to get by. The group includes a middle-aged alcoholic named Gin, a drag queen named Hana, and a teenaged runaway girl named Miyuki. Christmas Eve is just another cold night for these three "homuresu (homeless)" sorts to get through, until Hana, while sorting through a pile of trash, finds an "kurisamasu puresanto (Christmas present)" -- an abandoned baby girl.
Gin wants to hand the infant over to the police, but Hana becomes attached to the little girl, who he names Kiyoko, and wants to track down the baby's parents and find out what is going on. The result takes the three on a wild ride of improbable misadventures and remarkable coincidences, involving yakuza (gangster) bosses, Latin American "guest workers", the proprietors of a gay bar, and so on.
* On considering the contents of this movie it becomes obvious that there are many ways to do something like this wrong, veering into too much sentimentality or moralizing, but TOKYO GODFATHERS plays it just right, as a tragicomedy. There's nothing basically all that funny about the three bums, each having a background with at least its fair share of misery, but a heavy application of some very sharp humor, mostly in the form of clever dialogue, keeps it flying. There is some degree of moralizing, with proper fastidious Japanese citizens holding their noses in the presence of these unsavory characters, but in the end the three are still responsible for their own fates, and the moralizing never becomes an irritant.
The production values are excellent, though unlike Kon's previous MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, the artwork doesn't sparkle, since much of the story takes place in the dumps and (not surprising for late December in bad weather) in the dark, with an ambience of deliberately drabness. Of course, it manages to set the proper mood. Incidentally, those who were put off by the unconventional script of MILLENNIUM ACTRESS -- I loved it myself -- will find TOKYO GODFATHERS much more conventional, though it certainly still has a fair degree of quirkiness, emphasized by the "skewed Christmas music" soundtrack. The film never quite goes over the edge into outright fantasy but pushes the bounds of the plausible on occasion.
I said in my review of MILLENNIUM ACTRESS that the number of anime productions released each year that honestly deserved five stars could be counted on the fingers of one hand. TOKYO GODFATHERS definitely fits into that category, and leaves me intrigued about what Satoshi Kon will do next. Incidentally, no English dubbing -- all Japanese dialogue with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, and Portugese.
