Tokyo Godfathers (2003): An Anime film that tells a touching, heart-warming, and harrowing story.
Now at the helm of this film is something of a harrowing and beautiful melancholic tale of three homeless runaways who find an abandoned baby. I found this film to be delightful and it brought a certain joy with a pervasiveness that I can’t quite explain. Satoshi Kon the director of the film is a master in editing, and he is famously known from his previous works of Perfect Blue, Paprika, Millennium Actress, and the anime series Paranoia agent.
The three homeless runaways are of a weird, lovely breed. One is a guy named Gin who is a drunkard and allegedly tells that he was a successful racer who eventually abandons his wife and daughter. The other is a transvestite Hana who has nowhere to think of a place called home. And lastly the small girl Miyuki is a runaway who had a fight with her father and refuses to go back but sometimes feels like she wants too. Now these three find an abandoned baby and decide what to do with it. The whole film is their relationship and journey with the baby and Kon manages to tell the tale in a surreal and magical sort of way. Hana always refers the baby as a gift from God and through certain impending struggles and hardships the metaphor of the baby as a gift of God always kicks in. Its as if Kon is telling it’s a Christmas miracle (as the film is a Christmas story).
He manages to create wonderful backstories to each of the three main characters and their interactions and incidents to the many characters in Tokyo. It palpitates with empathy towards the characters and Kon shows it not only subtly but through the animation he manages a sympathetic atmosphere that can be realistic at times, we are able to connect to the emotions. The film is also highly coincidental and that is not a drawback as Kon creates the world of “his” Tokyo as if its only a small world and this makes it a believability. The animation is simple, but the motion is seamless and especially when we see the facial expressions of the characters. Words are not much needed at these moments but rather their wonderfully animated expressions tell it all. The film is also set up with action sequences that can only be done through animation, and it is fantastic to watch. The film is also rather humorous most of the times even during emotional and serious scenarios and correctly times the moments of exuberance. The ambience of Tokyo and its dark alleyways or its streets are captured wonderfully, and the frames of some scenes are just perfectly framed and staged.
Kon has this distinct, idiosyncratic style to him. His work is mainly defined by like I said his fast-paced unorthodox editing. Let me try to explain If you look at a normal scene where we are shown a particular object like a key, we usually see the key being taken by the individual by his hands. But what Kon does is he only shows the key and cuts away and that key is later shown after a few scenes. This implies that Kon wants us or we as an audience to register later that the key was taken. This style of editing is not seen much and Kon does it with ease. Its distinct and we can recognize from that this is his style of editing. He plays with the time and space of the frame and movement in each scene (he was a professional editor at first).
Kon is one of the best anime directors of all time and sadly he had to be succumbed to an early demise, but his work will speak on as it already is. He is different from let’s say Hayao Miyazaki as Miyazaki is the so-called master of anime around the world, his style and film sense is more of a “fantasy” type genre whereas Kon is grounded and gets really under the psychological affects of human behavior. His style of animation is more simplistic yet quirky which makes him standout and he must be remembered for his contribution to animated films.
I highly recommend this film, a film of adult themes (usually you won’t see this in Japanese animated movies), and it brings a certain joy and happiness but also a melancholic feel not in a bad way but in a good way. I believe that this type of film where three people carry around an abandoned baby cannot be emulated properly in a real film that is I wouldn’t really consider watching a film if made in real life, but I believe it can only be done through animation and Satoshi Kon just nails it.