Kidnappings. Gangsters. Drag clubs. Car crashes. Stabbings. “Tokyo Godfathers” is not your average Christmas movie.
Yet in the years since its release, the 2003 anime film by the late director Satoshi Kon has become a holiday classic. It’s being screened this month in theaters in Japan, North America and the U.K. to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
“Tokyo Godfathers” centers on three homeless people who have formed a kind of makeshift family. There’s Gin (voiced by Toru Emori), a middle-aged man whose drinking and gambling cost him his wife and daughter, Miyuki (Aya Okamoto), a teenage runaway, and Hana (Yoshiaki Umegaki), a transgender woman and former drag performer. On Christmas, the trio discovers an abandoned baby, and Hana convinces her companions to go on a quest to find the child’s mother. So begins a journey across Tokyo filled with action, danger, and even a few Christmas miracles.
“Godfathers” is the third of four features directed by Kon, who died in 2010 at age 46 of pancreatic cancer. The film, developed by luminary Masao Maruyama at studio Madhouse, was a departure from Kon’s previous two films, “Perfect Blue” and “Millennium Actress” (and his final feature, “Paprika”). While those films dealt with Kon’s favorite theme, the trippy, porous border between illusion and reality, “Tokyo Godfathers” is a more straightforward romp. By Kon standards, anyway.
“If I had to describe it in one word, I’d call it ‘sentimental,’” Kon told an interviewer in 2002. “Still, I don’t like making things that are too ordinary, so it’s a sentimental story with a lot of twists. The key word is ‘coincidence.’”
From sudden run-ins with long-lost friends to near-fatal close calls to a sudden gust of wind that blows just in time to save the day, the 90-minute film steams forward thanks to a series of increasingly interconnected flukes. Tiny seeds planted in the audience’s mind early on pay off brilliantly in the final act, and while the whole thing is implausible (OK, let’s face it, impossible), it’s done with such aplomb that it doesn’t really matter. It’s Christmas, after all.
Coincidence is the fuel on which the film runs, but its engine is the trio of Gin, Miyuki and Hana. Living at the edge of society, they aren’t typical protagonists for live-action film, let alone animation.
“It might be difficult to say that homeless people make for typical anime characters,” said Kon in 2004. “I did not intend to use them as representatives of weakness or misfortune, or as obstacles to society, but as symbols of the weakness and regret that we all have.”
Symbols, perhaps, but fully fleshed-out characters, too. Miyuki isn’t a typical cutesy anime girl: Kon specifically chose Okamoto, who had never worked as a voice actor before, for her “low, grumbly voice” after seeing her in a film. Nor, obviously, is Hana. A transgender character portrayed with depth and empathy, not played for laughs (there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments when Hana is onscreen, but they’re of the with not at variety) is as rare in anime now as it was 20 years ago. While “Tokyo Godfathers” is a lot of fun, the trio’s trials touch on some serious turn-of-the-century societal issues, like assaults on unhoused people and seemingly inexplicable violence by Japanese youth.
This is Kon’s most character-centric film, and his devotion to his marginalized protagonists comes through in the animation. Kon decided to forego some of the flashy camera moves for which he was known and let his protagonists handle the majority of the onscreen movement. The result, brought to life by legendary animators like Shinji Otsuka, are scenes that combine realism with freeform fluidity and give each character their own distinct way of moving (there exists an incredible piece of behind-the-scenes footage with Kon “playing” Hana, which the animators could refer to when working).
So those are the godfathers, but the film has one more key character: Tokyo. To bring the city to life, Kon instructed art director Nobutaka Ike to produce near-photorealistic backgrounds. Using lots of digital photos taken over the course of months of location scouting, Ike’s team packed absurd amounts into each frame.
Iconic locales like Tokyo Tower and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building make appearances, but just as much love was put into the city’s quotidian aspects: tiny Kabukicho bars, homeless encampments, ubiquitous convenience stores. In the same way the film features protagonists from the margins, the backgrounds evoke “parts of Tokyo not usually seen, like the alleyways and paths I would take on my way to work,” said Ike in a making-of documentary. Giving the film a holiday feel is a smattering of snow (rare but not unheard of in Tokyo) with layer upon layer of white paint adding a feeling of depth. Tokyo-as-character reaches its apex during the end credits, when the buildings start to sing and dance. One inspiration for the film, Kon said, was “the idea of ‘urban animism,’ that even the buildings and alleys in the city may have a soul.”
Animism makes sense, because while the film begins on Christmas, it ends on New Year’s, a time of year associated with traditional animistic Japanese religion. Christianity and Shinto, skyscrapers and cardboard huts, weakness and vitality: Much like the city of Tokyo itself, “Tokyo Godfathers” is a glorious jumble.
The film clearly stuck with Kon: He mentioned it and its extraordinary coincidences in his final, posthumous blog entry from 2010. It’s had immense staying power among both Japanese and Western fandoms, prompting American distributor Gkids to scoop up the rights and create a new English dub in 2020. Maybe Kon’s “twisted sentimentality” is the perfect antidote to the average holiday movie: it’s sweet, but not syrupy. Or, as the director put it in 2004:
“Japan’s economy is in recession, and people as a whole seem to have lost some of their vitality. I thought if I could depict the process of homeless people regaining their vitality and will to live, the audience might feel a little more energized, too.”
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.