This was supposed to be a post about what I wanted to see in anime in 2018 — in short, Crunchyroll to get its thumb out and actually sub openings and endings — but fuck it, this is about Tokyo Godfathers because damn this is a movie everybody really needs to see.
Like most people, the first Satoshi Kon movie I watched was Paprika. Tokyo Godfathers had been on my wish list for several years to watch at Christmas, but I never got round to it. Until today, when I had a three hour train journey to fill and a laptop loaded with anime. What would be more fitting on Christmas Day than this movie?
Tokyo Godfathers starts on Christmas Eve as three homeless people: Gin, an alcoholic, Hana, a trans woman and Miyuki, a teenage runaway, find a baby in a garbage dump. Instead of doing the obvious thing and handing her over to the nearest police post, the three take her “home”, mainly on the insistence of Hana, who always wanted to be a mother. After a night getting Kiyoko — as Hana has named her — to eat and sleep, the next morning Hana persuades the other two to look for Kiyoko’s mother.
What follows is a series of misadventures that are connected together by a series of coincidences and accidents, as in the fragment above. The ultimate coincidence is of course the homeless trio finding the baby in the first place. Normally such a string of incidents and coincidences would’ve bothered me, but the movie sets them up early and cleverly enough that this wasn’t a problem. As Hana puts it, Kiyoko is a child gifted by god, while the explicitly Christian opening to the movie, when the homeless trio attend a Christmas service to get free food, already telegraphs that there will be miracles here. And of course, a good Christmas movie always depend on a little bit of magic to get things going.
Tokyo Godfathers is a horribly sentimental movie, but the sentimentality fits. Everything works out, everybody gets some sort of happy ending, a reconciliation with their past and where it not for me watching this in the train, it would’ve had me ugly crying most of the way through. This never felt cheap or theatrical, as it was earned, through the Gin, Hana & Miyuki themselves, their backstories as well as their actions. Each time they let their better side guide them, they get rewarded for it.
Tokyo Godfathers is also incredibly funny, like when that ambulance out of nowhere crashes into the chemist, but also in the character acting. Just look at the way Gin and Hana run in the clip above and how it fits their characters and is funny in its own right. The exaggerated reactions and movements of the characters keep things funny even in the most melodramatic scenes, yet are grounded in their character. So Hana at all times is overly correct in her feminine way of moving and her mannerisms, which are exaggerated in a dramatic chase scene like the above.
This is such a clever, intelligent movie that I feel I’ve only scratched the surface having seen it once. It has enormous heart as well, which is why it’s such a good Christmas movie.
This is the twelfth and final post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge.
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