Tokyo Godfathers (Tokyo Goddofazazu) (Satoshi Kon and Shôgo Furuya, 2003)
Imdb
Date Watched: 11/9/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: My Nomination for the MoFo Animation Hall of Fame
Rewatch: Yes.
I first became aware of Satoshi Kon's work when I hosted the Animation Countdown in 2014. My very first introduction to Kon was when I searched for a gif to represent
Paprika. I was stunned by what I saw. The images were unsettling and incredibly beautiful. My experience was repeated when I later searched for images from
Millennium Actress and
Perfect Blue. Still later, I challenged myself to watch every unseen film that had made the countdown. When I got to Kon's work, I was rewarded with films that were rich with surrealism, mystery, and characters haunted by their pasts.
And so I expected the same when I decided to explore further and watch
Tokyo Godfathers - the one Satoshi Kon feature that failed to make the countdown. What I got was very different, but no less rewarding. The artwork looks great. There is some mystery and some surreal aspects, and certainly its characters are hiding from their pasts, but none of that is what the movie is really about.
It's a Christmas film about the importance of love and family, but it doesn't seek to define either of those terms in conventional ways. Here we are presented with a group of people with rough exteriors. They're homeless. They're ragged. They constantly bicker and sling insults (and sometimes objects) at each other. Each comes from a very different background - one a drunkard with a gambling problem, one an outspoken transgender woman, and the other a teenaged runaway - but above all their fighting rises a dedication and solidarity that makes them no less a family than any group of people related by blood. And this unity (and sometimes division) is amplified when they find an abandoned baby girl hidden among the trash and seek to find the child's mother.
Along the way, they encounter a series of outrageous events and coincidences that might have been a little harder to swallow in a non-holiday film or in one with characters who are not as fully realized as these. The things that happen in the film admittedly feel contrived, but I buy it anyway because there is so much heart and emotional authenticity to these characters. And the warm fuzzy feelings I get from watching this don't come covered in corn but rather a deliciously thick layer of salty humor.
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