Tokyo Godfathers: Film Review

Title: Tokyo Godfathers

Written by: Satoshi Kon & Keiko Nobumoto

Directed by: Satoshi Kon

Year: 2003

Before we begin, I feel it's probably worth noting that there are probably spoilers in this review.

I wanted the review to go a bit more in depth than just outlining the plot, so it is perhaps unavoidable that some aspects would be revealed in order to explain my points.

If you're reading this review in order to determine whether or not you should watch Tokyo Godfathers, here, in short, is your answer: Yes. It is good.

The review beneath is less critical and more analytical than is usual for reviews I think, but that is, on this occasion, how I rolled.

I will reiterate, slight spoilers below.

*****

I felt since it was Christmas I would do the right thing and make an offering of a Christmassy film as a review. Being a cynical individual, however, I felt it was necessary to stay away from offering that were morkish or twee. I feel I achieved this well.

Set around Christmas and the New Year, Tokyo Godfathers is the story of three homeless people who discover an abandoned baby and proceed to care for it and attempt to return it to its rightful owner. Sorry, to its parents. The three homeless protagonists are: Miyuki, a teenage runaway; Gin, a bearded man in late middle-age and; Hana, a slightly-too-masculine flamboyant transvestite.

The film flies in the face of conventional Christmas fare, as the overtly grim and bleak storyline often deals with neuroses and mental illness, featuring as one of the film's main antagonistic driving forces is a disturbed grieving mother who resorts to kidnap in order to resolve her manic misery. The film also features a raft of characters you likely wouldn't expect in a festive feature: a mafia boss, and by association, the mafia; agressive judgemental drunks; weapon-toting nihilistic youths and; homeless people as the main focus.

The conoisseur of all things Satoshi Kon will know that his stories often run along dark tracks, often with the focus on a mental illness or psychotic behaviour of some description. This is definitely present in Tokyo Godfathers, and while those may sound like awful ingredients for a Christmas film souffle, it is a delightful antidote for the often vapid and cloyingly hollow Christmas offerings. The film is, in places, a satire of the Christmas film genre, for example; in the faux-montage sequences where the characters are travelling around the city, with a relentlessly upbeat and claustrophobically chirpy backing track powering away throughout. This is but one of the ways in which the film is able to engineer an ironically harmless feel to a scene, where the reality of all of the characters is far from the sterile warmth that is suggested. Another technique is to use overblown bombastic gurning during arguments, suggesting a cheesy light-heartedness which the actual subject matter does not conform with.

Throughout the piece there are ludicrous 'magical' or 'miracle' coincidences which drag the story out of the fairly realistic portrayal of other aspects, such as living on the street, rummaging through bins and being treated with suspicion and distaste by the populace at large (for being homeless, and everything that brings with it). These 'miracles', however, often coincide, or are inextricably linked to, horrific and/or fatal goings on. In this way, the often highly improbably good fortune is portrayed in the foreground, while something far darker and gruesome is shown behind. For example: an argument breaks out between an aggressive drunk and the main characters in a shop, the drunks aggressive behaviour driving the group outside. No sooner are they outside than an ambulance careens off the snow-covered road and ploughs headlong into the shop, reducing it to glass and rubble as the group look on from mere yards away, shocked but unharmed. These bizarre episodes lend the film a delightfully offbeat feel, where each scene, as innocuous as it may appear, has a brooding tenseness to it.

Further contrast is to be found as the seemingly invincible cloud that covers the main characters is sometimes punctured, which is dramatically appealing, as there is no excitement in following the story of characters who cannot be harmed. In one sequence Gin, the bearded father-figure of the group, is assaulted by a group of teenagers, who seem to be trawling the area attacking tramps for their own amusement. It is unusual to find such a random occurence in a film, and it is an event which seems to acknowledge that however pressing and important the narrative you believe your are following is, there are often situations that arise that are out of your control. It is also an unusual thing to find in a Christmas film, which further adds to the subversion. I doubt there are many Christmas films where a bloodied and beaten homeless person lies on the cusp of death on bins in an alleyway. I suppose that is probably a good thing though, it is fresh as a change, but if it was a staple of yule offerings it would seem needlessly upsetting.

The messages I felt the film was sending were, despite its atypical nature, were fairly similar to those you'd expect of a Christmas film, albeit from a very extreme angle. The film promotes love and family, particularly working through hardship for your family, although it does acknowledge that the perfect family often depicted on-screen is a ludicrous fabrication. At one juncture the characters are discussing people having started a family, and the shot cuts away to a billboard atop a skyscraper which portrays a beaming pregnant wife with a responsible proud husband standing beside her, hand around her shoulder. In comparison, the main 'family' of the film is the infinitely unconventional unit that consists of homeless father, transvestite (and homeless) male-mother, runaway (and homeless) teenage daughter and abandoned (and therefore homeless) baby.

There is a steep arc of ridiculousness toward the end of the film, where, despite characters often declaring in self-awareness that they aren't action heroes, the plot does veer down an action-packed tangent. Strangely, this works well, and in no way does it undermine the integrity of the piece. It is as though following protagonists who are so cut-off from the world which the viewer inhabits (I am assuming here that the viewer isn't homeless) that turning up the level of surrealism in the film doesn't alter it's credibility. Although eventually the film feels as though it no longer desires your credulity, and is experimenting with extreme grotesques of overblown miracles that feels like a middle-finger-up to the Christmas film bourgeoisie (Home Alone etc).

The film uses Hana, the trampvestite (what?), to excellent use, using his/her tongue-in-cheek bombastic flamboyancy to deliver lines that are slightly too sincere to meld comfortably with the film, in a way which fits perfectly. My personal favourite is: "Being able to speak freely is the lifeblood of love". Suckle on that for a bit.

At the conclusion of the film, SERIOUSLY NOW SPOILERS, the pieces are all in place to allow an all-loose-ends-tied-up/happy-ever-after finale, which it deftly sidesteps by simply presenting the various jigsaw pieces needed, which while it is heavily suggestive, it requires the viewer to assemble them in their own imagination, or not to, as they see fit.

A powerhouse of a film. Funny, too.