This marks the fourth film that I’ve watched by director Satoshi Kon though it’s been so long since we watched Millennium Actress that I barely remember any of it. I do recall quite well the ones that we watched more recently, Perfect Blue and Paprika, both of which heavily feature scenes that skirt the boundary between reality and the imagination. Tokyo Godfathers for the most part has no such scenes, making it a much more approachable and straightforward film, albeit also a lighter one.
The story is centered around an unlikely trio of homeless friends: Gin, a middle-aged alcoholic man, Hana, a trans woman, and Miyuki, a teen-aged girl who has run away from home. While rummaging through garbage on Christmas Eve, they discover an abandoned baby. Declaring that the baby is a gift from God, Hana wants to keep her while the other two insist that they should do the proper thing and hand her over to the police. Eventually however they decide to search for the baby’s parents, aided by a key to a locker that they find alongside the baby, in order to understand what would cause the baby’s parents to abandon her. Genre conscious as we are, it is immediately obvious that this quest leads them to learn as much about each other as about the baby’s family.
Unusually for a Japanese film, Tokyo Godfathers highlights the underprivileged who live on the fringes of society. It’s still a bit of a soft serve since it shies away from showing the homeless in a truly desperate plight but it’s fascinating to watch scenes of them queuing for food from a charity and huddling in their shelter in a park full of such tents. Even more surprising is how respectfully it treats its trans women and drag queen characters. Despite initially making a joke of Hana’s longing for a child of her own, the film has the other characters eventually accept it as a real and laudable dream. At one point Miyuki comes to realize that Hana has an unrequited love for Gin and it’s a wonderful moment that is tenderly handled.
This being a Satoshi Kon film, it isn’t entirely bereft of fantastical elements. Whether because this is set in the magical span of time between Christmas and the New Year or whether because the baby really is a messenger from God, the trio finds that their quest is marked by a string of impossible coincidences and lucky breaks. It’s amusing and mysterious at first but the coincidences soon become so frequent that you end up expecting them, completely undermining their effectiveness. I even suspect that it’s a form of bad writing as the plot needs something to happen but the writers had no good way of transitioning from one point to another. As an example the scene in which the hit man apparently kidnaps Miyuki as a hostage suddenly becomes one in which she bonds with the hit man’s wife and then they’re dropped from the story entirely and at the end of the film we have learned nothing about these new characters.
Like most films that are set during the end of year holidays, Tokyo Godfathers teaches the familiar lessons of redemption and reuniting with families. As such, it makes for pleasant but not overly deep entertainment. Still, its main characters are memorable and its respectable treatment of the downtrodden differentiates it from the usual fare.