Satoshi Kon: Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

Tokyo Godfathers is about as close as you can get to a Charles Dickens Christmas adaptation apart from actually making a film based on A Christmas Carol. Set over the week between Christmas and the New Year, Satoshi Kon’s third feature takes inspiration from John Ford’s Three Godfathers in its tale of three homeless outcasts who find a baby in a dumpster and set about returning the baby to its parents. It’s a Dickensian tale of reconciliation and redemption, with fateful happenings and heartfelt moments throughout its brief 97-minute runtime. In some sense, it’s a step down after the profound meta-narratives of Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, but that’d also be understating how effective it is as a touching drama.

The film opens with elderly alcoholic Gin, former drag queen Hana, and young runaway Miyuki at a Christmas Eve service watching a rendition of the nativity story. After leaving the service, they hear cries coming from an alley and discover a baby discarded along with the trash. Hana takes the baby and names her Kiyoko—meaning “pure child” after a line in the Japanese translation of “Silent Night”—and together, they vow to find her parents by following the clues left in a bag discarded alongside her.

Right from the get-go, it’s clear that despite the gritty setting, Kon is not interested in dramatic realism. The film is working on several symbolic levels, most notably as a recreation of the nativity story itself, adapting this Christian story to the Japanese context. The three heroes are stand-ins for the Three Wise Men that brought gifts to the infant Jesus, while Kiyoko is the stand-in for Jesus. In this situation, they’re searching for the parents and not the child—it’s as if the Wise Men had to return Jesus to Mary and Joseph instead of searching him out in the first place—but they still have to follow signs and act out the miraculous narrative that they find themselves in.

Hana seems to understand that they’re in a fateful narrative from the moment they find the child. She often mentions that God has tasked them with this quest and understands that finding the child marks a fateful moment in their lives. As they follow the clues, they stumble into one fateful coincidence after another. Like in a Dickens story such as Oliver Twist, every person they meet along their path has some significance to their quest or personal biography. At one point, they find a man pinned beneath a car and help him to safety only to learn that he recognizes the name of the club left on a business card that was in the bag accompanying Kiyoko. He takes them to the club, where Gin sees a bookie that contributed to his mounting debts and destitution in the past. The narrative coincidences pile up in this manner.

There are no accidents in a story of this kind, which may annoy viewers that cannot stomach such a sustained level of dramatic irony and coincidence. But there’s a craftsmanship to the narrative that’s enjoyable even if you were to ignore its thematic implications. It all fits together so well, with every encounter playing into the next. Of course, it requires the viewer to accept narrative occurrences such as the miraculous appearance of diapers and formula on a gravestone just when the heroes realize Kiyoko needs food, or to understand that the narrative will inevitably lead them to encounter people from their past. But Kon has cued us into this manner of storytelling from the get-go by setting the film over Christmas and making the parallels to the nativity story.

In fact, the nativity story also informs the heroes’ relationship to Kiyoko, as their encounter with the child allows them to find reconciliation and redemption with the people from their pasts. Thus, Kiyoko truly serves as a Christ figure, in both a narrative and thematic sense. While trying to find her parents, Gin, Hana, and Miyuki find the chance for redemption. In a hospital later in the film, Gin comes across his estranged daughter, who he claimed was dead at the beginning of the film. Hana meets with fellow drag queens she used to work with, while Miyuki comes face to face with the police detective father she stabbed and ran out on. These encounters are coincidences, yes, but they are the entire point of the film, as their doing good by the child allows them to atone for their pasts and heal broken relationships.

Thus, by acting to save the child, they end up saving themselves. This is a standard approach to Christmas storytelling, as perfected by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, but few Christmas films dig into the guilt and circumstances of its characters quite like Tokyo Godfathers. The characters are all grieving and broken. Gin is a disastrous father who lost his fortune on gambling debts and abandoned his wife and child when he couldn’t repay them. Miyuki lashed out violently at her emotionally-distant father and fled her home in shame in the aftermath. Hana is the only one of them who isn’t trying to atone for her past—her partner died and she’s been homeless since—but she’s motivated to return Kiyoko to her mother so she can forgive the woman for abandoning her, and by proxy forgive her own mother for abandoning her when she was a child. Hana is not motivated by guilt, but by comprehending the opportunity for reconciliation, which is key to the film’s thematic meaning. Thus, Hana’s the character best able to grasp the significance of their quest.

Tokyo Godfathers is a film with deep sympathy for its protagonists. But it also extends that sympathy to other characters on the margins and even the woman that abandoned Kiyoko in the first place. In perhaps the film’s most pronounced moment of coincidence, Hana and Miyuki run past a woman attempting to jump off a bridge, only to pull her back to safety at the last moment. It turns out this is Kiyoko’s mother, or so they think at the moment. They give Kiyoko to the woman and think they’ve achieved their quest. But as Gin learns elsewhere from the woman’s husband, she is not Kiyoko’s mother. She was a grieving mother who lost a child in the same hospital that Kiyoko was born at. After her child died, she stole Kiyoko in desperation, intending to raise her as her own, but ended up abandoning her in the trash out of shame. Thus, Hana’s comment about needing to forgive the woman that abandoned Kiyoko becomes key, as the woman did something truly unforgivable, not only abandoning Kiyoko, but stealing her from her mother in the first place.

Through this revelation about the woman that abandoned Kiyoko, Kon is clarifying his interest in the outcasts of Tokyo. The film’s heroes are outcasts, but so are the other people they meet along the way. Kon uses their place at the margins of society to comment and critique Japanese culture, much as he did in Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. But instead of criticizing the film industry, he focuses on society in general and shows how society prefers to ignore people like Gin, Hana, and Miyuki, and even the woman that stole and abandoned Kiyoko. During an early scene, Gin, Hana, and Miyuki ride the subway and all the other passengers silently plug their noses, disgusted by Gin’s smell. Later, a bunch of bored teens attack Gin and another homeless man, claiming to want to “clean up the streets” by getting rid of some homeless people.

Gin, Hana, and Miyuki are treated as trash by others, who only react negatively to them if they notice them at all. The normal people in the film are happier just to ignore them and pay no attention to the trash in their streets. But that’s also why Gin, Hana, and Miyuki are the ones to find Kiyoko in the first place; they don’t ignore the trash on the margins, but live within it, so they can find a child hidden away in bags of garbage while others would ignore it. Such a component to the narrative shows how Kon is demonstrating that those on the margins are often the people with the greatest capacity for sympathy, which is another Christian element of the film. (While it’s unlikely that Kon was himself Christian, he was undoubtedly interested in the religion’s theological lessons.)

Kon may not be up to his usual meta-narrative tricks in Tokyo Godfathers, but he’s still demonstrating the same degree of patience and understanding with the characters as in his previous films. Furthermore, the animation is as stunning as ever, with a wealth of character drawn into the protagonists and others in the film. Kon also again demonstrates a knack for composing animated frames like they’re live action, with attention to framing and even lenses in the way things are drawn. In one scene, Hana gets enraged at Gin’s lies and Kon warps the perspective of the shot with Hana’s face rounded and distorted, mimicking the way that a wide lens would warp a person’s face in close-up in a live action film. It’s the kind of filmmaking detail that you don’t normally get in animated films.

As well, Kon also has fun with such a conventional narrative. He weaves Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 into the film, cueing up famous musical moments during scenes of spectacular coincidence. For instance, when Gin realizes that the nurse at the hospital is his estranged daughter—who’s also called Kiyoko—Kon has “Ode to Joy” swell over the soundtrack, as if divine providence has burst forth from the heavens in that exact moment. In other moments, he has the characters comment on the ridiculousness of their own situation. Early on, Gin says that “We’re homeless bums, not action movie heroes,” which becomes hilariously ironic during the action-packed climax when Gin gets to play hero as they chase the woman who stole Kiyoko in order to rescue the baby.

This entire approach reaches its apex in the final moment of the film when Miyuki’s father enters their hospital room only for Miyuki to freeze at the sight of him. Kon cuts to a shot of Kiyoko smiling happily in her mother’s arms, staring right at the camera—it’s as if she’s winking at us and letting us know that such reconciliations were her plan all along. If you find such an ending overly cutesy, Tokyo Godfathers may wear out its welcome with you. It’s undoubtedly Satoshi Kon’s most sentimental and conventional film. But there’s a wealth of humanity within its well-worn Christmas movie conventions and narrative full of coincidence and miraculous happenings. It’s a film that truly embodies the Christmas spirit. It doesn’t reduce the Christmas season to mere family bonding, but views it within its religious context as a season of spiritual renewal and redemption, a time of year when the promise of divine grace is fulfilled.

8 out of 10

Tokyo Godfathers (2003, Japan)

Directed by Satoshi Kon; written by Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon, from a story by Satoshi Kon; starring Toru Emori, Yoshiaki Umegaki, Aya Okamoto.

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