is a 2003 Japanese animated Christmas tragicomedy adventure film written and directed by Satoshi Kon. The film stars live-action actors such as Toru Emori, Yoshiaki Umegaki, and Aya Okamoto as the lead voice actors.
Kon was inspired by the 1948 American film 3 Godfathers to make the film. Unlike Kon's other films, Tokyo Godfathers is grounded more in realism. However, as is typical of Kon's work, the film includes devices that are not straightforward, and Kon himself called it a twisted sentimental story.
Tokyo Godfathers was released in Japan on November 8, 2003, by Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan and in the United States on January 16, 2004, by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Destination Films.
It won the Excellence Award at the 2003 Japan Media Arts Festival and Best Animation Film at the 58th Mainichi Film Awards.
Plot
One Christmas Eve, three homeless people—middle-aged alcoholic Gin, transgender woman Hana, and teenage runaway Miyuki—discover an abandoned newborn while searching through the garbage, along with a note asking whoever finds the baby to take good care of her and a key leading to a locker containing a bag holding clues to the parents' identity. The trio sets out to find the baby's parents, and Hana names her Kiyoko, after the Japanese title of "Silent Night," meaning "pure child".
Outside a cemetery, the group encounters a yakuza boss trapped under his car. After they rescue him, he gives them his business card and tells them to call if they need anything. He then invites them to the wedding of his daughter, who is marrying the owner of the club where Kiyoko's mother used to work. At the reception, the groom tells them that Kiyoko's mother is a former bar girl named Sachiko. He gives them Sachiko's address, but the reception is interrupted when a Latino hitman arrives and attempts to shoot the bride's father before kidnapping Miyuki and Kiyoko.
At the hitman's home, Miyuki befriends his wife despite their language barrier. As they talk, Miyuki confesses to fleeing her home after stabbing her controlling father when her beloved cat, Angel, went missing, believing that he had gotten rid of it.
While Hana searches for Miyuki and Kiyoko, Gin takes care of an elderly homeless man who is dying in the street. After Gin helps the man into his shelter and he gives Gin a little red bag, the man dies peacefully. A group of teenagers arrive and beat up Gin and the man's corpse.
Meanwhile, Hana locates the girls. Looking for a place to stay, they go to Angel Tower, a club Hana had worked at before assaulting a rude and intoxicated customer years earlier. There they find Gin, who was rescued by another employee of the club. Hana confides that she became homeless following her lover's accidental death. The trio later discover that Sachiko's house has been torn down and that her marriage to her alcoholic gambler husband was on the rocks. Miyuki sees a message from her father in the newspaper proclaiming that Angel has returned home. Realizing her mistake, Miyuki attempts to call her father, only to panic and hang up before she can say a word. The group rests at a convenience store until they are told to leave by the clerk.
Hana collapses, and Gin and Miyuki take her to the hospital, where they spend the last of their money to treat her. There, Gin finds his estranged daughter, who is also named Kiyoko and who he had earlier claimed had died of illness, working as a nurse. Hana berates Gin in front of his daughter for abandoning his family and storms out of the hospital, with Miyuki and baby Kiyoko following. Hana and Miyuki come across a woman about to attempt suicide by jumping from a bridge and stop her, and then realize that she is Sachiko. Sachiko insists that her husband got rid of the baby without her knowledge, and Hana and Miyuki return the baby to her.
Gin finds Sachiko's husband, who confirms that Kiyoko is not their child and was stolen by Sachiko from the hospital. Miyuki chases Sachiko to the top of a building. Sachiko reveals she became pregnant in the hopes it would bring her closer to her husband; when her baby was stillborn, she kidnapped Kiyoko from the hospital, thinking in her grief that Kiyoko was hers. Sachiko jumps off the building; Miyuki catches her before she falls, but Kiyoko is dropped. Hana jumps after her, catching her and clinging to a banner on the side of the building. As the banner begins to give way, a gust of wind miraculously slows its descent, allowing Hana and Kiyoko to land safely on the ground. During their reunion, Miyuki drops the old man's red bag on the floor, revealing a winning lottery jackpot ticket. Back at the hospital, Kiyoko's real parents thank the trio for returning their daughter and ask them to become her godparents. When a police inspector introduces them, he is revealed to be Miyuki's father.
Voice cast
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders mw-collapsible"
|+Tokyo Godfathers cast
! rowspan="2" |Character
! rowspan="2" |Japanese
! colspan="2" |English
|-
!
!
|-
!scope="row"|Gin
|Tooru Emori
|Darren Pleavin
|Jon Avner
|-
!scope="row"|Hana
|
|Russell Wait
|Shakina Nayfack
|-
!scope="row"|Miyuki
|Aya Okamoto
|Candice Moore
|Victoria Grace
|-
!scope="row"|Oota
|Shouzou Iizuka
|
|Jamieson Price
|-
!scope="row"|Mother
|Seizou Katou
|
|Kate Bornstein
|-
!scope="row"|Yasuo
|Hiroya Ishimaru
|
|Kirk Thornton
|-
!scope="row"|Homeless man
|Ryuuji Saikachi
|
|David Manis
|-
!scope="row"|Ishida
|Yuusaku Yara
|
|Crispin Freeman
|-
!scope="row"|Sachiko
|Kyouko Terase
|
|Larissa Gallagher
|-
!scope="row"|Gin's daughter Kiyoko
|Mamiko Noto
|
|Erica Schroeder
|-
!scope="row"|Doctor
|Akio Ootsuka
|
|Jamieson Price
|-
!scope="row"|Arao
|Rikiya Koyama
|
|Michael Sinterniklaas
|-
!scope="row"|Kiyoko
|Satomi Koorogi
|
|Kari Wahlgren
|-
!scope="row"|Kurumizawa
|
|
|Philece Sampler
|-
!scope="row"|Cat lady
|Rie Shibata
|
|Erica Schroeder
|-
!scope="row"|Taxi driver
|Kouichi Yamadera
|
|Marc Thompson
|-
!scope="row"|Yamanouchi
|Kanako Yahara
|
|Philece Sampler
|}
Additional voices
Japanese: Akiko Kawase, Akiko Takeguchi, Atsuko Yuya, Bin Horikawa, Chiyako Shibahara, Eriko Kawasaki, Hidenari Umezu, Kazuaki Itou, Masao Harada, Mitsuru Ogata, Nobuyuki Furuta, Toshitaka Shimizu, Tsuguo Mogami, Yoshinori Sonobe, Yuuto Kazama, Luis Sartor, Myrta Delgado
English (GKIDS):
The original story and screenplay were written by director Satoshi Kon, and co-written by Keiko Nobumoto, known as the screenwriter of the TV drama series Hakusen Nagashi and the TV anime Cowboy Bebop, and the creator of the TV anime Wolf's Rain.
The animation director was Ken'ichi Konishi, who had worked on My Neighbors the Yamadas while at Studio Ghibli, and the Studio director was Shōgo Furuya.
Themes
The motif of Tokyo Godfathers is "coincidence" and "family", and the rough plot is about "three main characters who are not related by blood but live together as if they were a real family, and through a miraculous coincidence triggered by a baby, each of them recovers the connection with their original family that they have lost".
What Kon was conscious of in his direction was "meaningful coincidence", in other words, to create a chain of miraculous events to move the story forward. Kon chose homeless people as his protagonists because he had long been interested in the lives of homeless people. One of the triggers for Kon to come up with Tokyo Godfathers was the idea that they are born even in times of affluence, and at the same time, they are supported because the world is affluent, so they may be said to be kept alive by the city. The other idea was the idea of animism in the city, that even the buildings and alleys of the city may have a soul, and that the main characters step into the other world that overlaps the city. Based on a story in which three homeless people living as a family pick up a baby and try to return it to her parents, Kon imagined a story in which the trio enter a "different world" where strange coincidences occur in succession, and they recover their relationship with their families and society through their adventures, while another protagonist named "Tokyo" is watching over them. These "faces" are not visible from the perspective of the characters, and only the audience can notice them. The movie was released on sub-only DVD on April 13, 2004, and they planned to use DTS for the DVD, but the plan was ultimately scrapped. Announced on December 19, 2019, international animation licensor, GKIDS, in partnership with the original US distributor Destination Films, released the movie on March 9, 2020, with a brand new 4K restoration and a new English dub.
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critics' consensus reads, "Beautiful and substantive, 'Tokyo Godfathers' adds a moving – and somewhat unconventional – entry to the animated Christmas canon." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, calling it "harrowing and heartwarming".
Susan Napier points out that Tokyo Godfathers is part of a trend in anime and manga that depicts families in an increasingly dark fashion, showcasing the problems with traditional families, and attempts by people to construct a "pseudo-family" out of an increasingly fragmented and isolating modern Japanese society. Despite its seemingly traditional ending, the film offers a more radical version of family. Throughout the story these three homeless vagabonds unknowingly form a "pseudo-family" to protect themselves from the outside world and to overcome their personal demons.