Tokyo Godfathers begins on Christmas Eve in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The three homeless people who become “godfathers” to an abandoned baby (they name “Kiyoko” for purity) will scour the city for the girl’s rightful parents in an odyssey that will lead them to confront their personal demons. You might think comparing the transience of Mary, Joseph and the Three Magi to the plight of the indigent was pretty corny, but Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon pepper the screenplay with lots of jaundiced humor and deadpan payoffs. Impossibly and extravagantly upsetting moments are interspersed with lines like: “You can’t squeeze milk from an old queer’s tits.”
Our heroes bitch, harass and care for each other more than they’d ever admit, but sentimental they are not. Their ill-tempered banter keeps this anime’ moving from slapstick to bathos to action to melodrama. The film was ill-served, at times, by its uneven pacing, undulating between stasis and chaos. One wonders if animators feel obliged to push the kinetic envelope, even in films such as this, that are plainly more character-driven, and where an excess of hi-jinks can be extremely distracting. I would not presume to suggest there is formula when devising the delicate balance of plot (who’s to say Bergman couldn’t have worked a car-chase into Cries and Whispers) but anytime an action pulls you out of the narrative, i.e., you become abruptly aware that you are watching a movie, this is a red flag to intrusion.
The milieu of Tokyo Godfathers, an urban jungle with its squalor, destitution and hordes of the disenfranchised is dense with color, detail and muted vibrance. I don’t think the art director, Nobutaka Ike, was aiming for photorealism or a painterly effect, but maybe a fusion of the two. The depth of each “shot” is startling, and the dreary, stony range of colors has a kind of sheen that’s hard to explain. The sadness of the world comes through but it doesn’t feel oppressive. At times it seems like there’s a twisted, visionary mind at work in the director, Satoski Kon, if not the entire creative team behind Tokyo Godfathers.
There are tableaux of hushed eloquence and eerie, trippy goofs on religious iconography. In one scene, Hana stops to sit down and rest, holding the baby in her lap as the snow starts to fall. She tells the others to go on, that her guardian angel will come to the rescue. She inclines her shawled head in a way that suggests a tawdry Madonna, and the movie takes this quantum leap into rapturous lunacy. As if Kon had hired seraphim to occasionally take control of the cameras. There are numerous instances like this, where you don’t know whether to gasp or laugh.
The godfathers of the title are Gin (Toru Emori) an alcoholic curmudgeon in his fifties, Hana, a transvestite of roughly the same age, and Miyukia (Aya Okamoto) a teen runaway full of piss and vinegar. Without giving away the particulars, none of them are paragons of virtue, but neither are they judged, which they are left to do for themselves. They have become a family to each other, and like many they spend a lot of time reading each other the riot act. Life has dealt them some harsh blows, but never are we asked to pity them. Nor does Tokyo Godfathers deal in quaint, broad strokes. We’re never tempted to use adjectives like gruff, spunky or campy.
I have mixed feelings about the character of Hana (Yoshiaki Umegaki). On the up side, she is arguably the most spiritually enlightened person in the film, perhaps even the moral compass. She has an ongoing relationship with God (that the film never questions or mocks) and an intuitive trust in the everyday miraculous. Caught up in momentary poignance, she composes haiku on the spot. For all her ranting, the results of her kooky behavior are generally to the good. On the down side, she may be as close as Tokyo Godfathers comes to caricature.
Thirty years ago, Hana might have been an eccentric bag lady and I suppose Nobumoto and Kon deserve points for giving a key role to a gay character. She is a mixture of scintillating attributes: haughty, weepy, giddy, pretentious, credulous, effusive. Her litany of self-effacing names: “faggot”, “homo”, “queer” is consistent with her mindset and surroundings. I wish she weren’t quite so shrill, though, so frantic. It’s hard to fight the notion she’s a clown of sorts.
Hana doesn’t just chew the scenery, she gobbles it. At times she seems grotesque, and others positively regal. But clearly she is one of the most intriguing and endearing characters, and we’ve all known guys just like her, however they gender-identify. I have never been one to sacrifice accuracy to political correctness. Just once though, couldn’t filmmakers with this kind of opportunity make the troglodyte gay, just to keep us on our toes?