Tokyo Godfathers
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| Tokyo Godfathers | |
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.jpg/200px-Tokyo_Godfathers_(Movie_Poster).jpg) |
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| Directed by | Satoshi Kon |
| Produced by | Masao Maruyama Masao Takiyama Shinichi Kobayashi Taro Maki |
| Written by | Satoshi Kon Keiko Nobumoto |
| Starring | Aya Okamoto Toru Emori Yoshiaki Umegaki |
| Music by | Keiichi Suzuki Moonriders |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Entertainment Destination Films (USA) |
| Release date(s) |  December 29, 2003 January 16, 2004 |
| Running time | 92 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Tokyo Godfathers (東京ゴッドファーザーズ Tōkyō Goddofāzāzu?) is a 2003 anime film by Japanese director Satoshi Kon.
Tokyo Godfathers is Kon's third animated movie, which he wrote and directed. Keiko Nobumoto, noted for being the creator of the Wolf's Rain series and a head scriptwriter for Cowboy Bebop, was also involved in the film's production.
Tokyo Godfathers received an Excellence Prize at the 2003 Japan Media Arts Festival.
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[edit] Plot
One Christmas eve, three homeless people – Gin (ギン?), a gruff, middle-aged hobo, Hana (ハナ?), an okama, and Miyuki (ミユキ?), a runaway girl – discover an abandoned newborn while searching in some trash for Hana's Christmas present for Miyuki. Deposited with the baby is a note asking the finder to take good care of the unnamed baby and a bag containing clues to the parent's identity. Using pictures of the baby's parents and a club's card found in the bag, the trio set out to find the baby's parents, even though Hana wants to keep the baby since it makes him feel like a mother. Gin, an alcoholic, knows that they can never give the baby a good life and insists that they return it. Hana eventually agrees and they set off to the address on the card with the baby, whom Hana names Kiyoko (清子?), "pure child," as Christmas Eve is the purest night of the year.
[edit] Synopsis
Along the way, Gin tells Hana that he used to have a wife and daughter, before he was an alcoholic. He made money by racing bicycles, but when his daughter became ill, he threw a race for a get-rich-quick scheme to get the money for her medicine. The venture failed, and his wife and daughter died.
They board a light train but, after Miyuki scapes through one of the windows after seeing her father in a passing convoy, they begin to wander in the streets. They enter to a graveyard looking for something whereupon to feed the baby; luckily, they find an offering containing milk. Then the group find a high-ranking yakuza man who is trapped under his car. After they free him, they ask him about the adress of the club shown in the card they found with the baby, and he gratefully agrees to take them to the club, where his daughter (also named Kiyoko) is getting married to its owner.
The baby begins to cry and Miyuki takes her into the bathroom to change her diaper. Gin becomes angry when he sees the groom and tells Hana that the groom was the one who convinced him to throw the race. The groom, meanwhile, tells them that the woman in the picture (the baby's mother) was someone who used to come to the club named Sachiko. He gives them Sachiko's address, but the party is interrupted when a maid is revealed to be a Hispanic hit man in disguise.
After unsuccessfully attempting to shoot the bride's father, but hitting the groom instead, the hit man kidnaps Miyuki and Kiyoko (the baby) and takes them back to his home where he leaves them with his much warmer wife. There, Miyuki shows the wife some pictures of her family including her policeman father, religious mother, and her cat, Angel. Miyuki begins to cry and tells the wife that she ran away from home after stabbing her father.
Meanwhile, Hana and Gin have an argument over what to do next. Hana wants to follow the hit man to rescue the kidnapped girls. Gin wants to call the police. Hana yells at him and calls a taxi and tells the driver to take him where he drove the hit man. Gin, meanwhile, finds a very old homeless man dying in the street. Gin examines the picture of Sachiko and her husband. The old man dies after giving Gin a little red bag and, just as Gin recognizes the background of the picture, some teenagers show up and beat him and the deceased old man severely just for fun.
Miyuki, meanwhile, has a dream that begins with her stabbing her father and accusing him of getting rid of Angel. Her father then turns into Gin, her mother turns into Hana, and "Angel" is shown as the baby Kiyoko. Hana in the taxi drives up to the place where the hitman, Miyuki, and Kiyoko were dropped off. While running through the neighborhood looking for the girls, he is seen coughing up blood. Hana finds the girls and they go off to find a place to stay the night. Hana takes them to a club he used to work at, where he is warmly greeted home by his "mother" (another drag queen who raised him). Gin, who was found by another member of the club, is also there. Hana and his "mother" talk about the death of Hana's boyfriend. Her "mother" asks if it was AIDS. Hana tells her that he slipped on the soap. Hana then reveals how he left the club after attacking an especially rude customer.
Gin tells Hana where the picture was taken and they go to Sachiko's old house. They find out that Sachiko's marriage with her husband was not a happy one, and Miyuki finds a piece of newspaper with a message from her parents, asking her to come home. Miyuki tries to call her father, but is too scared to speak to him. The group is resting at a store and told to leave by the shopkeeper. While arguing in front of the store, a runaway ambulance goes out of control and rams into the store where they had been sitting a moment before. Hana attributes their escape to God.
Despite being uninjured, Hana collapses and coughs up blood. He is taken to a hospital where it is suggested that he is suffering from AIDS. While at the hospital Gin finds his daughter (also named Kiyoko), who is alive and working as a nurse. Hana realizes that Gin lied to him and was never a bike racer. Instead, he owned a bicycle shop but ran off when his gambling debts grew too large. Hana becomes angry and tells Gin's daughter about her father's lies and storms out. Miyuki follows with Kiyoko.
As they consider taking the baby to the police, they find Sachiko, standing at the edge of a bridge about to commit suicide. They stop her and yell at her for abandoning her baby. Sachiko insists that her husband got rid of the baby without her knowledge; they return it happily to her. Meanwhile, Gin sees a "missing" notice at the hospital for a baby that looks exactly like Kiyoko. He finds Sachiko's husband and realizes that Sachiko stole Kiyoko from the hospital. He finds Hana and Miyuki and together they chase down Sachiko.
They find her in a park attempting to breast feed Kiyoko, but the baby refuses and cries. Sachiko panics when she sees the trio heading after her and steals a truck as Gin steals a policeman's bike and the other two chase after her in the same taxi cab from before. Gin tries to take Kiyoko back through the truck's passenger seat but Sachiko crashes into a building, knocking Gin off with the baby. When Sachiko takes the baby back with her, she races toward the building roof. When Miyuki and Hana manage to catch up, they separate so that Hana stays behind with Gin (who survived the crash), and Miyuki follows Sachiko. After the crash, reporters arrived at the scene and they are now broadcasting the news. Just before the baby thief's second attempt at suicide, Miyuki screams for Sachiko to stop.
Sachiko finally confesses that her own baby had died before it was born and when she saw a healthy baby in the hospital (one that smiled at her), she took her. She believed that her husband could cope with it. Sachiko again tries to jump off, but her husband comes out of his apartment (just across the street) and screams at her to stop, telling her that they can start a new life. Sachiko mutters that she needs to restart hers first and jumps off. Miyuki manages to get a hold of her, leaving Sachiko's legs dangling from above as the people down below watch in fear. Miyuki tells Sachiko she is ruining Kiyoko's life. When Sachiko looks down upon the stolen baby, Kiyoko is very quiet, as if saying "I want to go home".
Miyuki accidentally loses her balance, but Gin and Hana arrive atop the building in time and catch her. Sachiko, startled by all the happenings, accidentally drops the baby off of the building and Hana jumps after Kiyoko. He is able to catch the baby, but was left dangling from a banner hanging loosely from the side of the building. He loses his grip and falls, but the first sunlight appears and a strong wind blows Hana with Kiyoko in his arms down to the ground safe and sound.
Hana, Miyuki and Gin are taken to the hospital. Miyuki hands Gin his cigarettes (even when Miyuki reminds him that smoking in a hospital is forbidden), and she makes the small red bag fall to the floor, revealing the winner lottery ticket. Kiyoko's parents want to ask the trio to become Kiyoko's godparents, so the police inspector in charge of finding Kiyoko lets them in and is extremely surprised to see Miyuki. She stares back at him and whispers "Dad".
[edit] Source
The story is patterned and partially named after the 1948 John Ford Western film 3 Godfathers, in which a trio of thieves come to be responsible for a newborn baby. Other films using a similar theme are Three Men and a Baby and The Ice Age.
[edit] Trivia
Certain scenes also have some references to Satoshi Kon's other series or reflect the date itself in the movie.
- In one scene, three women are heard saying "Of course not, of course not!". In Satoshi Kon's TV series Paranoia Agent, the three women star in the episode "ETC" with the same catchphrase.
- There are innumberable recurring instances of the digits 12-25 (i.e., the date of Christmas), such as on license plates, in phone numbers, on taxi meters, and on lottery tickets.
- In one scene, two movie posters are visible on a store's window: one of Millennium Actress, and the other of Perfect Blue. Both of the films were directed by Satoshi Kon.
[edit] Cast
- Toru Emori - Gin (voice)
- Aya Okamoto - Miyuki (voice)
- Yoshiaki Umegaki - Hana (voice)
- Shōzō Iizuka - Ōta (voice)
- Inuko Inuyama - Kurumizawa
[edit] External links
- Tokyo Godfathers (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
- Tokyo Godfathers Review at Anime+ Podcast
- Tokyo Godfathers Review at Animeworld
- 東京ゴッドファーザーズ (Tōkyō Goddofāzāzu) (Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-07-21.
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