Tokyo Godfathers

Tokyo Godfathers (2003) takes place in Tokyo on Christmas night. Three homeless people find a baby in a rubbish tip: a middle aged alcoholic, a teenage runaway, and Hana, a trans woman. Instead of taking her to the police they decide to find her mother themselves, and one coincidence after another carries them across the city. The structure comes from John Ford's Three Godfathers, in which three outlaws find a baby in the desert. Satoshi Kon moves it to modern Tokyo and ties it to each of the three confronting the family they walked away from. The coincidences are deliberate and excessive. Kon is playing openly with the tradition of the Christmas miracle; every chance encounter triggers the next and the film offers no excuse for it. Kon's other films, Perfect Blue and Paprika, were psychological puzzles; this is his warmest and most direct work. He died in 2010 at forty six. Hana is treated with unusual seriousness for 2003; the film does not make a joke of her, and she is the emotional centre of the three. It runs 92 minutes. Good for: Satoshi Kon, Christmas stories, and portraits of a city. Less good for: the coincidences come too easily for some viewers, and the plot advances on nothing else. There is suicide and violence in it; this is not animation for children.