Tôkyô goddofâzâzu (original title) / 2003 / animation, adventure, comedy / 1h 32min / directed by Kantemir Balagov / country: Japan / language: Japanese / subtitles: English
“In Japan animation is not seen as the exclusive realm of children’s and family films, but is often used for adult, science fiction and action stories, where it allows a kind of freedom impossible in real life. Some Hollywood films strain so desperately against the constraints of the possible that you wish they’d just caved in and gone with animation . . . Here is “Tokyo Godfathers,” an animated film both harrowing and heartwarming, about a story that will never, ever, be remade by Disney. It’s about three homeless people — an alcoholic, a drag queen and a girl of about 11 — who find an abandoned baby in the trash on a cold Christmas Eve, and try for a few days to give it a home. The title makes a nod to John Ford’s “3 Godfathers” (1948), where three desperados (led by John Wayne) rescue a baby from its dying mother on Christmas Eve and try to raise it, at one point substituting axle grease for baby oil . . . The movie’s story is melodrama crossed with pathos, sometimes startling hard-boiled action, and enormous coincidence. The streets of Tokyo seem empty and grim as the three godparents protect the child and eventually begin a search for its true parents. And the story involving those parents is more complicated than we imagine. There are scenes in an abandoned house, in an alley of homeless dwellings, in a drugstore, that seem forlorn and hopeless, and then other scenes of surprising warmth, leading up to a sensational ending and a quite remarkable development in which two lives are saved in a way possible only in animation.”
–[Thus Spake The Great] Roger Ebert
In modern-day Tokyo, three homeless people’s lives are changed forever when they discover a baby girl at a garbage dump on Christmas Eve. As the New Year fast approaches, these three forgotten members of society band together to solve the mystery of the abandoned child and the fate of her parents. Along the way, encounters with seemingly unrelated events and people force them to confront their own haunted pasts, as they learn to face their future, together.Co-written by Keiko Nobumoto (Cowboy Bebop) and featuring a whimsical score by Keiichi Suzuki, Tokyo Godfathers is a masterpiece by turns heartfelt, hilarious and highly original, a tale of hope and redemption in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. (source)
LUMIERE CINEMA 