Three Down-and-Outs Rescue a Foundling From the Trash
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 16, 2004
Samuel Goldwyn Films
A child is born: Gin, alcoholic and homeless, and Miyuki, a runaway girl, with the baby they've found, in "Tokyo Godfathers."
Animated Films
Kon, Satoshi
Tokyo (Japan)
t is curious that animation, in many ways the freest form of filmmaking, should also be among the most convention-bound. In the United States, feature-length animation is synonymous with children's entertainment, and even in Japan, where anime occupies a much broader cultural niche, much of it is confined to the science fiction and fantasy genres. Satoshi Kon, a 39-year-old Japanese director whose third film, "Tokyo Godfathers," opens today, is happily oblivious to such constraints. His previous movie,"Millennium Actress," which had a brief commercial release in the United States last year, was beyond category a meticulously drawn surrealist pseudo-documentary that was also a pen-and-ink primer in classical Japanese live-action cinema.
"Tokyo Godfathers" is only slightly less paradoxical. Apparently inspired by "Three Godfathers," an unstintingly maudlin John Ford western from 1948 (starring John Wayne as the leader of three outlaws who take care of an orphaned baby), the movie is a kind of neorealist cartoon, a heartfelt urban fable about human decency among the down-and-out. For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth. Mr. Kon's exuberant love of the city to say nothing of his free-wheeling, slightly goofy eclecticism is perhaps best expressed during the end credits, when the landmarks of its skyline wiggle and gyrate to the rhythms of a techno-disco, Japanese-language version of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
By then you may find this musical message redundant, since the visual and narrative joys of the movie itself are so ample. As in many other anime features, the story is at once fairy-tale simple and epically convoluted. On Christmas Eve three homeless people a shaggy alcoholic named Gin, a middle-aged transvestite named Hana and a teenage runaway named Miyuki discover an abandoned infant in a pile of discarded books and papers. As they follow a meandering trail that they hope will lead them to the baby's parents, they revisit their own unhappy pasts. They also traverse a city landscape full of danger and surprise, bumping into unsympathetic middle-class types, nightclub dancers, gangsters and a family of Latin American immigrants.
The city that so mystified the uprooted Americans in Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" is, if anything, even more vividly and dangerously mysterious to the three footloose natives. The landscape of "Tokyo Godfathers" is marvelously various and rendered in extraordinary detail. The human figures are flat, and their movements are sometimes rendered through a series of still pictures, like comic book frames, while the backgrounds are three-dimensional and unceasingly kinetic. At one point, as Hana, Miyuki and Gin argue outside a drab cement-block hospital at night, the fluorescent lights in the windows flicker on and off, an effect that deepens both the film's realism and its sense of wonder.
But though you may sometimes wish you could stop the projector and examine each frame as you would a painting, the shaggy-dog story has its own antic, slightly gooey charm. In a live-action film, the teary talk of angels, Christmas miracles and unfulfilled parental dreams might be hard to take, but Mr. Kon's cool, comic-book style defuses the sentimental excess. Instead, the characters, with their frozen, emphatic expressions and exaggerated voices, take on an appealing eccentricity, and by the time those buildings start dancing, you will be sorry to see them go.
"Tokyo Godfathers" opens today in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Berkeley and Irvine, Calif. It is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for some violent and otherwise potentially upsetting scenes.
TOKYO GODFATHERS
Directed by Satoshi Kon; written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) by Keiko Nobumoto and Mr. Kon, developed by Masao Maruyama and based on a story by Mr. Kon; director of photography, Katsutoshi Sugai; edited by Takeshi Seyama and Kashiko Kimura; music by Keiichi Suzuki; animation director, Kenichi Konishi; art director, Nobutaka Ike; released by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Destination Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 91 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH THE VOICES OF: Toru Emori (Gin), Yoshiaki Umegaki (Hana), Aya Okamoto (Miyuki), Shozo Iizuka (Oota), Seizo Kato (Mother) and Hiroya Ishimaru (Yasuo).
Average Reader Rating:4 Stars Rate This
Ce mec je doute qu'il ait vus le film, et encore plus qu'il se soit interessé un tant soit peu à S-Kon !
