Tokyo Godfathers
dir. Satoshi Kon
Destination Films

No man is an island, entire of itself;/ every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;/ if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,/ as well as if a promontory were,/ as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;/ any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;/ and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;/ it tolls for thee.
— John Donne

There are probably people hiding behind issues of the New Yorker who would tell you that a John Donne meditation has no place in a cartoon, let alone one from Japan that features homeless people as its heroes. They should be told that Tokyo Godfathers tolls for thee. When one character in the film says, "no man is an island," it's played as a punch line, but it drives home that the protagonists, among others, are intrinsically connected. So, like the best intellectual anime, Tokyo Godfathers employs its plethora of references to maximum effect. After all, the film's theme emerges from the same literature that inspired artists as dissimilar as Ernest Hemingway and Metallica. "No man is an island," indeed.

Tokyo Godfathers takes superficial cues from 3 Godfathers, a mostly forgotten John Ford western in which outlaws John Wayne & Co. take an orphaned baby across the desert to safety and, of course, learn valuable lessons about life. Tokyo Godfathers' homeless trio — the drunken gambler Gin, the runaway teen Miyuki and the fallen drag queen Hana (the Wayne role, natch) — finds an abandoned infant in a pile of trash and embarks on a long, strange trip of detective work to uncover who ditched it. Along the way, the three begin to redeem their respective pasts and realize themselves as an ersatz family. In Ford's version, the story is beautiful to look at but otherwise mawkish. As anime, it is beautiful to look at and exhibits an emotional honesty not usually associated with animation. It may sound trite here, but only because, in the anime of writer-director Satoshi Kon, the story is not as important as the telling.

Kon made a name for himself with narrative experiments that can only be labeled, probably incorrectly, as "transcendental." His directorial debut, Perfect Blue, is a thriller about a pop idol-turned-actress relentlessly stalked and driven to the point of not being able to distinguish between her performer self and her real self. Thriller is a genre rarely, if ever, seen in anime, but due to the medium's boundless nature, perspectives of reality are jostled and misrepresented to a degree that would make Hitchcock jealous. Kon's follow-up, Millennium Actress, is simply about shooting a documentary interview with an aging Japanese actress, yet it is told with a purée of genres including biography, documentary and Japanese costume epics. Animation allows for traditional cinematic time and space to be severed as the interviewer literally steps into the actress's life and movies. From this, a near-perfect postmodern narrative is created, a feat only rightly achieved in the post-post-pomo megalopolis of Tokyo.

Tokyo Godfathers is more straightforward. Kon's flights of fancy occur primarily as dream sequences and flashbacks, leaving room for the plot to linearly unfold. The plot itself, however, heavily relies on coincidences of time, place and relationship. Clues lead the three to the wedding of the same man who led Gin to homelessness, and later an injured Gin is taken in by the drag queens Hana once worked with; an unassuming Hana also ends up with them for different reasons. Later, Gin decides to give up gambling and turn his life around, and soon after he encounters his own abandoned daughter. Mannered happenstance occurs exponentially from there — it becomes apparent that the homeless "family" mirrors the characters who abandoned the baby: Gin is the gambling father, Hana is the "mother" who wants a baby who isn't hers and Miyuki, the runaway, is the found infant. Kiyoko, the name given to the baby, is also the name of Gin's neglected daughter. Every beat of the story is built on interconnections that at first seems like coincidence.

A multitude of chance that would normally elicit groans is Kon's way of working in the transcendentalism. Every character in the film is linked in one way or another, whether by plot, character type or both. Corny story cheats become believable, and meaningful, because the whole story works this way. And why shouldn't it? Connection builds on connection builds on connection — this is the world of Tokyo Godfathers and, according to Donne, the world we live in. The movie's baby-saving climax shows Hana and the swaddling-clothed MacGuffin floating to safety by the wind between Tokyo high-rises. A moment that could only be pulled off gracefully in animation, it might be the slickest use of deus ex machina ever, and it affirms that every man is a piece of the continent. Or more correct, that every homeless person, the most allied to avenues and alleyways, is a piece of the city.

All this self-conscious connectedness makes the film's moralizing on character redemption, family values and homelessness that much more, believe it or not, sincere. Ford's live-action Hollywood flick, despite starring the Duke, is just plain maudlin. But even that is somewhat redeemed by Tokyo Godfathers, as the two are, you know, connected.

— Tony Nigro (tony@superheronamedtony.com)