Christmas and childhood are inextricably linked. Whether you’re religious and believe in the story of the birth of Jesus or you were just a child that believed in Santa Claus and woke up early on Christmas Day to open presents, there’s a universal sense of wonder and purpose to the biggest holiday of the year. On top of that, seeing a newborn baby in any context awakens something in us, and legendary director Satoshi Kon recognizes and uses that universal feeling to create a brilliant and timeless film in Tokyo Godfathers.
On Christmas Eve in Tokyo, three homeless figures – Gin, an alcoholic middle-aged man, Hana, a former drag queen transgendered woman, and Miyuki, a teenage runaway girl – find an abandoned newborn baby while digging through a dumpster. It’s not quite a manger surrounded by animals, but it’s close. The film touches on a lot of issues: transgender/gay characters, religion and belief in fate or a higher power, and especially poverty and homelessness. On each of these points, Kon is both philosophical and empathetic without being patronizing.
Most of all, Tokyo Godfathers is a found family film, with each character playing the role in a typical nuclear household, in the way that a husband and wife, or parent and child, will bicker and fight and make up (as Hana says, “being able to speak freely is the lifeblood of love”). It fully realizes and humanizes each of them, with their own pasts and flaws and emotions and senses of humor and wounds and dreams. As the family they’ve chosen rather than the ones they were born into, they are there for each other while trying to fill the gaping holes in each of their own lives. Over the course of the movie, they are forced to reckon with themselves and their pasts as well as with each other.
This isn’t a thriller or an action movie, as Gin reminds them over and over again. Kon shows us a textured, unvarnished, and live-in version of Tokyo that we don’t usually see in movies, away from the flashy lights of Shibuya Crossing and far below the Tokyo Skytree. Our protagonists have largely accepted their stations in life, but can’t help risking the little they have to give the baby its own hope for a better life and a happier family than they had. They christen the baby “Kiyoko”, a translation from the Japanese Silent Night meaning “pure child.” Kiyoko represents something that each of them has lost and deeply desire, and gives each of them a strong sense of purpose again.
Tokyo Godfathers is not what first comes to mind when you think of a Christmas movie. It isn’t cheery or festive, nor does it involve a small-town gal falling in love with a big-city lawyer or whatever else Hallmark and Netflix are churning out these days. It is dramatic and farcical and at times darkly and anguishingly honest. But it is completely and utterly a Christmas movie, symbolically and thematically, about family and a newborn baby and with themes of redemption and hope. It is a profoundly modern and relevant movie, and at a scant 93 minutes, there’s no excuse not to work Tokyo Godfathers in your annual Christmas movie rotation.
Now streaming on Tubi.
