Movie Square

For good or bad there are certain things one comes to expect when watching animes especially after watching them for many years. Surely the avid anime enthusiast would like to see more and more serious anime films, but at the same time they’d like an anime feel to their films… what’s most important though is whether or not the film is intriguing, creative, and powerful. This film fails short of all of those things and instead pretends to be something it isn’t.

This didn’t have an anime feel… which wasn’t really a problem for me – I’ve seen a number of anime movies which were serious, but this movie was – in my opinion – about as horrible as they come.

Trying to show itself off as a feel good anime film about Christmas (how many damn Christmas-happy movies do we have out there?), this anime follows the same premise as thousands of films before it and fails in the face of them. “A Christmas Story” and all of those films far surpass both the quality and thematic/story-delivery found within Tokyo Godfathers.

Are we supposed to like it because these themes are found within a Japanese animation? I doubt anyone could really say that the visuals were great (they were not, but that’s beside the point since visuals aren’t all that matters), I doubt anyone can even say this film was really all that original (the only thing semi-original about it is the cast of “odd fellow” characters like the street bum with the heart of gold who wants nothing more than to have a child of her own… except she is a transvestite, really a man).

I feel really bad about posting this review considering so many people enjoyed it, but I can only guess that they haven’t watched very many Christmas movies in the past or that they have little to no capacity for judging films accurately.

The director however is one of my favorite – I deeply enjoyed Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress is perhaps my favorite anime movie ever made – after watching this movie though I’m kind of disappointed that fans of decided to “cling” onto this movie and call it a classic when in reality it mimics half a dozen non-animated titles and brings nothing new or intriguing to the table.

Furuya was successful in taking a bland film, creating such a big hype over it by attaching his renowned name to it and putting a child in it and some heart breaking tales already told time and again. The audience bought it up… too bad. You don’t need to feel ashamed to say it really isn’t as special as it tries to present itself as.

Oh well, perhaps you really need to be a hardcore sentimentalist to like this film. Here is the film’s ultra-negative review by an informed reviewer… I sincerely hope people take my words into consideration not merely rate this as “unhelpful” because they disagree with it (then again, that’s the style on Amazon these days isn’t it?).
Rating: 1 / 5

“Tokyo Godfathers” is not, as the title would suggest, a film about the Japanese mafia, but rather a sentimental fable about three homeless people – a destitute gambler, a lovesick transvestite and an ill-tempered runaway – who find an abandoned newborn babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a dumpster, on Christmas Day. The film recounts their journey through the city as they search for the little girl’s mother.

This animated feature is indeed lovely to look at, capturing the stark beauty of its snowy urban landscape in finely drawn detail. The story, however, steeped in sentimentality and riddled with coincidence, plays like a third-rate Dickens melodrama, minus the richness of character and subtlety of wit the Master would have brought to the task. The three main characters aren’t particularly interesting, and the story, such as it is, is tedious, unfocused and rambling. I guess there has to be a reason for a story to be done in animated form, but “Tokyo Godfathers” fails to provide us with that reason. The backgrounds are pretty, but the film itself is instantly forgettable.

Rating: 2 / 5

The lives of three homeless people are plunged into chaos when they find an abandoned baby on new-year’s eve. Do they keep it or do they start an impossible search for the parents in snowbound Tokyo?

Diverting, but felt like it was not explored as fully as it could have been. The characters are definitely fascinating, but seem to lack something in depth.
Rating: 3 / 5