Tokyo Godfathers, by Shogo Furuya and Satoshi Kon, is an anime film so content to be mediocre that it is dispiriting to watch. It follows three destitute friends, a man, a transvestite, and a teenage girl, who find a baby on the street and try to take care of it. This alone is cliché and cloying but it only gets worse. The film can't decide if it wants to be melodramatic or realistic and so is filled with scenes of cornballish plot developments and splotched by serious ones (there is scene where a mobster gets shot in the head!). The film is done with too light a touch when it should pound away at the corniness and is too corny when it should earn our respect. So many critics have forgiven the films lukewarm impact for its humanism. I am all for humanism, but I must say that the jarring stereotypes of transvestites (the transvestite character is made to look like freak) make me a little reluctant to praise this humanism critics speak of. I suppose the only real reason to catch this film is its radically weird style, with an awesome chase scene fueled by tacky music that sounds like its from a Sega 'Mario Brothers' game and ending with a shot of a dancing tower.
Review of Tokyo Godfathers
