It’s that time of year after Thanksgiving when the floodgates open and Christmas armageddon arrives. Every radio station is playing the same 10 classic Christmas songs over and over, every TV station is airing Home Alone or some version of A Christmas Carol, and around town, there are more plastic trees than you can count.
For some people, this is their favorite time of the year. The atmosphere of Christmas brings them joy and happiness. Others, however, can never get into the Christmas spirit – and may never. I definitely fall more into the latter category. I can’t call myself a total scrooge, but I can definitely sympathize with anyone who despises the artificial and forced atmosphere of joy brought on by the Christmas season where every product, image or phrase associated with Christmas is crafted to try to get a positive emotional response from you.
You might think that someone who doesn’t enjoy Christmas must be a miserable person who despises their own happiness, and you wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that. However, as someone who just sees Christmas as just another part of the year, smack dab in the middle of my least favorite weather season, I can attest that we don’t hate joy or goodwill. In fact, I love being happy and joyful – who doesn’t? I think my issue, and the issue of some others, comes when we see past the Christmas spirit as an artificial farce and see a forced social responsibility to appear happy rather than actually feeling genuinely joyful.
All the songs tell you that it’s the most wonderful time of the year and that you should feel happy, but what if you don’t? Are we supposed to lie and put on a joyful farce for everyone? For some people, myself included, the answer is no.
Resentment toward that message of Christmas cheer develops when well-meaning people insist that we have to be happy because of an arbitrary date on our calendars. Why lie about how we feel when that would be the more sinister thing to do?
That resentment toward well-meaning people translates to all Christmas-themed media. This is why myself and others dislike “Christmas” movies. It’s why some will jokingly (or sometimes seriously) claim that Die Hard is their favorite Christmas movie.
Like the holiday itself, Christmas movies want to evoke emotions from you. They attempt to fill your heart with warmth and joy. My problem with “Christmas” movies is that, often, the emotions are all they have going for them. If you’re open and receptive to the emotions the film is communicating, then you get something from it. However, many like myself find the messages and emotions in Christmas movies to be forced and feel that they use manipulative tactics to wring disingenuous emotion from the viewer.
Christmas movies often focus on these contrived tactics so much that it comes at the cost of other qualities in the movie. If you don’t feel what the movie is telling you to feel, you’re left with no entertainment value and no positive experience.
All this being said, a Christmas movie would have to take a different approach from the typical sweet and sappy tactics in order to get a scrooge to love the story. The emotion evoked would have to feel genuine. The movie can’t feel like it’s telling the audience to feel a certain way. It also must have entertainment value so that if you aren’t receptive to the emotions being communicated, you can at least say you thoroughly enjoyed yourself.
I think it’s an amusing coincidence that the one person to make a Christmas movie fit for a scrooge is the kind of person that you would least expect to make a Christmas movie.
Satoshi Kon in the early 2000’s was on a critically acclaimed roll. He made a stunning and masterful debut with his thriller Perfect Blue, a damning and horrifying look at the Japanese pop-idol scene. He continued his success with Millennium Actress, a drama celebrating Japanese film history while telling a genuinely touching story about an actress past her prime. Kon was on the cutting edge of animated films for mature audiences. His style was cerebral, thought-provoking and haunting, and his stories had a lasting impact on contemporary Western film (I could write at length about how Darren Aranofsky’s Black Swan is a re-imagining of Kon’s Perfect Blue, or how Christopher Nolan’s Inception borrowed stylistically and thematically from Kon’s last film Paprika).
The last thing anyone expected Kon to make in 2003 was a Christmas movie, but he did. While some directors who venture out into unfamiliar territory fail miserably, the black sheep of Kon’s short filmography still manages to be a great movie, even succeeding in ways that most other movies in the genre do not.
Tokyo Godfathers follows three homeless people – a middle aged man, a drag-queen, and a young girl – after they find a baby abandoned in the trash and attempt to find its parents. In the process of finding the infant a home, these three outcasts find their own sense of belonging in a world they thought had rejected them.
Right away, it’s easy to write off the premise of this movie as your average manipulative Christmas schlock. However, execution is key, and Kon’s unique way of presenting stories helps elevate this above your average holiday flick.
The movie’s message of acceptance and family feels far from preachy or over-bearing. It doesn’t beat you over the head with sentiment and holiday platitudes expecting you to feel something; it just presents a genuine story with characters that have real, human problems, and hopes you can sympathize with them.
All of these characters have a backstory and a reason for why they live on the street. They’re full of regret and fear for the life that they lived. They truly feel rejected by the people who once knew them. Most of the characters in this movie are far from being in the Christmas spirit, and moments of stereotypical, artificial Christmas cheer are used for comedic purposes.
Kon was no doubt aware of the pitfalls of many holiday movies, and as a result, this movie really feels like some of the best classic Christmas tales where the Christmas setting is secondary to the journey of the characters. The emotion displayed in Godfathers is genuine. It doesn’t ask that you cry along with the characters; it just presents their pain as truthfully as it can and lets you react how you want.
When the main female character of the movie, Miyuki, calls her father on a payphone, she hangs up the phone after hearing his voice and sinks to the floor, sobbing. In this scene, the movie isn’t trying to manipulate you into feeling sad; it is presenting its character as a sad, broken little girl who is too scared and full of regret to return home. That honest depiction of vulnerability is far more moving than many contemporary holiday films that try their hardest to get you to feel something.
However, the movie isn’t all depression and sadness. In addition to being a dramatic Christmas film, this is a comedy. That’s ultimately the entertainment value that this film offers besides being a holiday movie.
This movie’s premise, while having the potential to be heartwarming, also has the potential to be hilarious, and it often is. The dialogue and interactions the main cast of characters have with each other are charming and funny. The characters’ contrasting personalities all work to create a light-hearted atmosphere that balances out with the more serious scenes in the movie. It also provides opportunities for Kon to slip in winks to the audience with punch-lines like “We’re homeless bums, not action-movie heroes!” knowing full well he’s going to end the movie with a frenetic car chase.
Besides standing out as a Christmas movie, what makes Godfathers stand out as a Satoshi Kon movie is how reserved Kon’s style is in this movie. Kon’s visual magic lies in his editing, which is often so quick and seamless that it leaves your head spinning and creates for some truly heady experiences. While that editing is still there in small doses, it’s not at the level of Perfect Blue, which used his quick style of editing almost constantly.
Kon is also known for blending reality with fantasy. Perfect Blue blended perception with reality, Millennium Actress blended film with reality and Paprika blended dreams with reality. On the surface, it appears that Kon’s signature theme of blending realities plays no role in Tokyo Godfathers, but I believe it plays a smaller, yet still important, role in the narrative.
Godfathers blends reality with the supernatural in subtle ways, raising the question of divine intervention. The plot hinges on multiple unlikely conveniences. Even the premise itself relies on the convenience of our central characters being at the right place at the right time. For any other movie, relying on these conveniences could be seen as a fatal flaw in the story, but Kon uses them for a greater purpose.
When the trio miraculously finds baby food in a grave yard or when one of the characters finds help in the form of a woman wearing an angel costume, it’s apparent that these incidents are more than coincidence, and that there’s a higher power at work guiding the characters. Kon didn’t write these coincidences into the story lazily. He put them there intentionally to show how, sometimes, things in life just inexplicably work out.
It makes the backdrop of Christmas more appropriate as the characters experience quite a few small, but significant, Christmas miracles throughout the story. Kon uses these plot conveniences to show the magic of Christmas in a way that isn’t super showy or manipulative, but in a way that feels real, and sometimes, in a way that’s ridiculously funny.
With Tokyo Godfathers, Kon created a Christmas movie that even the toughest of scrooges can get some enjoyment out of, and maybe even warm their hearts a little. It presents realistic characters with genuine emotion, it has lots of comedic entertainment value and it weaves the backdrop of Christmas into the narrative in a really creative way.
It’s a very different movie for Kon that shows he was willing to experiment with his style and do things no one expected of him. It even primed him for potentially directing his first family film, something he began working on before his death in 2010, but sadly, it has yet to be completed.
Tokyo Godfathers may not be many people’s favorite Kon film (in its defense, masterpieces like Perfect Blue are kind of hard to beat), but I think I speak for a number of Kon fans when I say it’s probably my favorite Christmas movie. With Tokyo Godfathers, scrooges everywhere have a Christmas movie they can enjoy for the holidays. Now, if only I could find a Christmas movie for the scrooges who also hate subtitles…
Grade: A
