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Tokyo Godfathers
R4 - Australia - Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Noor Razzak (7th November 2004). |
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The Film
 Filmmaker Satoshi Kon began his career as a Manga artist, eventually focusing his talents to animation. Having worked throughout Japan with the many illustrious animation houses as a background artist it wasn’t until 1995 when his talents as a storyteller were noticed. He directed an episode as part of the Memories anthology, the episode Magnetic Rose garnered Kon critical and fan praise, which soon allowed him the opportunity to make his own feature-length animated film that became 1997’s Perfect Blue, which was followed by 2001’s Millennium Actress both box office hits in his native Japan and cult favourites worldwide. Throughout his career Kon has stayed true to traditional animation processes, and focuses on characters and story arcs throughout his works, these practices culminated to what many call his finest work to date Tokyo Godfathers Tokyo Godfathers is a modern-day fable that spins a story of adventure, love and redemption with fantastic visuals, endearing characters and movie magic that literally lights up the screen. It’s Christmas Eve in Tokyo and three homeless people, Gin (Aya Okamoto), Miyuki (Yoshiaki Umegaki) and Hana (Yoshiaki Umegaki) whose lives are changed forever when they discover a baby girl in a garbage dump. Banding together to solve the mystery of the abandoned child, the trio set out to learn the fate of her parents. But along the way, these forgotten members of society will confront their own haunted pasts, as they learn to face their future together. As soon as we are introduced to the main characters we are sent down this journey with them to find the parents, each character’s storyline and background is wonderfully placed through the story and we learn a little more about each one as the night goes on and the trio get into one situation after another. The structure of the story continues to interest the viewer in taking the ride with these three characters and as the story progresses their bond, friendship and loyalties are all put to the test in this wonderfully conceived and animated tale. This film features excellently written dialogue, and the performances are a seamless blend of animation style and voice acting that works so well together you’d swear you were watching real actors. Mixed with a unique and original visual style and you really can’t go wrong, in fact since Toy Story there has been a boom in computer generated animation, even the once mighty Disney have dropped their traditional animation departments to make way for the future of CGI, and despite this it’s refreshing to see an animated film the way they used to be done, with hand-drawn characters. The only CG elements you’ll see in this film are background matte shots and wide cityscape shots that would have taken much longer to animated the traditional way. Satoshi Kon has managed to create an engaging, fun and wonderfully realised film. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great viewing experience.
Video
Presented in the film’s original widescreen ratio of 1.85:1, this anamorphic transfer is excellent. The image is sharp and background detail is immaculate, black levels are bold and there is plenty of shadow detail for even the most discerning viewer. Colours are rendered true to the director’s vision, they are muted and the transfer presents it accurately. I could not detect any flaws, this is a top-notch transfer.
Audio
This disc includes three audio tracks, a Japanese DTS 5.1 surround track, a Japanese and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround tracks. For the purposes of this review I chose to view the film with the DTS track. The majority of this film is dialogue based, and that comes out very clear and distortion free, sound effects and the score also feature accurate 5.1 separation and are integrated within the dialogue without feeling out of place. Generally the soundtrack supports the transfer quite well, although there appears to be a lot of background city action that the soundtrack doesn’t support, it isn’t as dynamic as I would have liked.
Extras
Columbia has only included the film’s original theatrical trailer as well as a series of bonus trailers, which include "Steamboy", "Metropolis", "Cowboy Bebop", "Memories", "Cyborg 009", "Astro Boy" and "warriors of Heaven and Earth".
Overall
Tokyo Godfathers is a wonderfully realised animation that features a strong script, lovable and well-developed characters and that is beautifully drawn. It’s refreshing to see a traditionally animated film especially since computer animation is taking the world by storm. The DVD packs a top grade transfer and adequate surround track, unfortunately aside from some trailers there are no other extras, it would have been nice to have included some making-of material at the very least.
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