Tag Archives: Satoshi Kon

The Godfather of Tokyo

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“So the Madhouse studio was in debt,” says Masao Murayama, “and there was this big buy-out. I was happy to sell it on to someone else, and then I thought: now what am I going to do? I put people together. We make things that we love. Am I going to stop?”

Which is why, at the age when most Japanese workers are long-retired, Maruyama found himself setting up Mappa, the Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association, which soon established its credentials with the critical smash of Kids on the Slope. But even then, Maruyama bowed out in 2016, as the studio unleashed In This Corner of the World and Yuri on Ice.

Did he retire? Hell, no. “People like me and Hayao Miyazaki,” he said, “we’re all born in 1941. We were there for the beginnings of anime as we know it. We don’t know when to quit. We don’t know what we would do if we did quit!” And so he founded his newest start-up, the studio M2, at the age of 75.

“This is probably my last,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. “Or is it?”

He is wearing an Astro Boy sweatshirt that recalls his first-ever job, but is remembering a figure from much later in his career.

“I said to Satoshi Kon: I like you. I like your work. There’s greatness in you, but the mainstream just can’t see it. We just don’t get the box office on your films. We did horror with Perfect Blue, we did film history with Millennium Actress. So maybe let’s do something entertaining. And he says: ‘I want to do a thing about three tramps who find an abandoned baby.’”

The result was Tokyo Godfathers, anime’s good-natured, sardonic Christmas movie, in which a foundling child inadvertently propels the cast into a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences that fix their issues, solve their lives, and reunite them with their estranged families. The message, arguably, was universal, but the medium was incredibly, well, Christmassy, unleashed on a Japanese population with barely 1% believers.

“Yeah,” sighs Maruyama. “Nobody came to see that one, either.” He looks out over the packed cinema at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, and raises a quizzical eyebrow. “What did you think?” The crowd bursts into raucous applause for his 14-year-old movie. This frail old man, so shaky that my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to watch him climb some steps, beams with pure joy.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Japan. This article first appeared in NEO 171, 2017.

Christmas Movies: Tokyo Godfathers

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Tokyo-GodfathersThree tramps, alcoholic Gin, transvestite Hana and teen runaway Miyuki, find an abandoned baby while searching through the trash on Christmas Eve. They decide to return it to its mother, only to plunge into a whirl of scandal, kidnapping and attempted murder, all on the one day when Tokyo is supposed to be quiet.

Tokyo Godfathers may have three wise men (one and half of whom are actually female), but its nativity story is not limited to Christian lore, and displays a typically Japanese attitude towards death. A cemetery becomes a treasure trove as the tramps search for votive offerings of sake, and the film’s stand-in for Santa Claus, white beard and all, can only perform his task properly if he dies doing it. The movie alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which similarly features old men bickering over a foundling child in a storm, via John Ford’s 1948 Western 3 Godfathers, but at its heart is a search for kindness and warmth in materialist Japan.

Like Perfect Blue before it, Tokyo Godfathers initially seems like a strange choice for animation. With so many real-world locations, why not film it with real people? But nobody in the metropolitan government was going to approve a live-action film depicting a shanty town in the shadow of Tokyo’s distinctive twin-tower tax office, nor were too many of today’s TV idols likely to sign up for a tale of grunge and poverty; however happy the ending, they might have mussed their hair. The clincher would have been the snow. It is popularly believed that it only falls in Tokyo once every ten years – the presence of snow in Tokyo Godfathers being the first of its many Christmas miracles.

The baby’s arrival sends the tramps scurrying to buy water instead of booze at their local convenience store, much to the shop assistant’s surprise. Hana jokes in the soup queue that she is “eating for two”, only to shock the charity worker the following day when she does indeed turn up with a babe in arms. In its comedy and sentimentality, Tokyo Godfathers is the closest thing we’ll see to an anime pantomime, an end-of-year revel that turns everything on its head. It even features stars having a laugh at being cast against type, such as Koichi Yamadera (Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel), who has a brief cameo as a harassed taxi driver. The movie finds divine inspiration in everyday events, such as a wounded tramp seeing an angel, who turns out to be a bar-girl in fancy dress.

Satoshi Kon’s choice of subject matter is an act of faith in itself – framing the relentless hope and happiness of a Christmas comedy in the stark, realist tones of his other work. Gin walked out on his family over unpaid gambling debts. Hana lost her surrogate family of fellow drag artists after punching out an unappreciative listener to one of her songs. And Miyuki ran away from home over a misunderstanding with her father. Throw in a gangland wedding, a suicidal wife in the middle of a collapsing marriage, and a cross-dressing Filipino assassin, and the result is a seemingly impossible knot of problems to sort out before dawn.

Tokyo Godfathers performed poorly on British DVD, despite higher production values and even more fiendish twists than Kon’s better-known Perfect Blue. In a world where every December sees a rash of cynical, focus-grouped, predictable Christmas specials, Tokyo Godfathers urges its audience to see miracles on every street corner, and it’s good to know that there is a movie with a genuine heart. Since it’s the season to be jolly, why not give Tokyo Godfathers a try? But just remember, anime isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #14, 2005.

2009: The Year in Anime Books

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It has been a good year for worthy books on Japanese animation. Apart from my own Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, of course, there have been a couple of books I have yet to read but suspect I will like: Andrew Osmond’s Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist and Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Surely the prize for best anime book of the year must go to Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point, lovingly translated by Frederik L. Schodt and Beth Cary, and treating the anime fans of the English-speaking world to an unparalleled glimpse inside the mind of the medium’s most famous director, warts and all. Miyazaki is surrounded at all times by a cloud of idle speculation and spin, and it’s great to see him speaking up in his own words. Not wholly about anime, but deeply illuminating about one of its best-publicised elements, was Lowenthal and Platt’s Voice-Over Voice Actor, also published this year.

Osamu Tezuka has enjoyed a revival, with two excellent English language studies of him arriving in swift succession, first from Natsu Onoda Powers in May, and then Helen McCarthy in October. Meanwhile, in Japanese, the “God of Manga” was the subject of the multi-authored The Osamu Tezuka That Nobody Knew, and Yuka Minakawa’s chunky, gossip-ridden tomes, The Rise and Fall of Japanese Animation: Osamu Tezuka School, 1: The Birth of TV Anime, and 2: Psychologist With an Abacus.

Japanese-language books on anime this year have offered some tantalising glimpses behind the scenes. Just before the end of 2008, the Association of Japanese Animations (sic) and Tokyo Bureau of Industrial and Labour Affairs published a new syllabus for trainee animators and those wishing to enter the business, which seemed to carefully airbrush out much of anime history before the millennium. You might argue that on a need-to-know basis, new animators don’t really need to know… but for those of us with a historical perspective, industry stories are vital for keeping a sense of institutional memory in a notoriously amnesiac business. Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, guiding light of Production IG, published The Animation Business and a Non-Conformist Producer’s On-the-Spot Revolution, and Masanobu Komaki published his memoirs from behind the scenes at magazine in My Time at Animec. Meanwhile, Mana Takemura published Magical Girl Days. And in 2008, although I did not acquire it until this year, Mamoru Oshii (yes, him) published a management guide called (deep breath) : Salvation Through Outside Help: Seven Powers for Work That Does Not Fail, which not only included some wonderful insights to the anime movie-making process, but some mental photographs.

Few of these works seemed to have troubled the reading lists of people who call themselves anime fans, or indeed who call themselves anime scholars. It irritates me that so much anime scholarship seems to revolve around the re-invention of the wheel, as hordes of newcomers blithely ignore what has already been published in the field. Enough respect, then, for Simon Richmond, whose Rough Guide to Anime, also published this year, took the trouble to acknowledge his predecessors. If you just like watching Japanese cartoons for fun, then this shouldn’t bother you in the slightest, but anime seems to be attracting a lot of self-styled experts these days, and it wouldn’t kill some of them to pick up a book every now and then. Starting with the Anime Encyclopedia, which really does have some very interesting essays in it, the contents of which I keep finding other people to have ‘discovered’ independently, which is frankly a waste of their time, and of mine!