The Interest of Solving Mysteries that Ask Questions and Are Betrayed - Looking Back on "Tokyo Godfathers" as a "Mystery Drama" [Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No. 87

Masashi Ando, who has worked as an animation director on Studio Ghibli films, is now in cinemas for his first film, "The Deer King: Yuna and the Promised Journey," directed by Masashi Ando. Originally an animator, Ando has participated in a variety of genres since leaving Ghibli, and was the animation director for Satoshi Kon's "Tokyo Godfathers" (2003).
What did viewers think of "Tokyo Godfathers," in which three homeless people walk around looking for the parents of an abandoned baby between Christmas and New Year's Eve?　I think it was "warm," "humorous," and "humane." ...... From the script level, the film plays out like a mystery drama.

Three clues give purpose to the three homeless people.

First, three homeless men (Gin, a middle-aged man separated from his wife and child, Hana, a gay woman, and Miyuki, a high school girl) find an unidentified baby and discover a coin locker key under the baby's bedding. When they open the coin locker, they find several clues among the many packages.

A] A photo taken by a young couple in front of their house.
B. A key to something.
C] A business card from a snack shop.

Of these, the three pay attention only to [C] and are invited to the wedding reception of the owner of the snack bar. At the reception, Miyuki is unexpectedly taken hostage by a foreign assassin, and Gin and Hana end up fighting (note that [A] is left in Gin's hand in this scene).
It takes approximately 14 minutes from the time the three clues are found to the time the three fall apart. The three are only detoured from the goal of "finding the baby's parents" by [C], but this detour brings out the complicated circumstances of the three, as is evident in the scene where Miyuki tells her story to a foreign woman she happens to meet. Then, how are the remaining two clues, [A] and [B], used?

As one mystery is solved, the other is also revealed

Hana joins Miyuki, who has been taken away, and Gin helps an elderly homeless man who has fallen ill. The old man's house was made of cardboard, some of which was also newspaper. Seeing this, Ging notices that the high-rise apartment building in the background of [A] matches the photo in the newspaper ad.
The three meet again at the snack bar where Hana used to work, and this time they walk around Tokyo using [A] as a clue. There is no dialogue in this scene, and only light music follows the three on their way.

<1>They walk along a pedestrian crossing.
(2) They walk past a stall selling New Year's decorations.
(3) Walking past an advertisement for hamburgers.
4〉Searching for food in the garbage dump between apartments and eating at a small shrine.
(5)Staying up late at a family restaurant.
6〉Miyuki runs across the bridge and points to the high-rise apartment building she saw in [A]. (7〉The three of them walk along the sidewalk near the apartment building.
(8〉The snow is getting worse, and they are sheltering from it under the eaves of a store.
(9) They run into a house that is being demolished.

For almost a minute, music alone follows the three as they gradually approach the apartment building, which is a clue. In <5>, a total of five shots are taken from the same position, and in the middle of the shot, snow is falling outside the window. The snow continues to fall from <6> to <8>, creating the inevitable sequence of events leading up to their escape to an abandoned house in <9>.
Then, as Miyuki leaves the abandoned house to go shopping, she notices that she can see a high-rise apartment building from the exact same angle as in the photo in [A]. In fact, the vacant house they had entered to escape the snow was next door to the new house photographed by the young couple in [A].

However, the new house where the couple took their pictures has since been demolished, and now only the front door remains. This is where [B]'s key comes in. It was the key to the front door left in the vacant lot. When Ginn inserted the key, the front door opened. Ginn walks through the door, mutters "I'm home ......" in a weak voice, and closes the door. The only remaining door collapses under the vibration of a nearby car, and the three stand stunned in the empty lot.
It is a careful use of props that when the truth of [A] is revealed, the mystery of [B] is also solved at the same time .......

The "main character's goal" and the "film's goal" do not always coincide.

Once again, the three's goal of "finding the baby's parents" has come up empty. But is a film interesting if the protagonists' objective is not achieved?　Rather, isn't it precisely because the goal of "finding the baby's parents" is kept at a distance that viewers can enjoy the elaborate drama of the film, in which the mystery of [A] is revealed at the same time as the mystery of [B] is solved?　 An interesting film will go according to the audience's expectations up to a certain point, but will betray them in the other half. What is interesting about "Tokyo Godfathers" is that it is a mystery drama in which "when you assume a question, the answer is drowned out by a greater truth" and "the answer comes in from an unexpected direction. It is interesting because it betrays us.

And there is one more important thing.
The next morning, a lady who came to feed the cats gathered in the vacant lot said to me, "You guys stayed in a place like this?　　You're not homeless," she said to the three of us. The scene in which they return home to the vacant lot where their house once stood, saying, "I'm home. ......," once again confronts the viewers with the fact that they have no home. The above-mentioned scenes (1) to (8) are all made possible by the fact that they have "no place to stay," even though the world is moving toward the new year.
At the end of the film, the baby's parents are easily found through a chain of coincidences. In other words, "finding the baby's parents" is only the goal of the three, not the purpose of the film. While the film is an interesting mystery drama in which the three protagonists search for answers and are betrayed, the purpose of the film is to reveal the blank spaces, the depletion, and the "absence" of the three protagonists, and this is what makes the film rich and creative, is it not?

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)