I've never seen any other version of this oft-filmed story (about three outcasts who try to return a baby to her mother), but I'm not in any hurry after seeing this anime. Not that it's bad, but I have trouble imagining any version that doesn't succumb to sentimentality; and this version has homeless people as its protagonists as opposed to cowboys. Maybe I'm just a little wary of babies.
Kon is no Miyazaki, but perhaps that's the point. The opening minutes are jarring: we find our protagonists at Christmas concert for the homeless, sitting amidst a sea of identical, weary faces, that look like flat, cardboard cut-outs. Our heroes seem to be the only ones with life (even compared to child singers regaling them with carols), but they too move with the traditional anime stutter, thumbing its nose at the relative smoothness we expect from Miyazaki. There's a grittiness, a griminess on display here, something I associate with, say, Bakshi, not anime.
Once the godfathers move out into the winter Tokyo landscape, the true strength of the film is on display. The Tokyo here is incredibly detailed: looming apartment buildings, power-line cluttered skies, alleys filled with white trash bags. While most movies focus on their characters to the exclusion of the world around them, the Kon's Tokyo feels completely alive and lived-in, like we could crane up into one of those apartments and witness another drama altogether. The city becomes another character, and it joins other works (namely, Jacque Tati's Playtime and Grand Theft Auto III) that express the awesomeness (in the traditional sense of the word) of the archetypal Big City.
I could be generous and forgive the many coincidences as the work of the city-character; but I won't. The story is determined within an inch of its life, working overtime to make sure every loose end is tied up. Each character has some deep and profound connection to the baby (It's the daughter I lost! It's the daughter I can't have! It's my little kitty!) and each character arc is carefully traversed, like a man looking for where he dropped his keys. It feels like a Hollywood movie from the 80s, like, I don't know, Beverly Hills Cop, where the filmmakers try to please everyone by jumping from comedy to drama to action and back again. It slowly but surely saps the grit out of the opening minutes, and while I think I understand the purpose (to restore hope in the world of the characters, where hope is a rare commodity), I think it goes too far.
Where we saw it: film | We deign to rate it: outta 100