popcorninhell I've had to work on Christmas day four times in five years. So you can imagine that while I'm totally and advocate for merriment and good will towards man, I do have a bit of a humbug up my butt when it comes to the season. Your memories of Christmas might entail opening presents by the tree, mine has to deal with you and your family in the afternoon, trying to find the best combination of food items that will keep your kids happy and your wallet full (can't happen by the way). Then as you leave, I have to clean up the mess. Yet "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is still a beautiful song and there are plenty of movies that warm the cockles of my heart when the holidays come around.I can go through the gambit of classic holiday films, each of which conjures memories. One of the few traditions my family had was watching A Christmas Story (1983) on Christmas Day. While many appreciate or rather celebrate holiday snark with neo-classics like Bad Santa (2003), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) is still a staple of holiday cynicism for yours truly. And of course for unbridled Christmas spirit you can't go wrong with the occasionally corny Love Actually (2003) or the genuine Joyeux Noel (2005).I didn't think it would be possible to surprise when it came to Christmas films but I recently sat down to watch Tokyo Godfathers (2003) and had my inner pessimist silenced for a an hour an a half. The movie sets up our three protagonists: Gin, a cynical hard drinking loner, Hana, an interminably happy transvestite and Miyuki, a teenage runaway. All three live on the streets of Tokyo and scrounge up a living collecting bottles and making the rounds to the soup kitchens. On Christmas Eve while rummaging they find a baby in a garbage heap. Gin wants to go straight to the police while Hana wants to keep it. The three ultimately decide to find the parents and go on an adventure across the city involving crime syndicates, burlesque clubs and fateful coincidences.Throughout the night, we as the audience slowly discover the reasons for the trio's current state. They are lost souls redeemed by their mission and each must come face to face with their myriad of issues. We sympathize with their loneliness and revel in their joy when the mismatched heroes become a makeshift family. All while of course enjoying the arguments, the fights and the jests. It is after all an animated movie.The hand-drawn animation of Tokyo Godfathers is incredibly well detailed. The visage of a bustling city with so many moving parts is something to admire in a live action movie. In an animated movie, the detail is a downright miracle that likely took years, or an army of animators to make. The fact that principle story takes place in Tokyo's neon evenings creates a contemporary setting that is almost never seen in the works of Hayao Miyazaki who creates his own, new worlds instead of expanding the old. The effect is elating.In fact, outside of Hayao Miyazaki, I'm not too familiar with anime as a subgenre of animation. I am appreciative of their contributions to animation and storytelling in general and I applaud any cartoons that introduce adult themes. Still, the cultural differences are a bit to overcome when you consider Americans have a slightly different definition of spirits and a skewed impression of what's funny. Still there are very few anime movies or shows that I have seen and don't at least place value in.Tokyo Godfathers is in my opinion, a valuable cultural masterpiece. Despite adult subject matter, it is a luminous film for family audiences that has more to say about the good of human nature than say A Christmas Story, Bad Santa or even It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Unlike those films, which drown you in nostalgia or confounds with snark, Tokyo Godfather brings you into a bleak world to show you how much light there is if you only look.http://www.theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com

Jose Cruz Satoshi Kon was one of the most talented directors that ever worked on the medium of animation. Here we have another solid offering by the director. Perhaps not as great as Paprika, which was his film that impressed me the most, but still it was a stronger film than Perfect Blue for me.It is a very solid and well constructed drama/comedy that just happens to be animated. One of the main characteristics of this film is that it's pacing is much faster than most other films, perhaps the outcome of it being animated: since each second costs 12 frames of animation it makes sense to minimize the amount of "fat" in the film to reduce costs and thus make a less dragging film.Highly recommended.

Sean Lamberger The most accessible film of director Satoshi Kon's all-too-brief anime career. Where Perfect Blue and Paprika are more adventurous and challenging, they're also difficult to sit back and enjoy in a traditional sense without falling into a deep state of analysis. This one, of three bickering homeless chums who find an infant girl in the garbage, retains the quirks, charms and emotional punch of Kon's other works without challenging quite so many conventions. Sweet, funny and grounded, it's constantly flashing a dry wit and, although it often tugs at the heart strings, things never get overly soft or weepy. The trio of leads are diverse and interesting, each with an onion skin of personal history to explore, and their hunt for the child's parents amidst the overpopulation of a major world metropolis constantly jolts out in surprising new directions. Beautifully written, drawn and animated, it can also be a bit static and randomly fortuitous.

Tweekums This film is unlike the late Satoshi Kon's other films in that the viewer doesn't wonder if what they are watching is meant to be taken as real or if it is a dream, fantasy or delusion; here it is all real. The fact that it has a traditional narrative doesn't mean it is any less engrossing than his other films though. Set in winter in Tokyo this film follows the lives of three homeless people, one an alcoholic gambler, one a transvestite and one a runaway teenaged girl. On Christmas Eve they find a baby, which they call Kiyoko, abandoned amongst the rubbish and decide that they must return her to her parents. Their self-given mission will lead them to confront they own pasts and the reasons they are homeless and find redemption with those they have wronged. They may be on the bottom rung of the social ladder but for this one week they seemed to be blessed with amazing luck; a man they help just happens to be the future father in-law of the former employee of Kiyoko's mother, a nurse they meet in hospital in the daughter of one of the men and the teenager's father is the policeman who brings Kiyoko's parents to the homeless trio when they want to thank them.This was another brilliant film from Satoshi Kon; it is a tragedy that this brilliant director died so young. It is impossible to imagine what he would have gone onto achieve. The story, which he wrote as well as directed, is genuinely moving without ever being overly sentimental. The characters are well designed and the animation was first class throughout. While this isn't a comic film there are plenty of moments that made me laugh as well as one or two that almost made me cry. Even if you aren't usually a fan of animated films I'd recommend this.These comments are based on watching the film in Japanese with English subtitles.