Tokyo Godfathers

Tokyo Godfathers (東京ゴッドファーザーズ, 2003) is an animated drama by Satoshi Kon — watch online on iFILM. Produced by Madhouse, it takes a classic Christmas-night setup and drops it into the street-level grime of a Tokyo winter.

Three homeless people — Gin, a middle-aged drunk with a buried past; Hana, a transgender dreamer desperate for a child of her own; and Miyuki, a runaway teenager — find a newborn baby abandoned in a pile of trash on Christmas Eve. The baby has a name tag and a set of clues. Tracking down the parents pulls all three into a chain of coincidences that digs up everything they tried to forget.

Kon — who had already made Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress — built the film around the kind of tight plotting that anime rarely attempts, with each character's backstory clicking into place by the final act. The result is a film that feels warm without being soft. Stream Tokyo Godfathers online on iFILM.