Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Dolby Digital Trailer Theatrical Trailer Trailer-Steamboy, Metropolis, Cowboy Bebop, Memories, Cyborg 009 Trailer-Astro Boy, Warriors Of Heaven And Earth
Rating
Year Of Production	2003
Running Time	88:11 (Case: 92)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (50:02)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Satoshi Kon
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Toru Emori Aya Okamoto Yoshiaki Umegaki Shôzô Îzuka Seizô Katô Hiroya Ishimaru Ryûji Saikachi Yûsaku Yara Kyôko Terase Mamiko Noto Akio Ôtsuka Rikiya Koyama Satomi Koorogi
Case	?
RPI	$29.95	Music	Keiichi Suzuki

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Japanese dts 5.1 (768Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Spanish Dutch Arabic Croatian Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Slovenian Swedish Turkish English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    This is a strange, but touching, story. Its basic premise is most easily described as Three Men and a Baby in the world of the Tokyo homeless.

    Our protagonists are three homeless people in Tokyo. They are, in descending order of height:

• Hana — a gay transvestite man who feels that "she" is really a woman
• Gin — a man who claims to have been a professional bicycle racer
• Miyuki — a girl of indeterminate age (probably early teenage)

    Each of these people has a different reason for being homeless, and we learn each of them slowly during the course of the movie.

    It's not quite Christmas, and our little group is fossicking through rubbish looking for something they can sell when they discover a discarded baby. Gin says they should turn it in to the police, but Hana is vehemently against this, for "she" fears that the baby will go through the same loveless upbringing "she" had, being shunted from one foster home to another. So they fall into the idea of discovering the parents of the baby and returning it. This turns out to be far from straightforward. There are sub-plots about an encounter with a gangster, an attempted assassination, and a gang of teenage delinquents, all of which complicate things considerably.

    This is not a happy movie — even the happiest moments are bittersweet, and there are a couple of quite confronting moments. However, the characters are involving, and you end up caring about them, which is something of a surprise, because each one is unpleasant in one way or another. I can't say why, but this is an interesting film.

Video

    This transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with 16x9 enhancement. That's the original aspect ratio, so there's nothing to complain about there.

    The picture is mostly clear, with a little bit of softness to smooth the image. There does not seem to be any film grain. There is no low level noise.

    Colour is nicely rendered, but there's a distinct dearth of bright colours, as you might expect among homeless people — about the only bright colours seem to be advertising posters and signs they walk past. There are no colour-related artefacts.

    There are no visible film artefacts.

    There is minimal aliasing, perhaps due to the touch of softness. The most noticeable artefact is occasional mosquito noise on lighter colours. There is some background shimmer, but it's tolerable. There are no other MPEG artefacts. One copy of this disc exhibited some digital break-up at several points between 43:55 to 50:02 (the layer change), and again at 74:10, but a retail copy showed none of these, so they were probably one-off errors in a bad pressing.

    There are subtitles in nineteen languages, including English, plus captions in English. I watched the English captions. They are easy to read, and seem to be well-timed, but it's difficult to judge how accurate they are — they certainly tell a coherent story.

    The disc is single-sided, dual layered, RSDL-formatted. The layer change is nicely placed at 50:02, inside a fade to black/fade up — it is essentially imperceptible.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in Japanese and Spanish — no English, unfortunately. The Japanese is provided in Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448kbps and in dts 5.1 at 768kbps, while the Spanish is Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448kbps. I only listened to the Japanese tracks — I didn't notice any big difference between the Dolby Digital and the dts.

    The dialogue sounds clear enough, but I don't know enough Japanese to know if it's easy to understand. There are some moments when there's a noticeable mismatch between the sound and the animation.

    Keiichi Suzuki's score uses varied styles, but does a good job of supporting the story.

    There are few examples of directional sound, but it is still worth having a 5.1 soundtrack for this, because those few moments are quite effective. Even so, the surrounds are really a "nice to have", rather than an essential, for this film. The subwoofer, though, is unnecessary — it gets no significant use.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is static and silent, but simple to use.

Trailers

    There are eight trailers on this disc:

• Steam Boy (1:17)
• Tokyo Godfathers (1:30)
• Metropolis (1:34)
• Cowboy Bebop (1:53)
• Memories (0:56)
• Cyborg 009 (1:15)
• Astro Boy (0:33)
• Warriors of Heaven and Earth (1:04) — this is live action, not animated

    The Region 1 version of this disc was released in April 2004, months before the Region 4 release.

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• lots of languages of subtitles
• Spanish dub

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• Animax making of (about 20 minutes long)

    It's unclear, from what I have found on the web, whether the Region 1 release includes the dts soundtrack (it seems not). Also unclear is whether the Region 1 includes a postcard (it seems so). I like having dts soundtracks, so I'm happy to buy the Region 4 (which is also noticeably cheaper).

    A superficially simple story with superficially unlikeable characters whose backgrounds are slowly revealed through the course of the film. This interesting film has been given a decent transfer to DVD.

    The video quality is good.

    The audio quality is good.

    The extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall