{"id":250,"date":"2004-01-24T00:17:07","date_gmt":"2004-01-24T04:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=250"},"modified":"2004-01-24T00:17:07","modified_gmt":"2004-01-24T04:17:07","slug":"tokyo-godfathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=250","title":{"rendered":"Tokyo Godfathers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers<\/em><\/a>. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue<\/em><\/a>. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress<\/em>)<\/a>. Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud<\/a> has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers<\/em> is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers<\/em><\/a>, the John Ford\/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers<\/em> is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers<\/em><\/a>. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue<\/em><\/a>. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress<\/em>)<\/a>. Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud<\/a> has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers<\/em> is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers<\/em><\/a>, the John Ford\/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers<\/em> is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}