Tokyo Godfathers

Christmas Eve in Tokyo. Three homeless people - Gin, a middle-aged alcoholic with a past he has been running from; Hana, a transgender woman who wants a child more than anything in the world; and Miyuki, a teenage runaway who cannot go home - find an abandoned baby in a garbage dump. They name her Kiyoko. They decide to find her parents.

What follows is the most structurally kind film Satoshi Kon ever made. A screwball comedy about homelessness, found family, and the specific grace that arrives in the lives of people who have stopped expecting it. The coincidences are implausible and multiply across ninety-two minutes into something that the film frames not as plotting but as theology: a miracle is something that happens to someone who needed it. Tokyo Godfathers has five or six of them.

Kon made four films. Perfect Blue is the one everyone cites for influence. Paprika is the one Nolan borrowed from. Millennium Actress is the one that stays with you. Tokyo Godfathers is the one that surprises you - that arrives without the reputation of the others and then quietly becomes the one you recommend first to people who ask where to start. By the time the coincidences arrive you will already be completely undone and you will not be able to call it manipulative because you will not want to.