With the main characters — a homeless drunk, runaway and transvestite — weird family unit is not the only term that comes to mind. Photos courtesy of Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Gin wants to turn it over to the police, but Hana is determined to not lose this chance to become a mother, while Miyuki wants nothing to do with the police. As Hana and Miyuki are forced to recognize that they cannot raise the infant, the three compromise and agree to find the baby’s parents themselves from clues within its blankets.

Perfect Blue is a psychological mystery-suspense melodrama. Millennium Actress is a bittersweet romance spanning many decades, with surrealistic scenes that are understood by both the characters and the audience to be visualizations of the elderly protagonist’s vivid recounting of her past. Tokyo Godfathers swings wildly from straight melodrama to black comedy (my favorite sequence is the one in which the search for the mother leads the three into a lavish wedding reception, and they are rejoicing at getting in from the cold, until they realize that it is a wedding of a crime boss’ daughter and that a shootout may result at any moment), from the realistic actions of three derelicts faced with the responsibility for an infant’s life to the (possible) fantasy that the child is being protected by angelic forces, and from very realistically drawn characters in most scenes to occasionally grotesquely distorted versions of the same characters for comedic effect (what anime fans call “super-deformed”). The blend is skillfully done and compelling (by halfway through the movie, you don’t know what to expect next), but Tokyo Godfathers is definitely Kon’s weirdest film yet.

However, all three have a common theme of emphasizing a strongly female viewpoint. Perfect Blue’s main character is an innocent adolescent actress shocked by the unpleasant aspects of the movie industry. Millennium Actress’s main character is a former movie star telling the flashback story of her search for over thirty years for the unknown man whom she loves. Tokyo Godfathers emphasizes such female concerns as an abandoned baby, a missing mother, a homeless adolescent girl, and men who are obsessed with becoming women.

Satoshi Kon learned under anime greats before moving on to direct his own features. Photo courtesy of Go Fish Pictures.

Kon, born Oct. 12, 1963, studied visual communication design at Musashino Art University. While at the university, he made his debut as a comic artist at Young Magazine.”

In the early 1980s, Kon met fellow manga artist/writer Katsuhiro Otomo, who had recently begun his mega-popular Akira sci-fi manga serial. When Akira was adapted into an anime theatrical feature, Otomo himself was its director. The 1988 Akira feature was such a hit that Otomo has been more active as an animation and live-action director than as a manga author ever since — and he brought Kon into the movie industry with him.

Kon’s first motion picture work was in 1991 on two features with Otomo; one anime and one live action. In the anime sci-fi comedy Old Man Z (Roujin Z), a senile inmate of a retirement home is selected as a test subject for an experimental robotic/AI care-bed that is supposed to automatically minister to all his needs. The government healthcare designers of the bed do not know that the military is trying to surreptitiously piggyback some of its own experimental equipment into the test; a super-fighting machine controlled mentally by its driver.

When ancient Mr. Takizawa daydreams about his long-ago summer visits to the seaside, his bed takes him on a rampaging ride toward the coast, smashing through all obstacles and integrating the rubble into itself to grow from a mechanical bed into a huge robotic monster. Old Man Z was written by Otomo, directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, and produced at the A.P.P.P. studio. Kon’s credit is art design, which means the general look of the movie rather than the characters (character design is by Hisashi Eguchi). Kon was the principal background artist; also, he explains in a brief written interview with AWM, “Otomo simply asked me for some [story] ideas on Roujin Z and I did supply some to him.”