Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Tokyo Godfathers (2003) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Aya Okamoto, Yoshiaki Umegaki, Tohru Emori, Satomi Korogi, Mamiko Noto, Ryuji Saikachi DIRECTOR: Satoshi Kon CINEMATOGRAPHY: Katsutoshi Sugai MUSIC: Keiichi Suzuki PRODUCTION: Madhouse, Sony Pictures, dentsu, GENCO

Box Office Performance

Tokyo Godfathers earned $367,131 domestically and $240,604 internationally, for a worldwide total of $607,735. The film skewed heavily domestic (60%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

During the production of Millennium Actress, a producer from Madhouse asked Kon if he had any plans for his next film. After completing the film, Kon took two months to write and submit a brief proposal, which was immediately accepted by Madhouse.

The original story and screenplay were written by director Satoshi Kon, and co-written by Keiko Nobumoto, known as the screenwriter of the TV drama series Hakusen Nagashi and the TV anime Cowboy Bebop, and the creator of the TV anime Wolf's Rain. The animation director was Ken'ichi Konishi, who had worked on My Neighbors the Yamadas while at Studio Ghibli, and the Studio director was Shōgo Furuya.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 8 wins & 1 nomination total

Awards Won: ★ Japan Media Arts Festival Animation Division Excellence Award

CRITICAL RECEPTION

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critics' consensus reads, "Beautiful and substantive, 'Tokyo Godfathers' adds a moving – and somewhat unconventional – entry to the animated Christmas canon." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, calling it "harrowing and heartwarming".

Susan Napier points out that Tokyo Godfathers is part of a trend in anime and manga that depicts families in an increasingly dark fashion, showcasing the problems with traditional families, and attempts by people to construct a "pseudo-family" out of an increasingly fragmented and isolating modern Japanese society. Despite its seemingly traditional ending, the film offers a more radical version of family. Throughout the story these three homeless vagabonds unknowingly form a "pseudo-family" to protect themselves from the outside world and to overcome their personal demons.