E-Mail This Article to a Friend TOKYO GODFATHERS

Satoshi Kon’s moving anime offers a welcome twist on the conventions of a genre that’s so often associated with graphic carnality and cataclysmic sci-fi violence. Adapted loosely from John Ford’s 1948 Western 3 Godfathers, this story of three homeless people — a grizzled, world-weary drunk, an over-emotional drag queen, and a headstrong but vulnerable runaway girl — who find an abandoned infant on a snowy Christmas Eve and traverse Tokyo in search of her birth parents is an honest and heartfelt parable. Here over-large breasts offer not salaciousness but sustenance. Menacing back alley ways serve as a backdrop not for hyperkinetic fisticuffs but for an elderly tramp’s merciful descent into death’s embrace. When violence occurs, it’s realistic and serves a purpose. "We’re homeless bums, not action-movie heroes," says one of the trio, and though they’re rendered as expressive caricatures, these celluloid images have the depth of real people. From wounded cross-dresser Hana’s motherly doting to Gin the drunk’s armor of hard-bitten cynicism, it’s an affecting, all too human drama that plays out against Ike Nobutaka’s gorgeous art direction, where snow falls softly on the neon city, blanketing even decrepit dark corners in a sad beauty. In Japanese and Spanish with English subtitles. (92 minutes)