Satoshi Kon's Impossibly Real Tokyo
Plus: news and a music video.
Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. It’s another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:
1) On the backgrounds of Tokyo Godfathers.
2) An animated music video.
3) Newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1 – A super-real world
Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is an unlikely holiday film. Its director, Satoshi Kon, wasn’t trying to create a rival to Rudolph — this is far from a Christmas special or a family movie. But it is a fun, heartwarming, emotional and endlessly rewatchable story that revolves around Christmas. So, here we are again.
We’ve written before about the magical characters who power Tokyo Godfathers. For Kon, this film was an experiment in acting — extreme, cartoony gestures and facial expressions take center stage. His animators, many of them Ghibli veterans, ensured that the lead characters Hana, Miyuki and Gin deliver memorable performances in every stage of their quest to return a lost newborn home.
But it took one other component to make their acting really pop. Kon’s team contrasted the cartooniness with one of the most detailed worlds ever to appear in a 2D animated feature. Under art director Nobutaka Ike, the backgrounds became close to photoreal. As animator Aya Suzuki recalled from her conversations with Kon:
All the animators started going really wacky and mad and very expressive. And he said, every time the animators were getting crazier and crazier, he had to instruct Ike-san, the art director, “More realistic! More realistic!” Because the animation was becoming so surreal, he needed something to keep the world in reality. 1
On his blog, Kon made it clear that this contrast was the point of Tokyo Godfathers. “The basic concept of this work is the ‘coexistence of conflicting images,’ such as ‘realistic and unrealistic’ or ‘tragedy and comedy,’ ” he explained.
The film needed backgrounds as real as the animation is unreal. Only then do viewers feel the intended effect.
Which is why the world of Tokyo Godfathers looks so lived-in and elaborate. It’s based on the everyday Tokyo of that time — not the parts of the city seen in media. Many stories idealize Tokyo or hyperfixate on its grim underside, Kon wrote. He wanted to show the messy, contradictory city that existed in real life. Ancient torii gates near new apartments. Homeless camps near government skyscrapers.
Here’s what Ike said:
I was interested in exploring parts of Tokyo not usually seen, like the alleyways and paths I would take on my way to work. I’d always wanted to show Tokyo as I knew it. The director shared my desire. When he told me he’d be using that side of Tokyo in his next film, I knew the job was for me. We tried to be extremely faithful. We wanted Tokyo to become a character in itself.
Digital photography was the tool that made it possible. Kon and his team scouted the city and took pictures of everything — a process that continued well after the pre-production phase. “We even took pictures on the way to work,” Ike said.
Real details and locations made their way into Tokyo Godfathers, but it wasn’t a matter of tracing photos. Most of the areas in the film, Kon wrote, were invented — just “likely places” based on their heaps of reference. Kon and his artists looked at their pictures, borrowed what they wanted and jammed disparate ideas together. They were building “places that feel like they could be in Tokyo.”
In fact, Kon saw it as fatal to copy the photographs too closely, even for locations based on real ones. The artists risked falling “into a labyrinth of details without grasping the essential composition and structure of the object.” The photorealism in Tokyo Godfathers was always added after a clear, simple, solid blueprint was in place.
Kon didn’t tell his artists to simplify the world in the Kazuo Oga style, though, where key elements are rendered in detail and others are omitted. “The most important thing was to draw out all the little things you may find on the streets of Tokyo. Never to ignore them,” Ike said. “The director asked us to draw every bit of detail.”
Everything was shown, and then some. “We added 1.5 times more things than in the actual photos,” noted Ike. It’s an elevated hyperrealism — based on tight compositions, but ultimately busier and more detailed than photographs can convey.
In part to help with the backgrounds and layouts, Kon dramatically upped the detail of his storyboards during Tokyo Godfathers. He wrote that it streamlined production — folding the “art setting” (environment model sheets) and much of the layout process into the storyboard stage. If he drew with enough detail, the team could get what it needed just from the boards. Given limited money and staff, it helped.
Kon’s drawings were blown up and made the basis for all the layouts. Roughly 10% of the film’s shots were built on unaltered storyboards, with no extra layout work from the team.
He purposely didn’t get fancy with the camera. “I’ve always disliked showy or ostentatious compositions, but this time the camera positions and compositions are more ordinary than ever before,” he wrote. He left space for the characters to act, and he reused angles and backgrounds as much as he could.
This served a second purpose. Limited camerawork would reduce the number of backgrounds, and in turn “increase the amount of time spent on each piece and thus increase the density of the work,” Kon wrote. Fewer backgrounds equaled more detail. Each camera angle became a puzzle, as Kon searched for a way to get the most out of every single shot.
And the background team certainly used this extra time — finding new solutions to the complex problem of drawing modern Tokyo.
One part was the snow. Typical ways of rendering it weren’t realistic enough. Ike said:
We needed to show some kind of depth in the snow’s surface. So we used a technique we had never used before […] we wanted it to look like real layers of snow, so we painted the snow in white over and over again. As you know the real snow has different layers, especially in piled snow. We wanted to draw piled-up snow realistically. In order to express that, we painted white over white. We made most of the random uneven colors during the painting process to express the snow surface somehow.
And then there was the garbage — bags and bags of it, everywhere. Here’s Kon:
“Garbage” is an important subject in Tokyo Godfathers, and it must be depicted beautifully. It seems that “beautiful garbage” is a bit of a contradiction, but the garbage must make an impression.
The garbage bags were built up in many layers, too, made easier by the team’s recent switch to digital tools. Kon wrote that, earlier in his career, you could only stack six physical cels — ABCDEF. On the computer, you could easily go up to Z.
Most of the look of the garbage came about through “harmony processing,” a Japanese industry term. It refers to a way of mixing background paintings with cel overlays to create a unified image — something that has the lines of a moving object, but the texture of a background object. You know it when you see it. They used it for the bags, but also for an unusually large amount of other background stuff in Tokyo Godfathers.
Again, it came from the switch to digital. The team was able to add many more effects, more texture and detail, than standard cel animation allowed.
When you overlay ink lines on a background object, Kon wrote, it makes that object feel “closer” to the characters. It plays on our subconscious understanding of the laws of cel animation: if something has lines like a character, it’s an active presence in the story. It could move. Combined with the painted texture, it creates a vibe that Kon summed up as “it doesn’t move, but it feels like it might move.” That’s harmony.
By applying this trick to countless objects scattered throughout Tokyo Godfathers, the world was made to feel that much more present.
In a story defined by contradiction and contrast, the only way to balance out Shinji Otsuka’s animation was to set it in a world more real than reality.
A maddening level of care went into the world of Tokyo Godfathers — even more than we’ve covered here. But the effect is undeniable. Satoshi Kon at his most realistic collided with Satoshi Kon at his cartooniest. The two poles united into something magnetic.
This is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on December 18, 2022.
2 – Animation news worldwide
2.1 – A new music video draws attention
In 2018, we saw the music video for Sirens — a song written by the late Ka, a New York legend. It really wowed us. Behind it was an animator from Romania: Alina Popescu. She told us recently that Ka was “an absolute delight to work with,” and that Sirens was “the project that gave shape to [her] passion for animation.”2
We happened to ask because Popescu is back with a new video — another stunner. She just directed and lead-animated Other I, which dropped last Monday.
This time, the commission came from France, from the band Kriill. Popescu chose to animate a song about “everything we consume without measuring the price we have to eventually pay.” It put her in mind of GenAI. The video for Other I became a kind of short film — a story about an entity that takes and takes, and a woman who gives and gives, only to be consumed altogether.
Popescu began by allowing the song itself to bring ideas to mind. “Usually, when I listen to something, I get glimpses of colors, images or textures,” she explained by email. “This intuition helps me figure out the visuals, and I let myself be guided by this gut feeling even if I don’t know where it will lead. To me, this is the most important part of the process.”
It brought her key impressions and images: a “cold, sinking feeling,” a sense of “metamorphosis,” the “terrifying” descriptions of angels in the Bible. “From that point on, things started to connect and the visual research began,” she wrote.
Her inspirations were mainly classical — “the dramatic forms of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, the vibrancy of Giovanni di Paolo’s illuminations for La Divina Commedia and the compositions of Eastern Orthodox iconography.” The villain’s look came from ancient Greek sculptures. Only the lead character is a contrast: Popescu wanted someone “very human” and out of place, with a scarf that creates “a more guarded, uncertain look … because she is always pulling it around herself, which closes her stance.”
Piecing it all together into a visual continuity was “a little bit like a puzzle of Sudoku.” Popescu sketched and tweaked and timed, and designed shots to imply a larger story.
“Part of the charm of a music video edit,” she noted, “is that you can rely on the audience to fill in certain gaps. I mainly focused on what I wanted my audience to see (or not see) — moments or angles I thought were important.”
Between the 1:14 and 1:31 marks, for example, she went for “a sense of uncertainty” and a “power imbalance” in the framing. The lead character “mostly looks down and the audience can’t see her face until she kneels and understands what is being asked of her.” Close shots add a “suffocating” vibe, followed by “a [temporary] sense of relief” when we cut to the wide shot of the first offering.
It’s strong filmmaking, which Popescu executed in her impressive style. Her animation (previously seen in Sirens and her Caravan Palace video) grows out of her approach to video and photo reference. This is an evolved form of the trick that Walt Disney’s animators once used. Like she told us:
I take a lot of references for my animations because I value the real, unscripted movement of materials. I play around with time remapping when I do scene planning, and sometimes I merge multiple references together to figure out a movement: videos or masked videos, cropped photos — the most complex scenes would look like a complete mess, with six to eight layers on different color modes.
I always animate “on twos” and mostly (with a few exceptions) use this type of photobashing technique only as a reference. For me, it’s important to go through the normal animation process of sketching the whole movement, then key frames, then in-betweens. It’s what makes me understand the volumes properly and gives my animation the precision and control I desire. The only fully rotoscoped parts [in Other I] are the crowd silhouettes.
Popescu led a mid-sized team to produce this video. Core to it was Gabriel Moise, the background artist, who became her creative partner here. (Also briefly involved was animator Jin Lim, who contributed to Jonni Peppers’ latest movie.)3
So far, the algorithm seems to be favoring Other I. And Popescu is already thinking about future projects. “I’d love to make a film with hand-painted frames on paper!” she wrote. Her “ultimate dream” is a mixed-media exhibition that would use “animation, ceramics, book design, painting and mixology (?!)” to put across a theme. (“Hear me out; I have a vision,” she wrote about that fifth part.)
We’re looking forward to it. In the meantime, you can find Other I below:
2.2 – Newsbits
We lost voice actors Jeff Garcia (50) and Jim Ward (66), known for their roles in Nickelodeon cartoons, and the Japanese legend Tomomichi Nishimura (79).
In Japan, a new book called Animation Nature is due this month. It comes from Koji Yamamura (A Country Doctor), and is reportedly both a how-to guide and a theoretical text on the nature of animation.
In America, Deaf Crocodile revealed that it’s bringing Soyuzmultfilm’s 17-year movie Hoffmaniada to Blu-ray in 2026.
Director Alexander Sokurov (Fairytale) gave a speech against the rise of artistic censorship in Russia. “Every week, we watch with anxiety to see again who is [declared] a foreign agent,” he said. Sokurov argued that the state’s treatment of artists needs to “decisively change … with young people first of all,” or else a grim future awaits art in the country.
Almost half of China’s box office revenue this year came from animated releases. Nezha 2 and Zootopia 2 led — the latter has earned more than $500 million in China alone (close to half of the film’s worldwide gross).
In Japan, Kazuhiko Hachiya took his custom copy of the Mehve glider from Nausicaä for one last flight.
Another from Japan: episodes of the classic TV series Japanese Folklore Tales are popping up for free on YouTube. (Thanks to Catsuka for pointing this out.)
In America, Disney is unfortunately investing a billion dollars into OpenAI. Interestingly, the company is also going after Google for infringing Disney copyrights with its GenAI data scraping.
A nice student film from Germany, Scrubby, recently came online for free.
Last of all: we looked at a Christmas film by Jiří Trnka — the project that began his career in puppet animation.
Until next time!
From the documentary Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist (2021), also our source for some of Ike’s words. Our main references throughout were Kon’s ultra-detailed writings about Tokyo Godfathers on his blog, and the Blu-ray special feature Unexpected Tours.
Popescu’s answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lim handled the background loop that starts at the 2:10 mark.
I found this inspirational l. The esthetic and values in place to produce a considered artistic statement. I thought about it and worked up similar ideas for a piece I’m working on. I’m a sonic storyteller so it’s not an exact translation. It came out like this:
We deliberately record key performances in an intimate, human-scale space to preserve emotional immediacy. These recordings are then placed inside a larger sonic world, creating contrast between personal voice and expansive universe.
That felt Kon-like. Thanks for the post.
Is this blog written by A.I? If not who writes it?