Animation director and writer Satoshi Kon has two previous movies: Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress. Both can be found at most bigger video store and are well worth your time, especially the powerful, lyrical and startling Millenium Actress. Although animated, neither are kid's movies, but movies that could only have been told effectively through animation.

Kon's latest film, Tokyo Godfathers could have been made through normal film-making techniques, but I suspect it would have been a lesser movie as a result. And once again, just because it's animated doesn't make it a kid's film, though I think older children might love its magical tale.

Tokyo Godfathers is the story of three homeless people. Gin (pronounced with a hard "g" as GEEN) is a middle-aged bum, who claims a crooked bike-race fixer cost him his vocation, and his wife and daughter their lives. Hana is a gay transvestite, neither man nor woman, shunned by all. Miyuki is a teen-aged runaway, gruff and prickly. On Christmas Day in Tokyo, they find a newborn hidden in some trash. They adopt the child, whom they name Kiyoko (literally "pure child") and set off to find her mother.

I said above that the movie is magical, and that it is. But it's an explicitly Christian magic, as the story begins in a Christian service at a food line. Hana claims that God must be watching over Kiyoko and events seem to bear him out. One close shave after another, repeated lucky breaks, strange meetings, all seem to help our heros out.

That's another part of this movie's power. On the one hand, the three are unwashed, smelly, ill-mannered and impatient. The movie doesn't shy from the realities of homeless life in Tokyo, nor from the harsh reactions of the "regular" people around them. All three have secrets and shattered lives, bruised places they don't want touched. None have been cast out; they have all chosen to cut themselves loose from society.

But they are heroes, because they have set themselves a quest and stay with it. They somehow work together and stick up for each other. No matter how humiliated, scared, beaten, or lost they don't give up. Given a choice, they will make sacrifices for each other time and again.

When we first meet them, Gin, Hana and Miyuki all act as a family, if a really shabby and distorted one. It is Hana who starts them out, by taking the child's discovery as a gift from God to honor her desire to mother a child of her own. Gin finds himself in the protector role and Miyuki grumbles at being put out by the whole thing. As the movie progresses and the tension grows, the characters begin to stress out and we find revealed their true pasts and feelings for each other and those they left.