Tokyo Godfathers was recommended to me by Wyrdwad. According to him, it was a great movie to watch for Christmas. I originally planned to watch other movies first, but on the other hand Christmas only happens once every year, so I figured why not. So now that I’ve seen it, I must say that not only is this the perfect movie to watch during the Winter-holidays, but it’s also one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Satoshi Kon is a true genius.

The brilliance of this movie already begins with the setting. I think it’s safe to say that no other anime features a bunch of homeless people as its main characters. This is probably also one of the first times where a homo gets a role beyond just comic relief outside of bishounen-series. The characters are all realistically drawn, in Satoshi Kon’s trademark. And yet, despite the dark and realistic setting, there has been lots of hilarious comedy inserted.

My major problem with a lot of comedy-series is that they tend to forget that a plot is important too. They either force some kind of overall storyline in, or forget about everything plot-related all-together, until the final moments of the series where a forced dramatic climax ends the anime with a bad taste in your mouth. Tokyo Godfathers is different, though. It’s got an excellent combination between plot and comedy, and Satoshi Kon really uses the comedy and quirky dialogue to flesh out the different characters. There is no single moment that feels annoying because of this, and during the later half of this movie I found myself crying over and over again, even though this is far from an angst-movie.

It seems that there’s one sacrifice that Satoshi Kon had to make, though. In order to keep the movie interesting and perfectly paced, we often see rather convenient coincidences here and there. But still, because of the quality of the rest of the movie, this will hardly form a problem, and I like how an attempt to explain them is given with the help of Kiyoko’s “angelic abilities” (note how I put this between quotes, you’ll understand after watching the movie).

Overall, this is just a must-watch. The fact that the characters are homeless immediately gives them interesting stories, and Satoshi Kon makes sure to show the viewer enough of it. The characters are fleshed out perfectly; all have plenty of background and are actually developed a bit through the hour and a half airtime of this movie, something that every movie should have. The side-characters too are all fresh and interesting. On top of that, the storytelling is amazing. What more could you want?

Ah, it seems that the Starside-hotel is going to consist out of a chain of life-threatening challenges. I still have no idea what still follows in this arc, but we’ve seen enough foreshadowing. In this episode, Kaiji manages to finish without pushing anyone, though he ends up getting disqualified. Now he needs to do the same thing again, but without pushing and without the competition, and in exchange the falling height has been increased from eight to eighty meters. In other words: certain death.

The thing is that the first event made sense: in order to make money of the rich guests, the yakuza needed a bunch of poor people who’d do anything for money. It’s fun to watch if you’re a heartless bastard, and it makes the Yakuza money. Still, what’s the point of this second challenge? There has to be something more than “giving the contestants an extra challenge to overcome”. I can’t imagine how they’d use just one unpredictable trial like this to reduce the total amount of money they have to pay. And let’s not forget the story by the narrator, at the end of the episode.

Anyway, about the rest of the episode, I find it intriguing that, while the other races aren’t shown, you can imagine what happened back there; especially the fifth one, because I can imagine how the most desperate people were in that group. These are the people that were too scared and decided to cling on to their life for as long as possible; much like Furuhata and Andou in the beginning episodes of the Espoir-arc. They would probably freak out the most when they found out that they had to pull off such a dangerous stunt, and probably all fell off in their despair. The only one who survived probably got grabbed by the one behind him, who was about to fall off, in an attempt to take at least someone with him, hence the damage number-tag.

I must say, I’m impressed. From all the stories I heard about this movie, I expected it to be filled with mainstream action, emo and screaming. After the public rage against the two rather weird final episodes of the series, I thought that Anno Hideaki would play it safe to please the fans, and go with something mainstream. Instead, he went along with the public for episode 25, but then happily decided to make the twenty-sixth episode into what the original end of the series would have been if it was given enough budget: strange, absurd, confusing and a work of art.

Let me get one thing straight, though: the End of Evangelion is very flawed in terms of storytelling. Almost nothing is explained, and some major scenes hugely lack in coherency. Don’t expect anything in the second half of this movie to make sense. The bad guys never get any explanation about their actions, and neither do we know where these other eleven angels came from. Episode 25 also starts out really disappointing, when it basically shows all of the new scenes of Death and Rebirth once more, making me wonder about the point of that movie in the first place. It then continues with the usual action-plot that just couldn’t grab my interest, with your occasional disturbing graphical scene and a bit of screaming here and there.

This movie starts to get really interesting with the arrival of episode 26 though, when the characters start talking to each other. It’s here where everything of the series comes together and this series slowly turns into a piece of art. A lot of things will end up not making any sense, but it turns into quite an interesting watch, that in my opinion beats the original finale of the series. The storytelling for this series may be messed up, but the dialogue between the characters is excellent.

Overall, if you hated movies like Tamala 2011 or Cat Soup, then you should stay away from this series, but otherwise the End of Evangelion served its purpose to give a satisfying ending to the original series. I feel that if this would have been a major action-packed ending, it would have failed, since Neon Genesis Evangelion was supposed to be strange and complex to begin with. Episode 26 fits Neon Genesis Evangelion perfectly, although it will be annoying to get through episode 25 to get there.

Angedemystere, you were right. Thenardier gets more than enough closure for this episode. His final plan was way more desperate than I imagined, when compared to his cunning plan of the third arc, where he basically tries to blackmail Marius with all the things he knows about Jean Valjean. Not really the most solid plan. Humans can indeed change, and Thenardier shows how this can happen for the worst. I really like how he and Marius clear up the misunderstandings they had, and Marius even finds out that it was indeed Jean who saved him. It seems that at that time, Thenardier mistook the unconscious Marius that Jean was carrying for a dead body, belonging to a person that Jean had robbed and killed afterwards. When Thenardier gets arrested, Marius also sees the guy’s face again, clearing up the misunderstanding he had that Jean killed Javert.

I’m surprised that Javert didn’t arrest Marius, though. He should have recognized him, though I guess that if he wanted to have Marius arrested, he would have done so long ago. I think that he has already forgotten about Marius’s crimes, just like with Jean. In this episode, it also happens: Jean takes off, without notifying anyone where he went. Marius can now take care of Cosette more than enough, so he decided to go back to the countryside, and help the poor farmers with their work. Marius, Cosette and everyone else don’t agree with this, though, and spend the episode, searching for him. The final episode will probably deal with this, and clear up the distance that Jean has kept in front of everyone.

One thing I’m really hoping for is to see Cosette, return to Montreul-sur-Mer for one final time, and meet Thenardiére and Azelma. It feels like the two of them could use a tiny bit more attention, and I’d love to see Cosette and Thenardiére make up after all these years, not to mention that they haven’t found out about Eponine’s death yet.

Anyway, I finally managed to catch up with everything, and I can now finally read the comments on episode 48 without the fear of being spoiled. ^^;

Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope you have a great time. :)

Oh my gawd! Thenardiére lost weight in prison! That was quite a shock to see how much she had changed. ^^;

And yeah, I totally forgot about the wedding, which took place in this episode. It was really cute, especially seeing some old faces back again (Cosette’s friends from the monastery return! Yay!) and of course the two children who entertained the guests at the dinner-party by singing random songs. ^^; Thenardier also returns for a bit, and he’ll probably get his big moment in the next episode.

You also have to love Marius’s uncle, who keeps begging him and Cosette to come and live with him. But no, instead the two of them will move into small house and take care of themselves. Also, Jean has finally decided to speak about his past. In the next episode, Marius will probably hear all about the things he did when he was younger.

Awww, how incredibly sweet. It baffles me to realize how much time this series is spending on wrapping up all its stories. Most series aim to have their conclusion at their final or semi-final episode, but this of course makes things very hard to wrap up properly after everything is over, and most of these endings are done hastily. Even series that also spend a lot of attention to their storyline (Higurashi and Seirei no Moribito) never came close to the amount of attention that Les Miserables is currently getting.

In this episode, it’s Cosette’s turn to wrap up her storyline, when she and Gavroche travel back to Montreul-sur-Mer and meet Sister Sanplice and Alain, who finally tell them the details of Fantine’s death. I’m surprised that they never mentioned Javert, but I can imagine how they didn’t want Cosette to continue to feel hatred towards the guy who killed her mother. She’d indeed be much happier to think that the harsh circumstances were the ones that really killed Fantine.

It’s also very nice to see that because of Fantine, a new orphanage has been created to take care of all the homeless children, to prevent them from ending up like Cosette and Alain. Overall, this was an excellent episode, despite the tension. Now, there are three episodes left, and there are three characters that still need closure: Thenardier, Thenardiére and Azelma. It would be awesome to see them again.