even the buildings and alleys of the city may have a soul, and that the main characters step into the other world that overlaps the city. Based on a story in which three homeless people living like pseudo-families pick up a baby and try to return it to her parents, Kon imagined a story in which the trio enter a "different world" where strange coincidences occur in succession, and they recover their relationship with their families and society through their adventures, while another protagonist named "Tokyo" is watching over them. In fact, "landscapes that look like faces," in which the outdoor units of air conditioners and windows are used as eyes and mouths, are embedded in various cuts, which could be said to be the figures of the gods of the city staring at the main characters. These "faces" are not visible from the perspective of the characters, and only the audience can notice them. Kon has also created a fiction here. The film's background is a trick of overlapping two layers of information: "the city scenery = reality for the characters" and "the scenery with faces that only the audience can see = a kind of fiction", even though it is the same single picture. The setting of the three main characters, who are not blood related, had the condition that they look like a family. It was not so much an exaggeration as a suggestion of a "new image of the family in the future," but simply a suggestion that Kon's idea of a family with this kind of relationship might be acceptable. Kon's idea was to suggest that it is necessary to find a way for each person to have their own family, rather than a standardized model of what a new family should look like. Kon said that he did not intend to portray homeless people as representatives of weakness and unhappiness, or as a hindrance to society, and that the three are symbols of everyone's weaknesses and regrets rather than real homeless people. He also said they are unhappy not because they are homeless, but because their lives have lost their former glow, and that happiness lies in the process of recovery, which is the story of this work itself. Release This movie was released in North America by Sony Pictures on December 29, 2003 in an unsuccessful attempt to get an Academy Award nomination