In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”
Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much better movie than the ones mentioned above. (Granted, it’s not very hard to be a better movie than Ferngully.2) The premise is simple: two clans of raccoon dogs (tanuki)3 that live outside of Tokyo are forced into an alliance as the city expands outward and human beings destroy the forests and hills in which they live. They decide they must stop the construction of new communities at any cost. Since tanuki, like cats and foxes, are creatures with supernatural powers, they can transform into other shapes and perform illusions. They plan to use these powers to disrupt the lives of human beings to such an extent that humans will be forced to abandon their projects and retreat.
How does that work out for them? They lose. I don’t consider that a spoiler. There’s no other possible way for things to go. Over and over, the movie uses a slapstick rhythm where tanuki try out a new plan, succeed in pulling off their stunts, and then celebrate the defeat of the land development prematurely. Then the announcer on the TV they’ve installed in their home says that despite everything, construction will continue. After enough of these moments, they stop being funny. Pom Poko is whimsical, but it’s also brutal, and as much as possible it takes place in the real world. (When the tanuki cause trucks to go off the road, for instance, people die.) The development that is destroying their habitat is Tama New Town, which is a real place. So there can’t be a happy ending to this story, in which they successfully repel land development, because that ending didn’t happen in real life.
The tanuki also don’t get some kind of noble loser ending, where they lose the battle but win the war. They eventually get the message across to human beings that they need to stop destroying the forest, but it’s much too late to save their own homes. Tanuki are left on the fringes of human society. Some of them manage to pretend to be humans, some of them can’t. Some of them just become roadkill. There is even what amounts to a mass cult suicide among the tanuki who can’t shapeshift.
If Pom Poko were just a cute but unusually downbeat children’s movie, I’m not sure there would be much to remember about it. However, it’s also wildly inventive. Until this series eventually reaches Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, I don’t think there will be another movie that takes advantage of animation’s total plasticity, its ability to show any reality, to the degree Pom Poko does. The tanuki’s transformations become more and more spectacular, and the movie’s highlight comes when the tanuki stage a “Goblin Parade”4 to awe and intimidate the people living in Tama New Town. The tanuki fluidly combine, recombine, and change from form to form. I can’t find a great clip of this sequence on YouTube, but this edited fan video can give you a taste:
However, this clip kind of diminishes the film’s achievement, because the movie itself doesn’t rely on rapid editing or cutting away. It’s the fluid change from one form to another that makes this sequence so incredible. The tanuki, too, are always changing forms in more mundane ways: when people are around, they look like normal animals. Around each other, they walk on their hind legs and look more like cartoon bears. They have a third, even simpler, even more cartoonish form that comes out when they’re really revved up or knocked unconscious. Though the natural world is depicted as attentively as it would be in any other Ghibli film, the tanuki are not wholly natural creatures, and thus they sometimes look like they belong to a different movie.
In some ways, Pom Poko is like an inverted My Neighbor Totoro. Instead of following people as they encounter a mysterious, alluring, and slightly frightening magical world, we live in the magical world as it attempts to negotiate a way forward in a frightening and mundane world. Even the allure of the “other side” is present: though the tanuki don’t form any relationships with human beings in the movie, they like aspects of modernity, like hamburgers. When one tanuki argues they should kill every human, another objects that without people there can be no tempura.
Ultimately, though, Pom Poko is not concerned with people, and that’s what makes it different from (and better than) all the anti-development stories I watched as a kid. There are no heroic humans with which to identify yourself and there are no villainous humans to oppose. There’s no clear lesson for children who want to start bullying their parents into being more ecologically conscious. People are not malicious or evil; like the tanuki, they want a place to live and raise their children. When the tanuki perform their final illusion, and briefly transform the countryside into what it was before the development came, the human beings realize that they need to accommodate wildlife. This realization simply comes too late to do any good.
If there is a message about people in this movie, it’s not really that people are terrible for building homes or suburbs, but that we will destroy things we don’t properly perceive or value until they’re gone. During the goblin parade, we watch two drunks reminisce about how they both once thought they saw something supernatural. Oblivious to the crazy things happening around them, both men sadly agree that these supernatural occurrences are nothing but a trick of the human mind. Then one of them turns around and tells the other: wait, it’s all real. The other guy keeps drinking. “They’re all in your mind,” he says. He doesn’t turn around. That’s how it’s always going to be: two kinds of people, those who see too late and those who never see at all.
Yes, this is the movie where the tanuki attack the police by inflating their testicles. No, I don’t have a take on that, though it is another case of the movie using a slapstick moment to create a sense of false victory (the police have guns).
There’s a lot of inventiveness in how information is presented throughout this movie: the video game image to demonstrate the tanuki’s population problem, an illustration of little steam shovels eating away at a leaf to show habitat destruction, and even one moment of live action television.
I think I would have liked Pom Poko as a kid. I loved The Fox and the Hound and Bambi. I was a fully bought in member of the sad animal movies community.
While I said that there is not a clear moral for children to adopt in terms of evangelizing to their parents, there is a moment at the end when a tanuki turns and speaks directly to the camera and says that you should stop pretending like they’re all dead. The practical takeaway of this message is unclear. But that is the lesson for children, I guess: the animals are still doing their best to live even though we’ve made it hard for them.
I also love that creepy fox guy, particularly because the moment you see him you know he’s a fox and not a person. Until the mass suicide event I was hoping for an ending where the fox set things up such that the tanuki all moved into the theme park and did “special effects.” I guess that would be the Disney version of this movie—even while I was hoping for it the movie itself was so blunt about the constraints of space and need for food that I knew it wouldn’t work out.
Aside from Grave of the Fireflies, all the Isao Takahata movies are first time watches for me, and so far they are all winners. I guess there are only two other ones left—My Neighbors the Yamadas and Princess Kaguya. Of the three I’ve seen (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko), two are about starving to death. That may be part of why Takahata is not a Miyazaki-level household name.
If you have dark undereyes, you might be a tanuki. Hm….
Even though it’s from 1972 we can add the TV adaptation of The Lorax to this list since it came out on home video in the nineties.
If only Pom Poko had a rap about the evils of animal testing.
This is translated throughout the GKIDS release as “raccoon,” which is probably for the best, but the Japanese raccoon dog is a different species from the American raccoon. So aside from the header I’ve written “tanuki” here because the conflation bothers me.
Called a “ghost parade” elsewhere (“goblin” is the GKIDS translation).