Original title: Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko
After Umi ga kikoeru/Ocean Waves (1993), which saw Studio Ghibli hand over the reins to a younger group of animators to see what they’d come up with, the company entrusted their next film to a safer pair of hands though it too turned out to be a never-repeated experiment. Isao Takahata, one of Ghibli’s co-founders along with Hayao Miyazaki, was best known for his more reality-based films, including the traumatising Hotaru no haka/Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and the more uplifting Omohide poro poro/Only Yesterday (1991) and the company as a whole largely side-stepped that staple of animation, anthropomorphised animals. Pom Poko was an atypical film both for Takahata (it’s unashamedly fantastic and is essentially a knockabout comedy) and Ghibli (the heroes are talking tanuki, or racoon-dogs, referred to, erroneously, as raccoons in the English-language dub).
In the late 1960s, a colony of tanuki are threatened by the construction of New Tama, a suburb of Tokyo in the Tama Hills. Thirty years later and the plight of the tanuki is becoming increasingly desperate. Food supplies are dwindling, land is in short supply and the animals have started fighting among themselves over increasingly scarce resources. Urged by matriarch Oroku (Nijiko Kiyokawa in the original, Tress MacNeille in the English language version) to co-operate instead of fighting among themselves, the tanuki band together to try to stop further encroachment on their land. Led by aggressive chief Gonta (Shigeru Izumiya/Clancy Brown), the wiser and calmer Seizaemon (Norihei Miki/J.K. Simmons), Oroku and Shoukichi (Makoto Nonomura/Jonathan Taylor Thomas) the warring tribes unite and despite their natural tendencies towards laziness and to not take things seriously, they resort to industrial sabotage even killing some humans in their attacks. But nothing scares the humans off and the tanuki put out a call for help from their elders who are able to change shape and assume the form of humans, something that has rather been lost among the tanuki. The animals stage a huge “ghost parade” code-named Operation Spectre, hoping to scare and awe the humans into respecting both nature and supernature only to have their spectacular display purloined by the owner of a local theme park who claims that it was all just a publicity ploy on his part. With hope fading, the tanuki start to fall apart, rival factions taking different tacks when it comes to fighting the humans. Time is running out for the tanuki and it may already be too late for them…
Pom Poko – we never really find out what the title means; the narrator (Kokontei Shinchou/Maurice LaMarche) refers to it as a period in time, “year 32 of the pom poko era” for example – is a charming fantasy, a very funny film with a very serious message bubbling up just beneath its seemingly light-hearted surface. It’s a more frenetic and slapstick venture than the average Ghibli film with an extraordinary number of jokes revolving around the tanuki‘s over-sized multi-purpose testicles (discreetly referred to as “pouches” in the English version) – they use them as parachutes, gliders and as aids to their shape-shifting.
Beneath the endearing silliness there are several more serious strands that occasionally poke their heads above the slapstick to briefly assert themselves. Ghibli’s long-standing commitment to environmental issues is at the heart of the film, highlighting human indifference to the natural world and the tendency to concrete over ever patch of land available with no thought to the wildlife that lives there. It’s also a biting satire on Japanese urban planning, a long-standing issue for an ever-growing society trying to exist on a relatively tiny land mass. Pom Poko explicitly references and questions the wisdom of the urban expansion that took place across Japan, but particularly around Tokyo, in the aftermath of World War II.
Pom Poko may be a film about “raccoons” acting silly but it’s also a potent rallying cry for a better balance between humans and nature. A compromise needs to be found, the film warns, or mankind risks its own survival if it refuses to find a way to live as one with nature. Take the planet for granted, Takahata cautions, and we face extinction. It’s a testament to Takahata’s genius that all this is visible beneath the veil of an endearingly daft story about lazy “raccoons” with big balls…
The tanuki‘s attempts to frighten the humans during Operation Spectre is both very funny (the humans often miss the tanuki‘s altogether or else mistake their supernatural manifestations for something else) but it’s also by turns magical and grotesque. The sharp-eyed will spot many a yokai, the panoply of demons, monsters and spirits that form a huge part of Japanese folklore lurking in the background. You may also spot much-loved Ghibli characters Porco, Kiki, Totoro and Taeko in the background of the same sequence.
One suspects that being unfamiliar with the place of tanukis in Japanese mythology (they are a long-standing element of Japanese folklore in the form of bake-danuki, supernatural beings first references in the second oldest book in the Japanese language, the Nihon Shoki). The enlarged scrotums are an integral part of the mythology for example. The English dub, supervised by Disney, attempts to gloss over some of this but one suspects that a better understanding of the mythology might enrich the viewing experience no end. There are echoes too of western influences, most notably perhaps George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Richard Adams’ Watership Down.
Pom Poko comes to a downbeat and sad ending. There’s a direct plea to the viewer for a better understanding of nature but the final shot suggests that, in the film at least, the human race has learned little from its experiences. There’s lip service paid to helping the tanuki by retaining some green spaces for them in the ongoing building project but it’s not enough and the fate of many of the tanuki is left in the balance. It’s not as devastating as Grave of the Fireflies (few things are) but it’s an unexpectedly gloomy ending for a film that starts out as a much more light-hearted romp.
Pom Poko was another huge hit for Ghibli, earning enough to secure the number one position in 1994’s domestic box office race. Japan nominated it as their entry to the 67th Academy Awards as Best Foreign Language Film though it failed to be nominated. It’s atypical Ghibli and not Takahata’s best work but it remains a charming, very funny and heartfelt film from Ghibli’s most experimental director.
The EOFFTV Review 