Movies: Pom Poko

Unfortunately, humanity isn’t satisfied with just a little encroachment. Work has started on a new housing development that will cover the countryside and reduce what land the tanuki have to a pittance. Rather than take this lying down, though, they band together and decide to take the fight to the humans — to resist in ways that would make the squatters who rioted in Brixton look like amateurs. This includes, among other things, destroying their earth-moving machinery and resorting to outright murder. Eventually rifts within the tanuki populace set them against each other — not just whether to use violence or passive resistance, but whether they should simply join human society and cut their losses. (Later, another trickster spirit, a fox, enters the story. He credits his survival to having assimilated into human culture, which only worries the tanuki all the more.)

The raccoons shift tactics again and again, using everything from appeals to superstition to wild displays of power. In one of the best bits of trickery , they pretend to be artifacts from a local shrine, thus encouraging the landowner to think twice about selling off such historic property. But they are still divided amongst themselves as to what the best final course of action is: violence, escape, deception, or even assimilation into human society. They send several of their own to bring back three wizened tanuki sages, experts in shapeshifting who might be able to give them the power to shift (pun intended) things in their favor. This they use to stage a gargantuan, hallucinatory public spectacle — but they don’t count on the human race to be able to rationalize everything they see. (Evidently they never read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

I’ve written before that the best movies work heedless of genre or convention; Save the Green Planet! was about equal parts black comedy, horror and human tragedy, and all the better for it. Pom Poko only looks like a cartoon, but has an adult complexity that extends into its sense of humor as well as its ideas. Consider a scene when the raccoons are urged to observe a moment of silent prayer for the humans killed in this resistance effort (as if that’s going to make any difference). They pray for a moment, then burst out laughing and head outside to party. Then, in another comic gearshift, one of the few who speaks out against murder appeals to the rest of the raccoons through their stomachs: “Kill off the humans and you’ll never eat tempura again! Or fried chicken! Or hamburgers!”

Studio Ghibli is of course the production house founded by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service and the recent Howl’s Moving Castle. His associates have also directed other films under the Ghibli name, and one of his most widely-praised cohorts, Isao Takahata, was at the helm for Pom Poko. The quality of the animation is on the same level as any of the other Miyazaki/Ghibli productions — in short, outstanding — but the real standout for Ghibli has always been the storytelling and the multifaceted characterization they bring to the material.

Even when it’s intended for kids, Japanese animation is often earthier (and sometimes downright bawdier) than its homogenized American counterparts, and that shows here, too. Tanuki legends often feature the various creative uses the creatures have for their testicles, and one of the more unforgettable shots in Pom Poko has a platoon of tanuki parachuting into action with said organs stretched out over their backs like windsails. It’s only one of a number of visually arresting things littering the movie, like the many attempts (not all of them successful) by the tanuki to transform into people or inanimate objects. Unfortunately, the most dazzling and lovingly-created sequence in the film — a tanuki-engineered parade of surreal happenings — runs so long and to such excess it becomes distracting.

The end of the film is actually quite sad and troubling, and suggests that neither assimilation nor coexistence will really succeed for the tanuki. There is a measure of survival in each choice, and a great deal of sacrifice as well. That many of them could live like humans does not imply that they all can, and in the end many of them choose not to. Perhaps that’s the ultimate message of this film: The more the human race assumes there is only one mode of life for everyone, th e more it will fracture at its fringes. Even more amazing is that we get all this in a wickedly comic story about raccoons that fight with their scrotums.