Anime Eiga Review: Pom Poko

Film Synopsis

In the late 1960s, the fields outside Tokyo were still a perfect haven for wildlife. Among these animals are the tanuki (raccoon dogs) who take pride in their laid back, fun loving lifestyle. 

This is now in jeopardy as demand for housing near the capital skyrockets and large sections of land are being cleared to make way for the massive suburban development project known as New Tama.

As the decades passed, food sources and living spaces have begun to dwindle. Infighting among the tanuki threatens to tear them apart. Their elders realize if they don't band together, they will lose everything. With that, the tanuki decide to revive the ancient art of transformation.

Since tanuki are easily distracted, mastering this technique doesn’t come easy. Slowly, the group gets better and eventually they are ready to take the fight straight to the humans.

At every opportunity, the tanuki disrupt and harass construction; causing a lot people to get injured or even killed. While this does slow down development, it doesn’t stop it. Therefore, the tanuki attacks and strategies are forced to become much more elaborate.

The crisis facing the tanuki is the greatest ever conceived. If they cannot put an end to the building soon, they will most assuredly lose their home.

Film Positives

Director Isao Takahata also gave us the more contemporary films Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday. Pom Poko breaks away from that style to tell a story more reliant on imagination and silliness. The atmosphere is playful, comedic, and slapsticky. It's always refreshing to change things up every now and again.

Therefore, I’m not going to say the direction and feel of Pom Poko doesn’t work. What I am saying is Pom Poko doesn’t make it work the whole way through.

Creativity

I love that this movie found reasons to do whatever the hell it wanted. Opportunities were created to allow the animators to go all out and push their creativity. What made it even better, the story was able to weave these moments into a coherent plot instead of simply throwing a bunch of random things onto the screen hoping for the best.

We have a bunch, and I mean a bunch, of characters who are able to transform into anything; human, object, mythical creature, you name it. With such limitless possibilities, it would be a crime to not go big and to not go crazy. Pom Poko recognized this. In the film, there were three moments when the tanuki use their abilities to the fullest.

The first was when they were trying to learn transformation. It’s one thing to think of all the things a character can turn into, but what happens when it goes wrong.

Tanuki have a tendency to lose focus, which is a problem because the art of transformation takes a lot of it. Thus when they don’t get it right, they screw up pretty badly and it was fun to see all the different mistakes they would make.

Once they figured it out, this leads into the second "moment". A poor choice of words since this takes a good chunk of the movie and it's when the tanuki use their powers against the humans.

This ranges from simple impersonations to full fledged sabotage. “Ghosts” and “spirits” start showing up and cause mischief. This of course scares the crap out of many of the humans. If I were seeing all this go down, I would probably lose a few nights of sleep as well.

Yet nothing can compare to final event; the Ghost Parade.

This was the tanuki's ace in the hole. Together they used their collective abilities to put on a show beyond comprehension. It's hard to describe what went down since so much happened I wouldn't know where to start.

Regardless, this moment in the film was absolutely amazing because of how balls to the walls insane it got. Literally anything you could think of had the potential of showing up in this scene, no matter how random it is.

Film Negatives

A word of warning to anyone not familiar with the basics of tanuki lore because testicles. Tanuki are usually portrayed with having a large pair of testicles. Oh and I assure you, this isn’t some side detail mentioned in passing; it’s a prominent feature of this film. For you see, a tanuki’s testicles, particularly the ball sack, is very versatile.

If you’re not expecting this, it will come off as a little strange.

That aside, I want to bring back something I said earlier. Pom Poko manages to tell a coherent plot, but I didn't say interesting. This might be from the same director of Grave and Only Yesterday, but this movie is more on the boring side.

Yes there’s a lot of creativity to the film, but ultimately it's nothing more than distracting pretty colors for two hours and Pom Poko should not have been two hours.

The Tanuki

The tanuki weren't annoying, I didn’t dislike them. In fact they're what made this movie as funny and as silly as it was. There’s just too many of them and I don’t remember a single one.

The only reliable way to tell tanuki apart is by the clothes they're wearing. It's not their personalities since most of them could have easily been the same character. Older tanuki were easier to differentiate since there was a lot more detail given to their visual appearance.

Pom Poko switches between three character designs for the tanuki; realistic, anthropomorphic, or pure cartoon. Unless it was in the anthropomorphic style, there was no way to tell one from the other. This isn’t a bad idea nor is it misused within the confines of the film, but when you don’t know who anyone is, it’s hard to care when something happens.

Let me put it this way. We don’t get any semblance of a main character until about thirty, yes thirty minutes into the movie; Shoukichi (voiced by Makoto Nonomura). Weather or not he was even the lead is debatable since he’s not in the film all that much. But this is the character we're expected to feel for by the end.

I certainly didn’t, but then again I didn’t really feel sorry for any of the tanuki. More the point, there were times when I was hoping they would lose. I understood why they wanted to fight back against the humans and their methods were not unjustified. However, their attitude to everything was what rubbed me the wrong way.

If you think I’m referring to the fact people got killed, that’s not quite right. I get the extremist view point in wanting to kill all humans in this situation and I also get why there would be resistance to this. I have no issue with the story going down this path.

What I do have an issue with is the pure indifference to the matter. For the tanuki that don’t want to kill humans, they're more than happy to celebrate whenever a human does get die. Pick a side would you.

Along with a story that isn’t all that interesting and characters I don’t care about, the entire message of Pom Poko comes off preachy as f@#$.

This is an environmental film that's trying way too hard to drive its point home. This wouldn’t even be so bad if the absolute final bit of dialogue wasn't the movie explicitly asking the audience to be kind to nature. You didn’t need that last bit, we got it.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t like this one.

Pom Poko is visually a lot of fun. It was cool to see how creative the storytellers were willing to go. The different transformation kept your attention. Too bad there was nothing to fully keep you interest.

The characters do nothing to set themselves apart and the message it shoved so down your throat the heimlich isn’t going to dislodge it. The movie's about an hour too long and you're thoroughly exhausted by the end of it all.

Ghibli Month will continue tomorrow with 1995’s Whisper of the Heart.

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