Isao Takahata: Endless Memories

Part V: Pom Poko

Part V: Pom Poko

At its best, animation brings objects to life in ways that encourage us to think about the very essence of that life. This is one of the reasons that animation is filled with robots and talking animals. In the process of making drawings (or computer renderings, or modeling clay) move and act, animation encourages us to think about our own movements, the movements of the world around us, and what gives something “life.”

Isao Takahata's Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pom Poko certainly wrestles with this question, using animation to question the role of humans within the natural world through the eyes of various tanuki and the relationships they have their environments. (The word “tanuki” is often translated as “raccoon dog,” and although they may resemble raccoons, they are actually canids, so are closer relatives of dogs and foxes.) One academic article I read about the film describes the action in the film as “carnivalesque ecoterrorism,” which is a phrase I quite enjoy since it captures the mix of play and deadly seriousness at the heart of Takahata's message.

Not many people would have known when it came out in 1994 that Pom Poko would be one of Isao Takahata's last feature films. It does sound like a rather odd fact, given that Takahata kept working right up until the end of his life, and Pom Poko was released nearly 25 years ago. Still, the only full-length films he directed after it were My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013). It's also one of Takahata's few films that was not based on a pre-existing story or manga (although, to be fair, Takahata often took his adapted material in new and unique directions). Part of this is due to the control that Takahata exerted over the process - from 1981's Jarinko Chie onward, Takahata wrote the scripts for all of the feature films he directed.

I've always thought that in terms of its message, Pom Poko is one of the most radical films put out by Studio Ghibli. It initially wouldn't seem like a story of some cute woodland creatures would deserve that designation, but Takahata's message really shines through. Pom Poko begins with a short-lived idyllic scene, with the tanuki taking over an abandoned farmhouse as their base of operations, which could be seen as a kind of continuity from the farmland of Takahata's previous film, Only Yesterday (1991). A voiceover tells us that these rural spaces are actually better for the tanuki than untouched woodlands because they can find more food there due to the changes humans have made to the land.

According to legend, tanuki are tricksters that can transform into people or other objects. However, it's really humans that are the tricky ones, as the animals soon discover once people begin building massive housing projects in which to house the many new families swelling the metropolis of Tokyo. Soon, the tanuki decide they need to stage an attack on the humans in order to curb the destruction of their forests. They use their shapeshifting abilities to cause construction vehicles to veer off course and into ravines, causing serious injuries and even deaths. In the aftermath of such destruction, the tanuki try to commemorate the humans' sacrifices, but their giddiness at apparent victory makes the somber ceremony quickly turn into a party.

When I saw the film for the first time, I was impressed with the way that the deaths of the humans were handled in such a matter-of-fact manner. The tanuki weren't inherently bloodthirsty creatures. In fact, as we often see throughout the film, they love nothing more than a good party, sometimes even to their detriment. They didn't necessarily want to kill humans, but they were willing to do what was required to try to preserve their forests. Although they memorialized the dead construction workers, they shed no tears. In a lesser film, the realization of such deaths would have made the tanuki contemplate the righteousness of their cause. Takahata's tanuki have the courage to accept the consequences of their actions. The fact that they decide to then turn to scaring humans rather than hurting them is due to a question of tactics, not morality.

The film culminates in a fantastic display of tanuki transformation power incorporating merging religion and myth - in order to try to frighten the humans away, they stage a fantastic, supernatural parade through the new housing development. In doing so, the tanuki incorporate references from various aspects of Japanese culture, including a fox wedding, various iconic yokai, as well as the giant, looming bones from Kuniyoshi's famous 19th century print “Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre”. The whole idea of a yokai parade is a theme in Japanese folklore and art going back hundreds of years. In a way, this is Takahata putting some of his ideas into practice - he wasn't just a gifted director of films and television, he also frequently wrote about art and animation. He wrote a book (among others) in 1999 called Twelfth Century Animation in which he tried to bridge the gap between Heian-era scrolls and contemporary anime practices. As we can see in Pom Poko, these are ideas that he had obviously been ruminating on for a while.

Although the yokai parade is powerful, it is also rather tragic. The effort of channeling so much energy proves to be too much for one of the old masters of tanuki transformation and he passes away. Additionally, the president of a new amusement park takes credit for the yokai parade as a publicity stunt, undermining the mystery of the tanuki's efforts. After the many shape-shifting tricks the tanuki have been playing on humans, we see they are no match for the deviousness of modern communication media. All of their painstaking efforts and supernatural powers amount to nothing against a few words uttered on a television screen.

As in many Ghibli films, while there may be antagonists of the story there are no “bad” characters. Even the humans destroying the tanuki habitat are just trying to make room so they can live with their families. Pom Poko also emphasizes the importance of community that also frequently appears in Ghibli films, and even earlier in Takahata's work. The focus on the necessity of banding together when times get rough is a theme that goes back as far as Horus - Prince of the Sun (1968), Takahata's feature debut. When food gets scarce and the roads get dangerous, the tanuki devise a communal food sharing program and education outreach about how to avoid cars. However, although individual tanuki may survive, we know things cannot end well for the creatures in general. The popularity of Pom Poko, as well as many other Ghibli films, illustrates a kind of cognitive dissonance. We will watch such stories, cheer on the little tanuki, and be sad when their forest has been converted into a golf course. Yet when the film is over we will go back to our same destructive way of life, having learned little from such a parable. Takahata treats all of his characters humanely, human and tanuki alike, forgiving their impulses and follies. But at the same time he exhorts us to think, think about what we are doing to nature and to ourselves.