The English title of the film is wildly undescriptive; a bit better is the customary alternate title The Raccoon War, though this introduces its own problems. At any rate, neither of them has a patch on the Japanese original, which Wikipedia helpfully translates as “Heisei-Era Tanuki War Ponpoko”, which tells us plenty: for a start, the “X-Era” suggests a story taking place in the land of legends and myth, recalling so many of the splendidly overwrought Japanese movie titles of the ’30s and ’40s, stories about samurai and geisha and the like in the days before Western powers forcibly took some of the tradition out of Japanese life. And, too, the title reveals the first joke, if a joke it is: for the legendary Heisei Era happens to be our era, and it began in 1989.
As for the confusion between “raccoon” and “tanuki”, that’s sadly more a matter of playing to the audience’s ignorance; a tanuki is a canid found on the islands of Japan, and the most sensible translation of its name (since using the Japanese word for a Japanese animal is plainly an unreasonable demand on native speakers of English) would be “raccoon dog”. The people responsible for translating Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko into English – those delightful folk at Disney – concluded that it was best to assume that children wouldn’t care if the animals were simply called “raccoons”, to make things easier and more familiar. This despite the fact that the tanuki prominently appears as the second-best power-up in the iconic Super Mario Bros. 3, the second-highest selling video game of its generation.
And they know a considerable number of tricks. Tanuki, it seems, are omnipresent in Japanese folklore, and the short version of the many things said about them is that they are held to be shape-shifting tricksters, able to take any form, and who can use their large scrotums in all sorts of applications; yet they are too good-natured and easily-distracted to use this ability to do harm. It would thus seem that the general arc of Pom Poko is that a pocket of untouched ancient Japan, threatened by the encroaching crush of Westernised culture, is forced to alter its primary characteristics (traditionally, tanuki would never attempt to war with humans) in order to remain alive in the face of modernism. This comes close to being spelled out on multiple occasions; a wise old tanuki visiting from the island of Shikoku is aghast at the fact that near Tokyo, people no longer venerate the animals or the local gods.
The tendency of “progress” to wreak havoc with tradition and nature was already old hat for Ghibli: nearly all of Miyazaki’s films have a similar pro-conservation theme. But Miyazaki could never have directed Pom Poko: it is harsher and grimmer than his films tend towards. When Miyazaki depicts the grandeur and unexplored vistas of folklore, it’s generally to express wonder, amazement, and delight (as in My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away), while as Takahata depicts the same kind of grandeur, it’s to impress upon us the weight of centuries, and the gravity of the story. No film about shape-shifting canids with huge gonads can manage to be humorless, of course, and Pom Poko is all-round a much more fun movie than either Grave of the Fireflies or Only Yesterday, Takahata’s earlier films with Ghibli. But there is a stark undertone to what happens that sets the film apart from Miyazaki’s generally more playful approach to animation.
Ah yes, the animation. Following upon Only Yesterday, with its conflicting color palettes referring to different time periods, Takahata continued to experiment with form and representation in animation in Pom Poko, primarily but not only in the depiction of the tanuki themselves. There are three ways the animals are depicted, depending upon the context of the moment, and Takahata simply throws them at us without explanation (though it is explained early on that tanuki are bipedal when humans aren’t around), and this unexplained crush of competing represenation serves to make the beginning of the film a fairly ecstatic experience of borderline-surrealism.
First, there is the realistic depiction of the tanuki in their animal form.
Again, this it most heavily the case in the opening sequence of the film, where Takahata seems almost gleefully eager to make sure that we can’t keep up. It’s exhilarating to make the attempt, though, for some of the best parts of Pom Poko are those in which the real world and folklore collide in messy, dizzying ways. There’s an extended scene in the second half that exemplifies this: the tanuki have all combined their energies to create a goblin parade in the streets of the city pressing hard upon their forest, and for several minutes the plot essentially shuts down to present the spectacle of traditional monsters walking the streets of a blandly contemporary city.