ehalcomb: Pom Poko Review || Anime Movie Review

Pom Poko is by far the strangest Studio Ghibli movie I've seen. It has a blend of the mythological while presenting a moral that confronts the modern world. The overarching plot is also very scattered as the Tanooki try to save their homeland from the humans in very strange but awesome ways. One thing I absolutely love about this film is its way of teaching the audience about Japanese culture. To my knowledge this film wasn't made to teach but I sure learned a lot from it. The history of Japan after WWII, the mythos of the Japanese raccoon, and the crazy creatures that the culture has made up over the years. Pom Poko is narrated throughout the entire feature. If it were any other movie with this narration it would be a huge negative for me but in this one it actually adds to the experience. Mostly because the story takes place over a span of thirty-plus years of these Tanooki trying to stop the development of the humans. They try to do this by using the power of transformation which is taken from Japanese folklore of the native raccoon species. There actions start out pretty brutal as they end up killing three regular people just doing their job. Though most of them feel justified in their actions, they soon learn, with the help of a young Tanooki named Shoukichi, that they can try to defend their homeland without hurting. This leads to a bunch of silly antics with the raccoon dogs trying to scare the humans away. This eventually leads to them gaining the help of a neighboring "village" using their more advanced transformation powers to put on an accidental "parade" that just ends up entertaining the humans instead of scaring them. The parade scene is the one thing that I take away most from this movie. Though I'm no expert, I do have some knowledge on Japanese folktales and there were a number of times that I could point out the names of some of the ghostly creatures, or 'yokai'. One of the yokai that stood out was a creature called the kasa-bake which is literally just an umbrella with one eye and one foot. The entire film is not only a very informative experience but a very good story as well.

Pom Poko is very illuminating.