Pom Poko
 Chad Clayton  rates it:    

For all the acclaim Western fandom gives to Studio Ghibli, many of us tend to forget that they've made more than eight or nine movies. In reality, Ghibli has produced 15 or 16 major works under four different directors thus far, each with followings of various size. Pom Poko is arguably one of the more "forgotten" Ghibli films. I say "forgotten" because Pom Poko is usually one of the last Ghibli movies to come up in any discussion, and even then it's often only mentioned for a chuckle at a certain... convention the movie has. As I hit the "play" button on my DVD player, the question in my mind was, does Pom Poko live up to its rather checkered reputation, or is it unfairly maligned due to some bizarre cultural differences? Let's find out.

Hailed by Disney as a "fantastic tale of survival," Pom Poko is about tanuki, translated as "raccoons" in both dub and sub (they're actually "raccoon dogs," which isn't quite the same thing, but I guess that's close enough). These tanuki are living in the forest, doing what tanuki do, until those clueless humans start developing the land into a new town. Naturally, the tanuki are starting to have a hard time finding food, so they decide to fight the urban sprawl. The weapons they have at their disposal are the ability to shapeshift, tanuki magic, and - I swear I'm not making this up - the ability to inflate their testicles and transform them into various and sundry things.

Sheesh. Nausicaa this ain't.

As you can see, I wasn't kidding when I said "bizarre cultural differences." Above all else, Pom Poko is a distinctly Japanese film. Though the theme of environmental preservation is universal, its presentation here is inherently and irreversibly attached to a particular culture and place. The culture, mythology, history, and sensibilities of Pom Poko are all distinctly and exclusively Japanese, and it takes at least a cursory knowledge of these matters to really understand what's going on in this film. As such, it's bound to leave Americans who aren't at least vaguely familiar with the mythology either scratching their heads, reeling in incredulous horror, or paralyzed with fits of laughter.


What about the movie's actual quality? Well, it's a Ghibli film. It's very good in most of the expected ways: great art, animation, music, humor, and a sense of whimsy. There's some very inventive visual moments thanks to the tanuki's transformation abilities, and there are a few instances when I laughed out loud - a rare occurrence for me during Ghibli films. It's not a bad film, I guess, but out of all the Ghibli films I've seen so far (including the audience-dividing Howl's Moving Castle), this is my least favorite by a very significant margin. In fact, I'll go so far as to say I really didn't like it that much, for reasons having little to do with the anatomical correctness of cute forest creatures.

Pom Poko's biggest problem is that it drags on torturously. It's pretty entertaining for the first twenty minutes and tolerable for the last 45 minutes or so, but the middle is simply endless! A good movie should keep you eager to see what happens next, but I was unable to finish Pom Poko in one sitting - I quit after getting halfway through, and finished it the next day. It drags that much. I think one of two things could have been done to make this film a lot better - either trim it down to 80-90 minutes or so, or simply make it a more engaging film.

I didn't think Pom Poko was very engaging for a number of reasons. For one, Pom Poko is probably the most impersonal Ghibli work. It's the only Ghibli work I've seen that has no great characters, but that's partially because the struggle of the tanuki is never genuinely brought down to a personal level. By and large, the tanuki are only portrayed as a collective, and the few characters that have names are more voices within the collective than characters in their own right. Furthermore, the struggle within the collective is marginalized as often as possible. The film constantly reminds us that food is becoming scarce for the tanuki and so forth, but the film seldom gives any direct evidence that life is becoming harder or necessarily more difficult for the creatures. They certainly aren't getting sick, or getting thinner. Most of the time, the struggle feels more like a matter of principle than a matter of survival. That may be why the film drags so much; throughout the first three-quarters of the film, it doesn't feel as though anything of real consequence is happening. I think this is partially the fault of the movie's tone, which is lighthearted to the point of being lightweight.

Personally, I think Pom Poko's tone is a misfire. Its tone is overall very whimsical and lighthearted - more so, I think, than the film's subject matter really allows for. That gives this film an odd lack of gravity. But at the same time, it's a little too grave and serious to fall into the realm of effective comedic farce, particularly near the end. The end result is... well, it's just weird. The oil-and-water mixture of gravity and levity produces some very odd scenes. In order to talk and otherwise advance the story, the badger-like tanuki transform into teddy bear-like creatures, but when joyous or injured, they change into bizarre doughy children's book drawings. In another instance, there's a dramatic coup d'etat scene that quickly degenerates into a humorous discussion about food - in fact, almost all the serious moments in this film degenerate into humor. It's difficult to take Pom Poko seriously as a struggle for survival when the film makes fun of its protagonists more than it sympathizes with them.


Now that we've got all that criticism and stuff out of the way, let's talk testicles. For years, it was assumed by most people that Pom Poko would never be brought Stateside due to the film's abundance of tanuki testes. They're all over the place in this movie, and they're visible even when they're not being inflated and transformed into giant mythological monsters or being used as weapons. And the film really isn't very coy about its subject matter. Let's just say this, the scenes that do contain scrotal shapeshifting are some of the most bizarrely and comically grotesque scenes I've ever seen in anime. I didn't know whether to be amused or horrified, and I can watch stuff like Angel Cop or Apocalypse Zero without batting an eye.

I didn't watch enough of the dub to offer an authoritative opinion on it, but it seems to be a serviceable, if not good, effort filled with voice-acting veterans ranging from The Lion King alumnus Jonathon Taylor Thomas to industry stalwarts Tress MacNeille and Maurice LaMarche. Of course, to the surprise of no one, all references to testicles have been removed from the English dialogue. Though in all fairness, were weren't that many in the original Japanese - I counted three. A song's lyrics about tanuki nards flapping in the wind is changed to something else entirely, and the other incidences change "testicles" to "raccoon pouch." Very coy little change, that. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering that raccoons don't actually have pouches, but I guess "pouch" was a more family-friendly term than scrotum, nutsack, or teabag. But don't be alarmed, all you fans of tanuki genitalia: the references to testicles and balls remain intact in the sub. I don't know if that's necessarily a positive or negative thing, but there you go.

Pom Poko is a mediocre film, but it wasn't made by a mediocre director. Isao Takahata did direct Grave of the Fireflies, one of the greatest anime films ever created, after all. Maybe Pom Poko was just a misfire. Maybe the culture gap was just too great this time. Maybe this film just wasn't to my tastes. But whatever explanation you choose to accept, this film just isn't up there with Ghibli's finest. Though it contains a lot of the same themes as other Ghibli films, it's a lot less adept at getting them across without becoming annoyingly didactic, or worse, preaching directly. In fact, the final line of the film is a direct appeal to the audience to preserve the forest. Yes, Pom Poko was a lot of firsts for me. It's the first Ghibli film I've seen where testicles were used as a combative weapon. It was the first Ghibli film I couldn't finish in one sitting. And it's definitely the first time a Ghibli film left me shaking my head, rather than grinning from ear to ear.

Added:  Saturday, August 20, 2005

Related Link:  Walt Disney Home Video
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