Jen Wang (Miyagi, 2008-09) is a lab tech in Dallas and a staff writer for the Japanese music website Purple SKY. Her love of cosplay and her junior high school students inspired the name for her own Japanese pop culture blog, Hibari-sensei’s Classroom.
For their 28th annual KidFilm Festival, USA Film Festival paid tribute to Studio Ghibli by screening 10 of its films, plus Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind which was made before the studio’s founding. Since The Secret World of Arrietty was sold out, I decided to catch Pom Poko with some friends. I had heard some odd things about the film and wasn’t sure what to expect.
Pom Poko , directed by Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), revolves around a group of tanuki, or Japanese raccoon dogs (incorrectly called “racoons” in the dub), who have banded together to face the transformation of their forest in Tama Hills into a suburban neighborhood. They cook up various ideas to reclaim their homes, ranging from sabotaging construction sites to tracking down legendary tanuki for assistance. Eventually the fun-loving tanuki have to come to terms with the harsh reality and learn to adapt to the changes around them.
The tanuki in the film appear in various forms: animal, mythical creature, and cartoon. In the presence of humans, they look much like their real-life counterparts. Amongst one another, they assume anthropomorphic forms with personality traits based on the lazy shape-shifting tricksters of Japanese folklore. When they get carried away with their emotions and behave ridiculously, they become even less realistic with their appearance based on characters of manga artist Shigeru Sugiura. The audience gets to see the tanuki in all its forms: animal, myth, and cartoon.
Click here to read the rest of the review.
Comments are closed.