Guerilla warfare

Noel Vera

Isao Takahata's "Pom Poko" (The Raccoon War, 1994) starts out with a
little song where children call on the tanuki (Japanese raccoon
dogs) to come out and play, and the tanuki reply that they can't,
because they're eating pickled plums. The film goes on to outline
their situation: land developers want to turn 3,000 hectares of the
forests of Tama hills into suburbs housing 300,000 people--the same
forest the tanukis have lived in for countless generations.

Takahata gives us the story straight, presumably because he has so
much ground to cover. He has scenes of tanukis discussing strategy,
followed by scenes of the same tanukis carrying out their strategies-
-scare tactics, sabotage, even outright assault on construction
workers or the people surrounding the forest. The tanukis aren't as
helpless as you'd think--according to Japanese folklore they have
the ability to change their shape, much like the fox does (they even
have the bizarre power to transform their testicles, from area rugs
to paragliders to even small bridges), and the tanukis (and
Takahata) exploit these shapeshifting abilities for their visual,
psychological, and military possibilities.

Woven through these scenes are sober, precisely drawn assessments of
the tanukis' character and their chances for success--as one tanuki
points out by means of an old folk tale, tanukis are too easygoing
and good-natured, and their plans of resistance are often marred by
bickering and the endlessly distracting call for food. In one war
council, a discussion is interrupted when the councilors are served
a platter of hamburgers; later a television set is smuggled into the
tanukis' headquarters, ostensibly to enable them to learn more about
humans, but the tanukis end up spending more time watching
television than doing anything useful (the sight of entire
communities sitting silently before the flickering video screen
recalls stories I've heard from far-flung Filipino provinces, where
whole villages gathered to listen to drama programs on the radio
with all the gravity and seriousness of Sunday mass).

These scenes, plus the constant reference to seasonal weather and
how this affects them (the need to save food for winter, the need to
keep the population down by suppressing the mating urge in spring),
can't help but make us think of how similar the tanukis' plight is
to that of aborigines of all kinds. It's Takahata's way of
characterizing the tanukis and their society for us, of making them
more palpable and familiar, and in a way it casts a faint dark pall
over the otherwise humorous anecdotes--think of the Maoris, the
Native Americans, the Moros of Mindanao among many others, of how
they stood before their erstwhile colonizers came, how they came to
resist and fight back, how they have fared since, and a chill can
come over you even while you're chuckling over the tanukis' cute
antics.

Early on you see the kind of unflinchingly level gaze Takahata
employed when he made his great World War 2 drama "Grave of the
Fireflies" (1988): the tanukis mount an attack on construction
trucks, and trucks are waylaid or driven off-road into ditches or
rivers; no mention is made of what happened to the drivers. The
tanukis are ecstatic with their success, and (as is usual with them)
celebrate with dance, food and drink; only later do they learn from
the TV news that three men were killed (something you'll never hear
mentioned in a Disney or Pixar film), which sparks a crucial debate:
how far do the tanukis want to go?

On one side is the militant Gonta, who wants to use their magical
powers to wipe out the human race, or at least most of them (a few
will be retained to cook tempura, hamburgers, fried chicken, and
similar indispensable fare); on another is Oroku, who recommends a
cautious patience (call attention to themselves, she warns, and the
humans will exterminate them all), and the aforementioned moratorium
on mating; on yet another is Kincho who, thanks to promptings from a
fox, brings up a startling proposal--use their transforming powers
to turn themselves into human look-alikes, and assimilate themselves
into human society. Caught in the middle is Shokichi, a young,
relatively easygoing tanuki who isn't a big fan of humans but
doesn't feel like he has to wipe them out; his viewpoint, we can
assume, stands for the majority of tanuki youths.

There are no easy answers, and Takahata doesn't help us out by
recommending one over the other--he's not the kind of filmmaker who
wants to tell you what to think. Certainly Shokichi is the most
sympathetic character, being the "handsome young lead" people look
up to in heroic epics, but again and again throughout much of the
film he proves irresolute and powerless; Gonta is a charming
buffoon, but unapologetically bloodthirsty; Oroku gives the most
sensible advice, but also the most unpopular and difficult to follow
(they obey her command not to mate for at most a year). The issues
they struggle with are the same issues aborigines struggle with in
the face of invaders and would-be colonizers: do we fight or protest
peacefully? Do we resist all offers or negotiate for the best terms?
Do we do our utmost to remain the same or adapt to changing
circumstances? Do we submit and live peacefully or die violently,
defiantly?

What follows is about as inevitable as what followed in "Grave of
the Fireflies" and almost as harrowing, albeit in a broader, more
multi-layered way; eventually you realize that what you're seeing is
the passing of a people, a culture, an entire civilization--not
without a hard, heartbreaking struggle--and that all that may be
left of them at the end of the film are a handful of survivors in
hiding, and the wisps of a passing-strange dream. "Pom Poko" starts
out as an amusing magical-animal animation feature that darkens and
expands in scope and complexity into tragedy on an epic scale; it's
perhaps one of the finest films from Takahata--colleague Hayao
Miyazaki's equal, if not his superior--one of producing outfit
Studio Ghibli's best and most ambitious works and, as such, one of
the greatest animated films ever made.

8/17/06

(DVD released on 8/16/05 by Walt Disney Home Entertainment)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)