I lived for years in Tama, where “Pom Poko” is set, and I used to go jogging at night along the Tama River, where I’d occasionally have real-life tanuki cross my path. They would disappear into the grass, and I never saw one shapeshift, but “Pom Poko” establishes that they can blend in with human society. So, who knows, maybe the next power-walker or pedestrian you pass will be a tanuki in disguise…
The title “Pom Poko” is an onomatopoeia of the sound of tanuki drumming their bellies. The movie’s full Japanese title is Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko. Heisei refers to the era that ended in April 2019 with Emperor Akihito’s historic abdication of the throne, while gassen is usually translated as “war” in this context.
As I was rewatching “Pom Poko” over the weekend, I took a bathroom break about halfway through it, and happened to check the news before I restarted the movie. New York had just declared an emergency state over a new polio outbreak, and thoughts of this — on top of monkeypox and all the different coronavirus variants of the 2020s — made for a sadly appropriate juxtaposition with “Pom Poko” and its environmental themes (which get even hungrier for human blood in “Princess Mononoke”).
In “Pom Poko,” we see nature, personified (or animal-ified) by raccoon dogs, pulling out all the stops in its attempt to fight back against humans. The tanuki are quick to celebrate their victories, and some of them bear an undying hatred for humankind. But the older, wiser ones feel sorrow over the loss of human life. “We wish that we could save our forest without harming any humans,” one says.
Would that it were possible for us to live in harmony with the tanuki.
