The main characters in Isao Takahata’s 1994 film Pom Poko are tanuki, an animal attributed with shapeshifting powers in Japanese folklore. Their powers form part of an ethos of constant metamorphosis pervading Pom Poko, enabling Takahata to address his socio-political concerns while avoiding what he perceived as the pitfalls of immersive realism. In his feature debut Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), Takahata (1983) attempted to express the interconnected processes forming a sustainable community. This interconnectedness, often extended to the community’s interaction with nature, is core to his subsequent films, most explicitly in the exhaustive explanation of the roles, both in the community and ecosystem, played by the eponymous waterways in his live-action documentary The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals (1987).
Pom Poko (1994) explores these themes in its depiction of tanuki who coexist with humanity (Yamamoto 1998) before their existence is threatened by the expansion of suburban areas as humanity rejects its relationship to nature. Like the villagers in Horus (1968), the tanuki must defend themselves while remaining united in desperate circumstances. When they fail, some survive by using their transformational powers to assimilate into human society. The association of these powers with pre-industrial folklore recalls Japan’s postwar westernisation and its lost connection to nature, frequently thematized in Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki’s works, with the tanuki’s transformation into overworked salarymen pointedly commenting on the social cost of the economic boom. If any passerby or colleague could be a disguised tanuki, no part of modern, industrial society remains untouched by historical injustices. The distinction between human and tanuki slowly disappears. By becoming us, they invite us to question if we are not also them. What have we lost or sacrificed to survive or thrive under a capitalist, industrial society?
However, beyond its allegorical purposes in Pom Poko’s conclusion, metamorphosis has a formal purpose by creating an intensely hypermedial aesthetic that brings about a distancing effect, enabling the audience to contemplate the film’s themes without becoming trapped in any one point of view. Takahata’s earlier work, like Horus (1968) and the television series Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), explored ideas of community and interconnectedness through the depiction of carefully researched and immersive settings. Writing about Horus, Takahata explains that the animated films “provide[d] […] a perspective through which [viewers] comprehend the unfolding events, capturing the entire situation,” (Takahata 1983: 28, author’s emphasis) while after Grave of the Fireflies (1988), he seems to have concluded that no single viewpoint was sufficiently external to do so. These early animations created a sense of complete, believable worlds, through spatial continuity (Hikawa 2019) and techniques like long takes and deep compositions, inspired by live-action filmmaking, as well as the writing of André Bazin (Suzuki 2019). Such completeness and believability expressed the nature of the lives and communities they portrayed.
Takahata later grew to believe that immersive filmmaking with realistic spatial rendering tended to “drive viewers into a position where they can only align themselves [with] the protagonist” preventing them from “critically appraising […] the protagonist’s actions” (Hikawa 2019: 223-224). Citing Berthold Brecht, Takahata (2007) stated that he attempted to create animated films that prevented a complete immersion, instead maintaining a critical distance from their characters. Takahata felt that his most realist work, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), failed to achieve this (Dudok de Wit 2021), which might explain his stylistic shift in the subsequent works. In what Katsuo Suzuki calls a “sliding worldview”, Takahata’s post-Fireflies films use visual styles that vary constantly, most relentlessly in Pom Poko, where the tanuki’s transformational powers metamorphose them between numerous visual styles (Suzuki 2019: 224).
If Pom Poko (1994) is Takahata’s response to works where he believed visual realism drove audiences towards a single viewpoint, then the tanuki’s metamorphoses unite numerous viewpoints within the animated film, or even within the same shot. They appear as: realistic tanuki, perhaps an external, documentary perspective; anthropomorphized characters, perhaps representing their traditional folkloric roles; ultra-stylized forms when completely unselfconscious; and as humans – the form they must take to interact with society. Each perspective has strengths and limitations: documentary-like scenes help us understand tanuki behavior and their environment, but lack relatability, while the anthropomorphic form is perhaps too appealing, risking simplistic alignment with their point of view.
Takahata wrote about different visual representations of tanuki in 1984, reflecting on his disappointment with the first tanuki he saw, as it did not resemble depictions of tanuki from Japanese art and popular culture (Fujita 2014). This echoes his later concerns about films that solely align viewers with their protagonists: the single view of flat- and round-faced tanuki created by popular, anthropomorphized depictions of them had overshadowed the real animal’s complexity and reality. In this context, constantly shifting representations in Pom Poko attempt to prevent the dominance of any one view on the tanuki, and indeed Takahata wrote that he had consciously crafted the film to avoid “complete immersion”, enabling viewers to critically examine its protagonists (2007: 273-274). Besides the avoidance of “easy sympathy” (Yamamoto 1998: 64), visual metamorphoses constantly remind the viewer that these different styles and viewpoints nonetheless depict the same creatures. Takahata bridged the troubling gap between and real tanuki with the constant metamorphic juxtaposition of their many forms, which contextualize them with each other, without temporal or spatial separation. Similarly, the film itself regularly metamorphoses in style and genre, extending this approach beyond character animation to its storytelling and visual language as a whole by citing and parodying genres and media, including samurai films, nature documentaries, 1930s manga, and video games.
This evolution from immediacy in his early work to hypermediacy in Pom Poko echoes “the double logic of remediation” identified by Bolter and Grusin across new media (1996: 313). The multiplicity of styles in Pom Poko is analogous to the examples that they give of the windowed computer interfaces and TV news broadcasts that combine images, sound, and text (1996): its hypermediacy creates a more complete view of its world.
References
“Arupusu no Shōjo Haiji [Heidi, Girl of the Alps].” Fuji TV, January 6, 1974.
Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4, no. 3 (1996): 311–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.1996.0018.
Dudok de Wit, Alex. Grave of the Fireflies. 1st ed. BFI Film Classics. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Fujita, Kenji. ANIME: ISAO TAKAHATA’s Gauche the Cellist Archive. Translated by Shinichiro Tanaka and Lauren Thompson. Onebilling inc, 2014.
Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko [Pom Poko]. Blu-Ray. Studio Ghibli, 1994.
Hikawa, Ryusuke. “Takahata Isao, Animation Revolutionary.” In Takahata Isao Ten: Nihon No Animēshon Ni Nokoshita Mono [Takahata Isao : A Legend in Japanese Animation], edited by Chikashi Saitō and Ryōko Tsutsui, translated by Christopher Stephens, 218–25. Japan: NHK Puromōshon, 2019.
Hotaru No Haka [Grave of the Fireflies]. Blu-Ray. Studio Ghibli, 1988.
Suzuki, Katsuo. “The Directorial Style of Takahata Isao: Aesthetics of Landscape in Animation.” In Takahata Isao Ten: Nihon No Animēshon Ni Nokoshita Mono (Takahata Isao : A Legend in Japanese Animation), edited by Chikashi Saitō and Ryōko Tsutsui, translated by Christopher Stephens, 232–36. Japan: NHK Puromōshon, 2019.
Taiyou No Ouji Horusu No Daibouken [Horus: Prince of the Sun]. Blu-Ray. Toei Animation, 1968.
Takahata, Isao. Animēshon no kokorozashi: “Yabunirami no bōkun” to “Ō to tori” [Aspirations for Animation: “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep and “The King and the Mockingbird”]. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 2007 (Translation by Ngoc Nhu Nguyen).
Takahata, Isao. Horusu no eizō hyōgen (Cinematographic Expression in Horus). Animage Bunko. Tokuma Shoten, 1983 (Translation by Ngoc Nhu Nguyen).
Yamamoto, Fumiko Y. “Heisei Tanuki-Gassen: Pom Poko.” Post Script 18, no. 1 (1998): 59–67.
Yanagawa Horiwari Monogatari [The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals]. DVD. Studio Ghibli, 1987.
Idris Kellermann Williams holds an honours degree in film from the University of Adelaide with a thesis on Isao Takahata. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the same university, which expands on that thesis, and he also edits the university’s film society newsletter. He presented a paper titled Depth, Flatness, and Community in Isao Takahata’s ‘Horus: Prince of the Sun’ at the 2024 Society for Animation Studies conference and will be presenting one titled Isao Takahata’s minimalism in the unseen writings and works of an underseen master at the 2024 SSAAANZ conference.