Pom Poko (1994)

Isao Takahata's 1994 animated feature concerns a colony of tanuki in the Tama Hills who discover that postwar prosperity has arrived in the form of bulldozers. The creatures shapeshift, drum their bellies, and mount an increasingly desperate resistance against a suburban development called New Tama. The film treats this as tragedy and farce in equal measure, and its sympathies sit squarely with the animals. Fair enough. There is nothing especially modern about grieving a forest.

The economic argument is where the film sharpens. Developers, shopping malls, and a theme-park proprietor who claims credit for the tanuki's ghost parade all take their turns as villains, and the satire lands hardest on the commodification of protest itself. A movement becomes an attraction. A haunting becomes a publicity stunt. That is an old complaint about greed, delivered with unusual clarity. The environmental register is narrower than contemporary audiences might expect: this is a film about habitat loss and paved hillsides, not about emissions or warming. The trees are cut for houses, not for fuel.

Where the film tips into sermonizing, it does so at the very end. Ponkichi turns to the camera and asks humans to be kinder to animals with fewer transformation skills, a plea delivered without irony and with the surrounding sprawl visible behind him. It is gentle and it is unmistakably a lesson. Elsewhere the film is content to let its folklore and its grief speak for themselves. The tanuki who cannot pass as human are simply left to dodge traffic, and the film offers no remedy, only the request. A sommelier might call this a vintage with a long, moralizing finish.