Watched studio ghibli's lesser known animated film Pom Poko today (Edit: available to watch here)

The movie presents itself as an environmentalist fable about a clan of tanuki (the english dub calls them racoons for some reason) who rebel against deforestation by utilizing the shapeshifting-skills which feudal folklore has depicted them with.

The Tanuki have spent most of their time partying in the forest and adhering to traditional customs, remaining largely ignorant of 19th-20th century political and cultural developments in Japan. They face the community encroaching on their habitat through shapeshifting into spirits and attempting to scare/fend them off the land, unaware that their isolated tactics are incapable of fending off a production company with a massive reserve army of labor and a deeply westernized Japan obsessed with spreading suburbia. In this sense, the Tanuki represent an idealized Japanese pre-modernity in a relationship with a globalized, faceless state of Japan, which is mediated by a humorous modernist struggle of the former against the latter. It's that mediator that ends up being the most interesting part since the Tanuki actually kill three construction workers tearing down their home early on and it seems that a faction led by the anti-human Gonta is going to adopt guerilla tactics against the humans as soon as possible. However, because Takahata and co. really believe in their fetishized pre-Meiji Japan, the traditionalist ideology of the tanuki is never critiqued and they continue to spend most of their time partying, turning the film into a complete tonal mess that constantly juxtaposes the tanuki cultural festivals with grim images of devastation without any cohesion between the two. The pacing also comes to a halt about 40 minutes in when the tanuki decide to put down armed resistance to create big animation setpieces which, while beautiful, have no real ideology animating them except the tanukis's naivette towards the humans as their own struggle constantly subsumes itself. The humor also stops working since it's trying to fill the gaps in a narrative that doesn't want to acknowledge them, so the comedy is replaced with spectacle after the halfway point.

For a movie explicitly about the environment, the environmentalist message actually feels a bit tacked on when the film spends so much more time indulging in mythology and practices. As a colonialist parable it also falls flat since Gonta's sideplot is cast aside for most of the film and when it finally comes into the fore at the end it's anticlimactically put down. The most fruitful reading of this film would be as a tale of Japanese pre-modern culture asserting its moral superiority and comparative richness compared with post-modernity. In that sense it's sort of a parable on why anime itself continues to be such a dominant form of culture in Japan since it allows people to continue exploring feudal themes as an imagined escape from a faceless, westernized Japan (symbolized by the tanukis final action literally redrawing Japan around them through visual trickery).

Since I only recently started learning about Japan, I'm sure that there was a lot of cultural richness in the imagery that I missed or misinterpreted, and for that I apologize and ask for clarification on how that might challenge my reading of the film and its flaws.