YMMV / Pom Poko

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • In the past, Kiyo's grandfather was shot and killed by a hunter who then sold his pelt. She's surprisingly undisturbed by this.
  • Many of the Tanukis can barely contain their laughter after accidentally killing several people.
• Anvilicious: The ending features a character essentially Breaking the Fourth Wall to restate the moral of the story.
• Applicability:
  • To the environmentalist movement. Disagreements between factions, a lack of comprehensive strategy, poor grasp of tactics, and the simple fact of being heavily outgunned by industrial and corporate interests hamstring many well-meaning groups in Real Life.
  • More subtly, to colonialism, displaying the internal struggles and conflicts in resisting the conqueror and maintaining the invaded culture while considering the invaders’ culture’s benefits, and finally considering the issue of forced assimilation.
  • To Villainous Gentrification. As Tokyo expands, its growing population of middle class families needs to go somewhere— it just so happens that Tama New Town is being built over what was once working class farmland. The tanuki are then a pre-existing group of residents without the means, supernatural or financial, to do anything but eventually be forced out of their homes. While some of them are able to adapt, the struggle of tanuki unable to transform becomes a metaphor for those unable to achieve class mobility.
  • To the westernization of postwar Asia, and more specifically the industrialization and urbanization of it. During the Ghost Parade scene, two drunk, older men muse over witnessing similar supernatural events when they were younger. While one of them eventually notices the parade of transformed tanuki right behind them, the other insists that it's all just "in [his] head." The Edo-era clothing, imagery, and societal values of the tanuki contrast with the capitalist, salarymen-driven community of Tama New Town. It's not that it's all bad— the urbanization and globalization of Japan, at least for a little while, provides the tanuki with varied sources of food, for instance— it's that tradition is practically exterminated under a wave of expansionism. Supporting this interpretation is the tanukis' final transformation of Tama New Town into the rural, agrarian vista it once was, in one last lament.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Not quite "fanservice", since we're talking about fuzzy, chubby animals, but just try to find a discussion of the film that doesn't lead to "magic testicles".
• Special Effect Failure: One scene set in a library has clearly outdated and obvious CGI. While the effect was quite impressive for the time, the scene is much blurrier (even in the very few 2D assets) than the rest of the film, being rendered in a lower digital resolution. This gets even worse with how the 6K Remaster (used for the Blu-ray) makes the analogue 2D animation look razor-sharp. The textures on the books are clearly pixellated, while the 2D characters look very flat and out of place with the 3D library. It's much more jarring since this is the only scene in the entire film that uses 3D CGI, standing out in a film otherwise filled with top-tier hand-drawn 2D animation.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Most of the Tanuki who cannot transform come together and form a dancing cult and then "sail away" to paradise, i.e. certain death.
  • In the epilogue, some of the Tanuki and Gonta's wife (in human form) pay their respects at Gonta's grave.
  • The Tanuki making one last stand, when it's already too late, combining their magic to turn their home back to the way it was for just a moment.
    • Adding on to this scene is when the tanuki see themselves as cubs and for a moment fall for their own illusion, driving home that their old way of life is really truly done once and for all. The scene can be a bit of a surprise considering the more comedic first half of the film.
  • The fact that, even after revealing themselves as a sapient race of people, the tanuki that can transform are forced to stay in human form all the time while ones who can't are cordoned-off from the rest of society and still treated like animals by many humans.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It's mentioned that in addition to Foxes and Tanukis, Cats can transform as well. Never does one appear.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Wonderland's owner. The tanuki hate him for taking credit for Operation Specter, but it sounds like the authorities and public opinion had already decided Wonderland did it, so his options were limited. He was also willing to find and hire the actual participants, and if the tanukis had taken the offer they would probably be better off than working in desk jobs and snack shops.
• Values Dissonance: Magic. Raccoon Dog. Testicles. It reflects many cultural and folkloric aspects of Japan, yet viewers from other countries who are unaware are left dumbfounded.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The film not only has some surprisingly sexual content ("Gentlemen club" hostesses, schoolboys leering at a nudie magazine, the aforementioned tanuki power we've already talked about more than enough), but loads of dark material (most tanukis are killed, some on screen, with their home completely destroyed) and a particularly tragic bittersweet ending.

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