Animal masquerade in Miyazaki's film Pom Poko

Projections No 2 (2013)

http://www.umac.mo/fsh/projections

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Animal masquerade in Miyazaki’s film Pom Poko

YOU Chengcheng, University of Macau

Abstract

Hayao Miyazaki's animation film Pom Poko problematises the relationship between

ecological concerns and anthropomorphic strategies and the way in which these

elements are combined in order to construct a contemporary fable. The text is woven

with cultural references to Japanese folk tales, the manga tradition, and metaphors of

identity and animal anxieties in a human-centered world. This paper draws upon

Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival to facilitate understanding of such elements as

transformation, the ghost parade, and the dancing cult. It explores how these

elements constitute some of the ways in which the tanuki as anthropomorphic

creatures subvert human-centered metanarrative so as to stage what might be

ambiguously read as either an eco-tragedy or an eco-comedy.

Keywords

Anthropomorphism, Bakhtin, ecological, metamorphosis, Pom Poko

摘要

宮崎駿的電影《百變狸貓》觀照環境生態，交織了文化寓意、身份隱喻和人類世

界裡的動物焦慮，以動物人化的修辭呈現了一則當代的動物寓言。本文引用巴赫



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金的狂歡理論解讀變形、百鬼大遊行、舞蹈祭儀及擬人化的動物如何顛覆人類為

中心的敘事, 評析該文本緣何具有生態悲喜劇的特質。

關鍵字

動物人化；巴赫金；百變狸貓；生態；變形



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Introduction

“The sensitive ear will always catch even the most distant echoes of a carnival sense

of the world,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin (1984: 107). Partly because of Bakhtin’s

influence, the theory of carnival has become central for many critics in literary studies,

especially those who focus on the liberating and often subversive use of various

dialogues and ritualistic violations of assumptions with regard to power relations and

bodily functions to recall us to “a common creatureliness” (Eagleton: 239). According

to Bahktin, carnival is a praise of folk laughter and a series of crowning and

decrowning rituals that make rigid social hierarchies crumble.

This paper consists of three parts, the first of which investigates the issue of

anthropomorphic treatment raised by the film’s subtext. Humanization of animals as a

rhetorical strategy is easily observed in this film. However, it has long been a

commonplace that sincere efforts to represent other-than-human sentience are

imperilled by a characteristic human urge to anthropomorphise. Therefore, my paper

brings this central issue to the fore, followed by an exploration of the carnivalesque

elements, with a close reading of several of the most significant episodes in relation to

them. The overall analysis leads to my central argument that the anthropomorphic

perception in this film is an essential means to the dialogic appeal for a contemporary

discourse between animality and humanity.

Pom Poko is a film produced by Studio Ghibli in 1994. Dubbed “the Disney of

the East,” Studio Ghibli has produced many remarkable animation films since it was

founded by leading animator Hayao Miyazaki and his long-time collaborator Isao



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Takahata in 1985. The most distinguishing feature of Studio Ghibli’s productions is

that they persistently tackle social, philosophical, and psychological issues of

considerable gravity even though the animations are targeted at children.

Comparatively, as Cavallaro (2006: 176) argues, “western animation cultivates the

ethos of anthropocentrism by inventing creatures such as living toys, dancing table

ware, lion kings and talking insects, whereas Miyazaki and Takahata’s movies

transport viewers into a parallel reality where neither man nor his humanistic

certainties could conceivably constitute the center of the universe.” What guides the

narrative trajectory of Studio Ghibli’s animations is not the desire to tame nature but

to create an empathetic voice to negotiate with nature and respect every life form.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Prince

Mononoke (1997), for instance, best exemplify this shared aesthetic concept. In these

films, the conflict between nature and human society is unmistakably laid bare.

Whereas nature or the wilderness is devastated in the process of social development in

these films, the emblematic female protagonists like Nausicaa, Prince Mononoke, and

Sheeta stand firmly in a battle against the corrupted social force, negotiating a

meeting point between natural preservation and social progress.

Like the above-mentioned ecologically concerned Ghibli classics, Pom Poko

also carries a strong environmental message. With urban sprawl and the process of

deforestation, the woodland habitats for tanuki, also known as Japanese raccoon dogs,

are leveled off and demolished, giving way to residential development. In order to

defend their homeland, the tanuki decide to revive the art of metamorphosis, resorting



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to a series of defensive campaigns to thwart the housing developers and retrieve their

pastoral idyll.

Anthropomorphic text

The film unfolds with a gigantic battle between two groups of tanuki. In the climax of

this seemingly comic fight, the matriarch Granny Oroku appears solemnly with an

evocative appeal for the end of this war as the tanuki tribe is faced with a grim

challenge posed by the human beings. This draws open the tanuki tribe’s decade-long

resistance against the construction workers and developers. Several tanuki lead the

resistance, including the aggressive chief Gonta, the old guru Seizaemon, the

matriarch Oroku, and the young and resourceful Shoukichi, while Oroku is

responsible for resuming the shape-shifting tradition and training the young tanuki

with this life-saving skill. Overall, anthropomorphic treatment is a prerequisite to the

dynamics of this production. This story is told in a “diary log” style of narrative by

tanuki themselves. Though they appear in three modes (real, anthropomorphic, and

surreal), talking raccoon dogs dressed in different costumes dominate the whole scene.

In an interview with The Daily Yomiuri, Takahata said “the film is not so much fiction

as a documentary of the destiny of the raccoon dogs as seen through their own eyes”

(Stafford, 2008). The director maintained that the movie was based on “the point of

view of the animals” and aimed to encourage the spectators to perceive the

predicament of the animal kingdom from the inside. However, the portrait of talking

raccoon dogs in clothes, with unmistakably identifiable human emotions, raises the



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question of whether the story hinges upon the auteur’s anthropomorphizing fantasy or

whether it reflects the thinking habits that are more concerned with dealing with

animals.

Jacques Derrida (2008: ix) emphasizes in The Animal That Therefore I am that

“the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we live has refused the ‘animal’

all of that (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions,

technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughing, tears,

respect).” The forceful denial of animal consciousness has long provoked debate on

animal welfare. The Cartesian School, led by René Descartes, argued that animals are

incapable of reasoning or feeling, so they are automata like mechanical robots.

Immanuel Kant, who adopts the identical view that animals lack the faculties of

reasoning and consciousness, also has little regard for animal well-being. This

philosophical trend took a turn when Jeremy Bentham, the first proponent of animal

rights, denounced Descartes’ claim and examined Kant’s views by asking “what else

is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the

faculty for discourse? . . . the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but,

Can they suffer?” These philosophical propositions address an issue that has

continued right up to the contemporary study of animal behavior. In literary studies, it

has long been commonly acknowledged in the scholarship that focuses on

animal-human relationships in representational texts that sincere efforts to represent

other-than-human sentience are not likely to remain detached from a motive to

anthropomorphize. Kenneth Kidd (2010: 246), in reviewing Debra Mitts-Smith’s



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Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature (2010) observes that “even the most

progressive humanist perspectives on animals . . . can’t or won’t get beyond

anthropomorphism.” As a consequence, from the earliest cave painting that endorses

primitive totemism to contemporary highlighting of the human-nature relationship,

anthropomorphism functions as a time-honored rhetorical convention, and serves

mystical, poetic, critical, allegorical, or environmental purposes.

In discussing the animated texts, it seems that anthropomorphism is frequently

and intrinsically related to animism, the belief that when children read such stories

they invariably identify with the animals (Townsend 1976: 120-1). Children’s bond or

affinity with nature and animals seems taken for granted in children’s literature as

children are often equated with primitives who “have some innate sympathy or

connection with animals and . . . imagine that they can communicate with them”

(Baker 1993: 123). The animistic connection between animals and children is also a

filmmaking credo openly embraced by Miyazaki. In discussing the characterization of

Princess Mononoke and Princess Nausicaa, Miyazaki (1996: 89) states “there is

something inside myself that can be called animism rather than religion.” Similarly,

commenting on Disney’s films, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1998: 33)

suggests that in Disney’s works on the whole, “animals substitute for people . . . The

tendency is . . . a displacement, an upheaval, a unique protest against the metaphysical

immobility of the once-and-forever given.” The effect of animation could deepen an

insight of the binary view of motionless objects and subjective agency of humans. The

boundary between the object and subject is, more often than not, questioned, blurred,



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and crossed in animated productions.

Nevertheless, in Pom Poko, the non-human perspective serves less as a

tendency to animism or sentimentalism and stands more for a means to envisage a

contemporary discourse between animality and humanity. It allows Miyazaki to move

beyond binary oppositions into the mindscape of the “creaturely life” (2006), a term

which is used here to contrast with the human/non human binary in which the human

being retains its sovereignty as the benchmark for explorations of animality.

From Metamorphosis to Masquerade

Erwin Panofsky claims, in Film Theory and Criticism (1979: 252), that the very virtue

of the animated cartoon is to animate; that is to say, endow lifeless things with life or

living things with a different kind of life. Animation effects a metamorphosis. It is

easy to fall under the spell of protagonists who carry an explicit animality through the

compelling theme of metamorphosis. The motif of metamorphosis in literature is

acknowledged from classical mythology to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and continues in

the production of animation and children’s films. More up-to-date versions of

transformed heroes, not to mention the animated bestiary in Disney or Pixar Pictures,

can be found in globally recognized cinematic figures like Spiderman, Batman, and

Catwoman. Metamorphosis is by no means limited to western texts: in China, there

are numerous folk tales featuring animals transformed into human beings. A

significant example is the canonical Chinese literary work, Journey to the West, in

which Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is capable of seventy-two transformations, a



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magic prowess that allows him to conquer almost everything from heaven to the

underworld. Children never fail to take delight in potentially subversive,

boundary-straddling figures that are capable of shape shifting. Perhaps this is why

Journey to the West has become one of the most popular stories among children since

it was written in the Ming Dynasty. In Development History of Chinese Fairy Tales,

the Chinese children’s literature scholar Wu Qinan (2007: 56) examines the elements

of fairy tale in this masterpiece and its wide influence in the children’s world,

claiming it as a “quasi-fairy tale,” with respect to the characterization of Monkey

King as the most appealing factor for children. Presumably, the association between

children and such animal fantasy is naturally underpinned. Nevertheless we cannot be

simply convinced by the conventional opinion that deems fantasy literature to be

‘childish.’ In Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, Peter Hunt (2001, 7) rejects

such a label, arguing that fantasy should not be regarded as the literature of the

impossible, but rather the opposite, “because of its relationship to reality, [it is] very

knowing: alternative worlds must necessarily be related to, and comment on, the real

world.” This claim foregrounds the seriousness of animal fantasy as well, as a means

to represent or critique reality.

In Pom Poko, the association with the real world cannot elude our attention. In

his characterization of tanuki, Takahata draws from an immense array of sources,

including not only Japanese folklore but also manga artist Shigeru Sugiura’s so-called

nonsense gag manga, in shaping the surreal images of tanuki as whimsical and

eccentric. In Japanese folklore, tanuki usually take on three roles: the vengeful



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transformer, the grateful friend, and the roguish prankster. Consistently and central to

the film, the tanuki can transform themselves not only into humans but also into

objects like iron pots, Buddha statues, and footballs. In addition to this superb skill,

the tanuki—who are depicted in the film as mostly fun-loving anthropomorphic

animals with big eyes, swollen bellies and a fondness for human junk food (especially

hamburgers, popcorn and pepperoni pizza)—are leading a life suggestive of Bakhtin’s

(1984: 123) description of the life of the “carnival square” in which “people who in

life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar

contact on the carnival square.” Tanuki, though marginalized as outsiders of human

society, usually band together, throw outrageous parties, play belly drums, and mate

without scruple, even in a hostile environment. Most interestingly, they possess a

secret talent: to alter the size of their testicles to function as both a parachute and as a

weapon to beat and smother their enemies.

In Rabelais and His World, Bahktin (1984: 15) re-examines the extravagant,

grotesque, and even vulgar life led by the two giants, Gargantua and his son

Pantagruel in Rabelais’s series of novels The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel,

finding the importance of recovering a culture of carnival that involves the

“temporary suspension of all hierarchical distinctions and barriers.” Such occasions

are always accompanied with unrestrained laughter, indulgence in bodily sensations,

and communication without any of the prohibitions of usual life. Fleshly pleasures are

eulogized in subverting the rigid social hierarchy, which is founded on an insistence

on “differences.” The body’s bulges, orifices, and sexual organs are where new life



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begins and thrives. The carnival, in this respect, suggests the union of death and

fertility. Therefore, the emphasis on the function of body and the celebration of

reproductive organs shows a ritualistic reverence for procreation and the potential for

renewal, and thus embodies the universality of folk culture.

Peter V. Zima (1993: 120) observes that “the pantagruelism, synonymous with

hedonism, exemplified by the boisterous, indecent, rude Pantagruel, is a reflection of

the Dionysus spirit. The political and economic crisis and recession is characterized

by the triumph of animality over humanity.” In Pom Poko, the hilarious, somewhat

lazy and gluttonous animals are sure to act like practitioners of pantagruelism. In the

scenes when tanuki are assembled for an emergency-response meeting to discuss

strategies to defeat the humans, they easily become languid and cheerless without the

timely banquet of hamburgers, drinks, and other junk food. Even when those tanuki

who are incapable of shape shifting skills sail away on a ship to the realm of death,

they choose a feast rather than a fast to embark on, leaving wave upon wave of

laughter behind. Whatever circumstance they are trapped in, such carnivalesque spirit

finds its way to the life of tanuki in this film.

Possessed of shape-shifting skill, the tanuki exhaust their brainpower to drive

back the humans by sabotaging construction sites and spooking the workers. Through

transformation, these tanuki resume their power to sneak attack the human beings in

various human disguise, which again echoes the Bakhtinian perspective on the power

of the body as a way to dissolve distinctions among species. However, with their

natural habitats dwindling due to deforestation, the raccoon dogs become increasingly



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powerless in the contemporary context of urbanization. A raccoon dog exclaims:

“Wow, humans are amazing. I always thought all animals were the same. But now I

think humans must be as powerful as Buddha and his disciples” (Miyazaki, 1994).

The irony of exalting the utilitarian humans to the level of Buddhahood is manifest

here. As a part of Japanese sensibilities, the Buddhist humanitarian concerns for

animals as sentient beings crumble especially when this raccoon dog’s outcry is

accompanied by a huge smiling Buddha reclining on the dwindling mountain,

watching the bulldozers crawl into the heart of the mountain, gnawing it till even the

green leaf is nibbled away. The tension between the tanuki and the humans is further

established, while the ethical and environmental significance of human-animal

confrontation is interwoven into this animated text.

Despite their guerrilla attacks, the construction is still underway. The tanuki

decide to resort to the last maneuver to win back the people’s respect: a ghost parade.

Led by the council chiefs, the tanuki collaboratively stage a mythical parade. In this

parade, all raccoons assume the forms of various goblins, demons, and other spirit

forms including a parade of foxes. They move through the town in a parade form with

an incredible variety of appearances. The scene offers a succession of hallucinatory

forms and elemental images like fire, water, and wind, conjuring up a mysterious but

glorious sense of a Japanese-style underworld, ritualized animals, and deities. Instead

of being terrified, the people watching think that is a majestic parade, which evokes

their awe for all beings. This life-giving parade shares a playful carnival dynamism, in

which the highest and lowest forms blend and romp with each other. In such



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subversive moments, humanity holds its breath in stillness, dumbfounded at the

primitive manifestation of all things in union. The marginalized raccoon dogs, masked

behind the culturally worshipped deities, demons, and elements, perform a distinctive

version of rebellion against the human world. In this ghost parade, humans are no

longer in a position of official power, while the animals launching such revolt are no

longer object of official repression. Such an anthropomorphic campaign against the

repressors is a case of carnival itself, a countermodel of ideological manipulation.

Metamorphosis, in this particular way, unveils the spirit of carnival, which

empowers the lower-class stratum with the ability to transform their status, with

clowns sitting on the throne. The tanuki’s special talent enables them to win glorious

moments of respect, though such triumphant moments do not last long. Their hope is

crushed when humans soon reclaim the crown as their own. The symbolic,

anticipatory overthrow of the oppressive species structure—the Great Chain of

Being—epitomized in the ritual masquerade, eventually fails.

Towards an animated discourse between animality and humanity

In the carnivalesque world of Pom Poko, the suppressed distinctions return in the

form of a fantastic array of spirits that march onto the streets. While the first part of

the film is overtly comedic, the second part becomes more serious and even glum.

The carnival spirit turns to despair when the animals lose complete faith in their battle

and split according to different fateful decisions they make: some decide to merge into

the human world in human disguise, some sail away on a ship to death due to their



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poor shape-shifting competence, some remain as they are roaming around the rubbish

heap for food and for survival, while most of them die from starvation, or are run over

by passing cars.

Though lamenting the doomed fate of tanuki in the face of civilization, we also

savor the amusement brought by these shape-shifting creatures. Interestingly, the

hilarious atmosphere discerned in this film even makes its genre difficult to define;

whether it is eco-comedy or eco-tragedy remains ambiguous. However, this ambiguity

is stylized as a deliberate authorial intention, as Miyazaki and Takahata attempt to

endorse a clear environment-friendly message in this film. To dilute or avoid a grave

moralistic color for their young audience, they combine the comedic features of this

mythic animal with readily amusing plots such as tanuki scrambling for junk food,

giving group greetings to a voice from a stolen television set, and male tanuki wooing

females in the spring with all kinds of tricks, so as to present a tale that is both joyful

or thought-provoking for both children and adults. Many reviews, such as that by

Michael J. Deluca (2006), suggest that it is such broad comedy that makes the

complexity and depth of the content and themes of the film more accessible.

If the term “broad comedy” justifies the comic relief presented in the film,

visually and through dialogue, then the strong appeal to dialogism, in the Bakhtinian

sense, is revealed in the later part of this film. According to Bakhtin, dialogism

refers to the interaction between the various languages of the speaker and the listener.

Thus, Bahktin (1981: 284) points out that “discourse lives on the boundary between

its own context and another, alien, context.” In this film, there are several layers of



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interaction between the animation and the audience, the animation and the animator,

and the animator within the animation. The text is constructed upon a flux of multiple

narrative voices by the tanuki, male and female, accompanied by a consistent

documentary narrative chronology of their battle against humans. The rich

multiplicity of narrative voices in the film is, on one hand, an effective means to

evoke the empathy of the audience for the distressed tanuki within this animated text,

and on the other hand, a means to stimulate reflection on the relations of power

through the narrations of animal anxiety represented by the dilemma of the tanuki,

and the seeming irresistible power of human society epitomized by the developers.

Privileging the animals with multiple points of views to narrate their story, this text

subverts the top-down meta-narrative of the taken-for-granted anthropocentric

account to explain experience and knowledge. We are left to consider the disturbing

meanings behind the narratives of the tanuki themselves.

We can find the height of this speculation in the closing episode when the tanuki

are finally thrust before humans—the old guru Seizaemon and the matriarch Granny

Oroku—who claim to want to talk and to know what they have suffered. However,

when they are pushed face-to-face with humans, an imperative issue emerges: Who

speaks for the animals? As the animal representation cannot be independent of human

perception, we may presume that Takahata and Miyazaki project their over-riding

environmental concerns onto their works and become agents of increasingly “othered”

and marginalized animals through their anthropomorphic tours de force. Terrence

Lindvall (1997: 205) argues that “animated films possess the ability to function as



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discourse, speaking directly to their audiences and reflect their relationships to their

creators.” The anthropomorphism, in this sense, conflated with other filmmaking

techniques and motifs, constitutes the clear utterance and dialogic imagination for

environmental care.

In terms of thematic content, Takahata was once asked what he thought about

the view that his film promotes eco-terrorism. Instead of eschewing this label, he

remarked that “historically, terrorism was sometimes a means of asking attention of

the established society . . . Terrorism sometimes had the capacity to make the world or

people reflect on their condition” (GhibliWorld.com, 2006). While this story of

metamorphosis is based on local-color folktales, it can also represent the status of

animals on a global scale, subject to human sovereignty, and marginalized in similar

circumstances. In the vivid closing episode, while many tanuki embark merrily on

an illusionary journey in a treasure boat into death, the remaining tanuki summon up

their last efforts to challenge humans with grand illusions of temporarily transforming

the populated residential land into the pastoral idyll it used to be. This final

heart-breaking defiance is a wake-up call for humans to commit to mind a

consciousness of the right that Vandana Shiva (2006: 317) in “Earth Democracy”

states is “not limited to protecting human beings who are privileged through class,

race, gender, and religion . . . it should not be limited to humans as a species. It is the

democracy of all life . . . All beings have a right to well-being and happiness.” Such

postulation provides insight into how humans should challenge the human-animal

distinctions and anthropocentric view and suggests that more dialogic interactions



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may prove central to humans’ relationship with animals, as well as a revaluation of

what it means to be human.

In The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoon and Culture, Paul Wells (2009: 52)

develops a model of “bestial ambivalence” to look at different levels of interaction

between the pure “animal,” the “aspirational human” who sees an animal “as a tool by

which to demonstrate favorable human qualities,” and the “critical human” who uses

animal characters to criticize humankind. Moreover, he invents the concept of the

“hybrid humanimal” which encompasses the parallel terms that have evolved to

explain both the human and the natural world. This term is appropriate to describe the

nature of a film such as Pom Poko, for its metaphoric and moral attributes should not

be overlooked as a whole.

Deborah Thacker (2000: 10) observes that, “[t]he parodic features of Bakhtin’s

notion of the carnivalesque and its roots in low culture, bodily functions, and notions

of the other, continually challenging notions of bourgeois social conformity, resemble

and include those child-like uses of language that repeatedly test the authority of

imposed structures of meaning.” The carnivalesque elements as seen in this film can

fit well into the children’s world alongside its emphasis on metamorphosis, bodily

pleasures, and a playful quality. As in a carnival text, the implicit performative quality

of childhood is full of all playful possibilities brought by the inversion and the

restoration of the norm. In the children’s world, there are about sixteen acknowledged

types of play: pretend play, object play, language play, social play, rough-and-tumble

and so on, which have many functions in the child’s cognitive development (Hughes,



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2002). The child always “exists in a space of play in which boundaries could possibly

be transgressed” (Hughes, 2002: 476), such as the boundary between animals and

humans, nature and nurture, the intuitive and the reasonable. It was Lev Vygostky

(1994: 103-107) who first affirmed the positive effect of play, especially pretend play,

which he assumes conjures up alternatives to reality, presupposes a certain knowledge,

and is a liberating source of imagination and creativity. It is because of the value of

play that the “humanimal” tale and talking animals such as we find in Pom Poko have

long since grabbed children’s attention. Humanimal relations in themselves embody

fantasy/reality crossings and metamorphoses.

Perhaps it is the case that children’s eyes are more open to the things that are not

nailed down by the ready-made anthropocentric views or prejudices we find, for

instance, in the fixed idioms of a language. In China, for example, each child is born

under a zodiac sign of his lunar birthyear, whose characteristics are said to govern

one’s life. Rat persons, for instance, are associated with shrewd intelligence and

agility, while Pig persons are suggestive of being materialistic, gullible and obstinate.

More than that, in the Chinese pedagogical system fixed idioms are easily located in

the dictionary to convey a moral lesson, such as 鼠目寸光 (the eyes of a rat can only

see an inch of light), 狗眼看人低 (dogs see only dwarfs). These examples reveal that

the more assimilated we are into our specific culture, the less we are inclined to

question the stereotypes inherent in these expressions. Contrary to such

well-established vocabulary or defined behaviors, the carnival played out by the

tanuki engages in a world of orders disrupted when the subversive fantasy and the



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masquerade of all creatures are conjoined. Such circumstances naturally partake of the

playful quality of childhood while dismantling the human-centered narrative, which

furthers the significance of Miyazaki’s films for children.

Conclusion

To sum up, I use the Bakhtinian lens to decode a cluster of elements that abound in

Pom Poko, such as metamorphosis, anthropomorphism, narrative substance, thematic

complexity, and cultural references to deities and ghosts. Camouflaged in the voice of

the tanuki, the story urges us to hear and feel the animals’ anxieties and

representational dilemmas in a global framework. The anthropomorphic device brings

us closer to a carnival world of all life forms in a subversive hierarchy; the carnival

laughter makes the ideal and mundane coalesce, turning into the laughter from

animals that erases ideologically-saturated distinctions between non-human beings

and human beings, though only temporarily.

Nevertheless, with both laughter and indictment resounding in the tale, the film

neither completely denigrates the human restructuring of the natural world nor totally

elevates traditional environmental concerns over the achievements of humanity. As a

post-modern fable told in an ambiguous tone, signifying neither a tragic nor a comic

ending, Pom Poko carries an appeal for a change in our attitudes and behaviors

towards the “othered” animals, in order to find a way to communicate with them.

When we are reminded that in representing the human-nonhuman relationship, we

invariably and inevitably position ourselves as subject, “over against the world as an



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object of mastery and desire” (Abram, 2010: 28), it is necessary to suggest a strategy

of dialogism in order to acknowledge the fact of nonhuman consciousness and to

render it through all literary means applicable. Otherwise, as Donna Haraway (1991:

20) suggests, we humans are unable to avoid the limitations of our own human

perspective, at most “we can only polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves.”

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Documents

Animal masquerade in Miyazaki's film Pom Poko