Director: Isao Takahata
Screenplay: Isao Takahata
Starring: Konkontei Schinchou, Makoto Nonomura, Yuriko Ishida
Running Time: 114 minutes
Genre: Animation, fantasy, comedy
In the Tama Hills, in the outskirts of Tokyo, a group of tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) find their homes threatened by human developers. The lazy and capricious tanuki take a break from their favorite pastimes of partying, eating and fighting to use their considerable shape-shifting powers to fight against the developers.
This is one of the lesser known entries in the back catalogue of Japan's great Studio Ghibli . The storyline suggests a fairly conventional plot of cute animals fighting to save their homes from greedy developers, but the film is far weirder and darker than that suggests. Writer and director Iasao Takahata (who also made Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) and the Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)) specialised in films inspired by and based around Japanese history and folklore and this is the case here. The film uses a variety of animation styles, from realistic depictions of landscapes and animals, to more traditional cute animation, to images based on traditional Japanese art, one sequence even animates the action as video game graphics. The film uses a documentary-style voice over and moves from goofy, slapstick comedy (true to the folklore the tanuki have massive testicles which they use in their shape-shifting), to surprisingly dark and violent. It's funny and entertaining, but it's very inconsistent in tone and certainly too long. Some of the sequences used when the tanuki terrify people with grotesque monsters and demons are genuinely nightmarish, and they are far from averse to straight up killing people, so it might be worth checking it out yourself before showing it to young children. The films' tonal inconsistencies and the donwbeat ending really threw me when I first saw it, but I enjoyed it much more on a second viewing
