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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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