Pom Poko (1994) is set in the Tama Hills on the outskirts of Tokyo, in the late 1960s, and it is focused on a tribe of shape-shifting raccoon dogs who are threatened by a massive suburban development project. The development consists in cutting down the forest – which is the raccoons’ habitat – to make space for a residential area. In response, the raccoons try to prevent their forest from being destroyed by learning the shape-shifting technique in order to transform themselves into people and objects to attack and scare the construction workers.
However, despite all their efforts, the raccoons fail to save their habitat, and some of them – only the ones who are able to shapeshift – go living in the human world in the form of human beings. The movie has the ability to nurture and convey a broader ecological and environmental awareness to the audience by focusing on the impact of human’s agency on animals and land. Thus, Pom Poko highlights the fact that the natural world can be exploited with the aim to promote urban development at the expense of nature.
The movie Pom Poko addresses the negative consequences of human’s agency on the environment. Thus, two different types of environments are in contrast to each other: on one side there is the natural world (i.e., raccoon’s habitat), whereas on the other side there is the man-made world (i.e., suburban development are). However, an important aspect of environmentalism is the way in which mankind interacts with nature, and hence, the environment should be a living collection of interconnected beings (Odell and Le Blanc, 2019). As a result, Pom Poko posits that, in order for nature to have any chance of survival, it must adapt, even changing its very being (Odell and Le Blanc, 2019). The movie encourages the audience to think of the environment and the impact that human’s agency has upon it, and hence, the message of human interaction with the natural world is emphasized.