Pom Poko

Grajdian, Maria Mihaela. Mythical serenity prayer: Ecology, ethnic humor and the praise of conviviality in the anime movie Ponpoko: The Heisei Tanuki War (1994).
In Maria-Luiza Dimitru Oancea & Ramona Mihaila (eds.). Myth, symbol and ritual: Elucidatory paths to the fantastic unreality (pp. 299-320). Bucharest: Editura Universitatii du Bucuresti.

Borlik, Todd Andrew (2015). Carnivalesque ecoterrorism in Pom Poko. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2(3), 127-133.

Ortabasi, Melek Su (2013). (Re)animating folklore: Raccoon dogs, foxes, and other supernatural Japanese citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko. Marvels & Tales, 27(2), 254-275.

"Takahata Isao’s animated film Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko (Tanuki Battle of the Heisei Era, 1994) is a unique demonstration of the affinity between the supernatural aspects of folklore and animation itself. Featuring anthropomorphized animals that possess the uncanny powers attributed to them by folklore, Pompoko mobilizes the medium to display the animals’ shape-shifting skills in their war against the humans who threaten their habitat. Pompoko’s visual extrapolation of folk belief allows these animals to become more than a nostalgic reification of stable Japanese identity. By forcing drastic encounters between the realistic and the fantastic, Takahata’s film questions whether the human anxieties embodied in fox and raccoon dog folklore are really a thing of the past. I argue that Pompoko, through the medium of anime, shows how folklore can become an effective ideological tool for questioning what it actually means to be a (post)modern Japanese."

Yamamoto, Fumiko (1998). Heisei Tanuki-Gassen: Pon Poko. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 18(1), 59-67