I now have the Ghibli DVD Box

Cafe Society
21

I just saw Ponpoko. :0

It’s late and tomorrow I’ll spend my whole morning in class with the meanest psychology teacher ever to set foot upon this earth. I should have gone to bed some three hours ago. I obviously didn’t.

I read the comments about gigantic testicles and tought, “this just ain’t possible. It must be some insider joke or something.”.

Just finished the movie. What the hell was THAT all about? I liked it but I’m very confused. What’s the deal with the privates? What happened at the end? Was this two separate projects that got combined?

It’s very hard to conciliate Bambi-ish animal movie moments with strange testicle humour moments with surreal, psychedelic Halloween sequences with the other gazillion elements and styles of the movie. It’s great but it’s also the most bizarre cartoon I ever watched, maybe the most bizarre movie period.

Whose movie is this one? Myazaki? It isn’t like anything else by him I know of.

I’m definetely seeing it again sometime before the end of the week.

22

Pompoko is a Ghibli movie, but it’s by Isao Takahata, not Hayao Miyazaki.

The tanuki are actually a part of Japanese folklore, along with the fox. Their “powers” are much like in the movie, the ability to change form to trick humans. In Japan, you see statues of them all over the place, much like the lucky waving cat you see in some Japanese & Chinese restaurants in the US. The statues are always of a tanuki with a fisherman’s hat, holding leaves in one had and a jug in the other. The story is that they would go to cities disguised as a human and trick the storekeepers into thinking that the leaves were money. They’d use the money to “buy” sake to fill the jug, then go back home and get drunk – so as in the movie, they’re basically fun-loving.

And apparently, their testicles are a source of their power; the statues of them are always made with large testicles. What this comes down to, IMO, is that the Japanese (along with most of the rest of the world) just don’t get that hung up about the sex organs of animals! I’m fine with hiding balls and boobies for human cartoon characters, and even animal cartoons that are just stand-ins for humans (like Mickey Mouse), but to get so hung up over animals’ having sex is more than a little prudish.

(I don’t mean to sound like I’m scolding anyone here – I had a WTF? reaction when I first saw it, but after thinking about it a little I realized that it actually says more about me than the makers of the movie. It’s not like I’d get all shocked and offended if I saw a real racoon walking around without pants.)

A lot more info about the movie is here at the nausicaa.net fansite.

I don’t understand your question about “What happened at the end?” I thought the ending was pretty straightforward, and it still makes my cry every damn time I see it.

23

It’s just so tragic in a realistic way it’s kinda shocking. I’ll really see it again this weekend.
Thanks for the info.

24

I loved the movie too, if only because it makes a very surreal and interesting talking point. Who else can think of a movie that has animals fighting a war with their testicles?

How did you like how the tanuki stopped having sex to increase their power? What do you think that says of Japanese society and their sexual mores?

25

I didn’t see it as a power thing. I thought it was because they couldn’t feed the young ones and hadn’t time for raising them.

26

I do remember that. It has been a while since I have seen it. In my defense, I saw it on a very poor bootleg translation. Seeing new comments makes me remember things a little differently. The translation I saw showed it as more of a “no time for raising kids, learning is more important” time of avenue.

27

I really hope we’re not talking about giant testicles anymore! :eek:

28

I dont know how to do the box thing so:

        ***MILD SPOILERS AHEAD***

That’s more or less how I saw it too. I think there might be a little confusion here.

As I see it:
They have an already too small, shrinking living place. They are engaged in heavy training, both male and female, and all their attention must be focused on the preparations. Kids would consume too much time and resources.

As evidence I offer the fact that even the non-transforming, non-magic tanuki weren’t allowed kids and that one year latter when they did have children their powers was reaching a neever before seen level.

As to japanese sexual mores, I dunno. The film seemed didn’t seem to have much in the way of sex or a concern with sex and sex relations. In fact the egality amongst the tanuki was amazing. There seemed to be a very equal sharing of work and responsability. Even the often mentined big balls didn’t seem to have any sexual significance. They were used for humour and that was that

I think that’s because the tanuki are a sort of ideal society. They are what humans were or could have been. There’s even a point were the tanuki especulate about this conection. One of them says something, IIRC, more or less like this: “They can’t do that. Beings without magic/powers/something can’t do that. They are tanuki. They are decayed, evil tanuki that forgot what they are. We can’t win against evil tanuki.”

BIG SPOILERS
REALLY HUGE, I GIVE THE ENDING AWAY, SPOILERS

I thought the movie was trying to show how that ideal society we first saw is impossible in modern times. It’s more than just enviromentalism.

The pressures the modern world put in the tanuki psyche are the ultimate cause of their downfall in my opinion. They get divided. They generate terrorist fanatics. They generate suicide cults. All the elders die or run away from the modern world and hide in death/hedonism/places that haven’t yet been modernized. The remaining tanuki cease to be tanuki spiritually, after all, being a tanuki is all about having fun and these aren’t. The remaining tanuki are fewer and fewer living by the grace of the humans and are obviously decadent.

It’s a great movie. The more I think about it, the more I like it. But is just so sad.

29

This is not true at all.

While there is not yet a U.S. release, and Disney may not ever release some of the Ghibli titles, the official Japanese DVDs all contain English subtitles. They are more expensive, of course. You could probably get only one movie for the price quoted by the OP for the whole set. And they are Region 2 encoded, yes. But multi-region players are easily available if you want to get one.

The only reason to buy pirated DVDs is because they’re cheaper. Meanwhile, you support the bootleggers intead of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, makers of the films you love so much.

You can claim ignorance if you want, but that doesn’t excuse continuing to own and watch the bootlegs without buying legitimate versions.

30

I know it’s bad form to resurrect one’s own threads but I’m still hoping the Pom Poko post will be answered and I need some human contact right now. The reason I need it is because I just finished watching Grave of the Fireflies. I think those that watched it already, know what I’m talking about.

It’s so beautifull and well drawn and has such happy, likeable carachters. And they die. That’s not a spoiler by the way, the first words in the movie are: “I died in the x day of the x year”. I cried watching it. I can’t remenber the last time I cried during a movie. She was so young and bright and full of life and loved her brother so much.

I couldn’t watch it all in straight through. I made pauses every twenty minutes or so.

Right now there maybe some children dying like that in Iraq now.

Sorry. I just had to write something about it. I’m lucky I’ll be going out with my friends today. I want some human contact.

31

I’ve owned Grave of the Fireflies on tape for about two years now.

Never watched it. Never got up enough courage.

32

No, that is what’s not true. While multi-region players might be “easily available,” they’re not 100% legally available. They’re just as much in the gray market of legality as a console mod-chip or a cable descrambler. Why would they have region encoding at all if region-free encoders were easily available and completely legal?

If I’m mistaken, and you know of a reputable distributor who makes 100% legitimate region-free DVD players, then I’ll gladly take back what I said. And then you can scold me all you want. I never said that my having pirated copies of these movies is ethical – it’s clearly not. I just said that it’s the only option available. I don’t think it’s being a cheapskate if I refuse to pay more to get a “region free” player; just because the player is more expensive doesn’t mean it’s more legal. It’s basically throwing good money after bad.

And for the record, I have Japanese DVD copies of all the movies in that box set that have been released; I finally picked up Pom Poko when I was in Tokyo last year. I have no way to watch them, but I figured at least I’d be throwing some money Ghibli’s way.

33

I agree with your interpretation mostly, but not entirely. I don’t believe it was saying that an ideal society was impossible to achieve, just that we humans weren’t achieving it, and that we’ve even lost sight of what we’ve lost.

One of the things I like so much about the movie is that although it has cartoon animals walking and talking and wearing clothes, they’re not completely anthropomorphized – they’re still inherently animals. It’s a little like Watership Down in that respect. The tanuki by nature are simple and carefree (almost hedonist), and their attempts to win by emulating the humans are ultimately a failure. At worst, they die fighting, and at best they’re absorbed by human society.

It’s definitely more than just a simple environmental message; that much is clear. At the beginning of the movie, the threat is just that their land and food source is being destroyed and they’ll be killed, the usual “man is ruining our environment message.” But at the end, when the main character sheds his clothes and runs off to join the tanuki party (cue Solomon Grundy crying like an infant), it says that we’ve lost so much more. The tanuki can still survive by adapting to human society, but it’s not really living. By extension, when we choose to destroy nature to build ultra-modern cities of convenience, then we’re not just losing nature, we’re losing our souls.

The same idea is expressed a little more subtly during the parade that the tanuki stage through the neighborhood – none of the humans believe what they’ve seen, because they’ve completely lost touch with magic, and by extension, with nature.

34

As far as I know, they are legal. You can buy region-free players from HKFlix.com, among other places. They are a reputable U.S.-based company, and have been in business for years. (I do not mean this to be an advertisement, so I will avoid a direct link to a specific player on the site.)

I don’t want to turn this into a debate, so I’ll leave it at that. And if you do have the Japanese DVDs, I have no desire to scold you for buying the bootlegs in addition to them. Sorry if I was too harsh before. :slight_smile: