I wrote at length about Takahata in general and
Pom Poko in particular for my Master's thesis. (Amazingly, it passed!) Excerpt follows...
Takahata has subsequently directed four animated features (Miyazaki, seven). As Osmond observed, these are harder to categorize than Miyazaki’s obviously fantastical films, though “all deal with Japan’s present or near-past, leaning towards unorthodox narratives and styles†[2001: 25]. This, Takahata explains, is because “I want to fight my bouts in a different dohyô [sumo ring]. In that way, I think we can better enrich Japanese animation and please Japanese audiences†[Schilling 1997: 40]. And they have succeeded, I suggest, by becoming each other’s complement: Miyazaki remains within the realms of the unreal (fantasy/science-fiction) but varies the setting tremendously, from the medieval forests of Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime, 1997) to the unrecognisably mutated, post-apocalyptic Earth of Nausicaä, a millennium hence; Takahata confines himself to 20th-century Japan while displaying a Winterbottom-like versatility with genres. His best-known work, the wartime tragedy Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, 1988), takes the form of a posthumous flashback (certainly an “unorthodox narrativeâ€), recounting the demise of two orphans, brother and sister, in 1945. Flashbacks punctuate the structure of Only Yesterday (Omohide Poroporo, 1991), a pastoral Bildungsroman – or should that be Bildungsromance? Pom Poko (Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko, 1994) is pure fantasy, albeit one which locates the supernatural (sapient, shape-changing tanuki, Japanese raccoon dogs) amidst the ever-expanding suburbs of Tokyo. After Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday, its unironic celebration of the otherworldly can appear atypical; in fact it is the only one of Takahata’s Ghibli films based on his original script. Unfortunately, the familial comedy My Neighbours the Yamadas (Hôhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun, 1999) disappointed both audiences and critics, and given his age (seventy in October 2005) may prove to be his last.
