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I'll tell you why so serious

Excellent adaptation.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Suspiciously lame political message from the overrated Ghibli. The narcissistic writers prove what a moral cesspool their city of Tokyo is by trying to convince the audience that all Life on planet earth must adapt to the sadistic whims of idiot bipeds. I'm sure Tokyo's construction contractors showed their gratitude to Takahati and his cringing assimilationist rhetoric. At least one character pulls through this blatant environmentalisn't propaganda with his soul intact - Gonta: a hero with balls big enough to take on dump trucks. Go Gonta! If he could pull off a few more Fukushimas, Japan might be suitable for life again in another 2000 years.

This is perhaps the only film by Ghibli that I really found it to be BAD. I mean, it is truly BAD. I watched it in the same day as Only Yesterday, and boy, the contrast in quality was amazing. Takahata really dropped the ball on this one: his previous film is easily the best film of 1991, for me at least, and this one is BELOW average. I mean, Ghibli has managed it: they made a film that is below the Hollywood average quality for their canned products.Why this film is so bad? Because nothing works: the characters don't fell like "people", they are cartoon characters truly. This film is perhaps the least artistically accomplished film that Ghibli ever made and one of the least intelligent ones as well. It feels much like an American cartoon, and yes, those suck. Not recommended, really: a genius like Takahata made this poppy!

(This review is of the Dusney Studios DVD via NetFlix in 2010, and may not exactly match some other releases.) While both the visuals and the storyline of Pom Poko are typical Studio Ghibli, the storyline doesn't completely translate across cultures to the U.S. readily.There are an awful lot of references to Japanese folklore and quite a few to Japanese culture, so many that the storyline only makes moderate sense to a naive viewer. For one example midway through the film there's a highly varied and lengthy parade of goblins. Every goblin shown is real in the sense that it has its own back-story in Japanese folklore. Although you can enjoy the display without knowing the details of each character, it's just not the same. For a second example, years are referred to in what at first appears to a U.S. viewer to be a rather strange construct about "era"s, something that's typically assumed to be specific to the characters in the film and somewhat random. In fact, the "era" construct for naming years is standardized and is used throughout Japanese society.Translation across cultures is a particular problem when it's not just secondary things but is the main characters. The main characters are "Tanuki", sometimes translated as "Tanuki" again, sometimes as "Racoon dog", and with a possible reference to something that would be called a "badger" in the U.S. While real, these creatures also have a central place in Japanese folklore. Particularly important are their "balls", which are displayed prominently, contained in a scrotum reputed to be as large as eight tatami mats. While the original is already a part of Japanese culture, is known by everyone, and is the source of quite a bit of gentle humor; American attitudes probably vary from some finding it a bit "odd" to the prudish finding it just plain "objectionable".Disney has done new/dubbed soundtracks for all the U.S. releases of Studio Ghibli material. Generally they're excellent, translating not only the words but also the most important cultural references. But here the Disney soundtrack has had difficulties (not blatantly obvious on first viewing, but clear enough on the second viewing); there are too many cultural references to translate, yet translating just the words results in a story that too often doesn't quite make sense. Even the earlier subtitles make obvious trade-offs that are not always successful, for example calling the main characters "Racoons" rather than "Tanuki" even though doing so risks changing the meaning of the story significantly. Both the old Japanese soundtrack and the new/dubbed Disney soundtrack are present. (As usual, the mouth movements of the anime characters don't quite match the English soundtrack, but the effect is not at all jarring and is in fact quite easy to just ignore.) More importantly, both the old subtitles that try to match the literal Japanese very closely and the new subtitles that exactly match the Disney soundtrack are present. Not being able to understand Japanese, I of course resorted to the English translations, but found neither the Disney soundtrack nor the original subtitles to be completely adequate. What worked better for me was a combination of the two -Disney new/dubbed English soundtrack (audio track 1 of 2) and original English subtitles (subtitle track 2 of 3).

Most anime fans remember Isao Takahata best for his wonderful tearjerker, "Grave of the Fireflies", will find interesting this title as well. This lavishly animated tale about raccoons battling for their homeland isn't so dramatic as "Grave of the Fireflies" but is an interesting amalgam of humor, drama, and action delivered instead. At times, the viewer gets treated to scenes which recall the tragic elements , but even though the tone of the movie is somber, a handful of lighthearted moments elevate the overall production out of depression. As this is a Studio Ghibli film, production values are spectacular. Backgrounds are painted with a tasteful mixture of simplicity and art, and the raccoons are as cuddle-some as you would expect. (If you're scratching your head while reading this, don't be alarmed--according to Japanese folklore, raccoons have the power to transform into anything--including human beings) The actual animation is as colorful and imaginative as you might expect from a Ghibli movie(and there is one scene where we are treated to cameo appearances by Porco Rosso, Kiki, and Totoro.) While Pom Poko has a story to tell and a meaningful message for one to think about, its character and plot aspects may come across as a bit off-putting to viewers expecting a typical animated feature. Indeed, while some raccoons identify themselves with distinguishable names and/or personalities (for example, Gonta is a burly, rough-and-ready raccoon who is always looking for a fight, while Oroku is the "wise woman" of the tribe), the story offers little in the way of character development. In fact, most of the action in the story is narrated (by Maurice LaMarche in English, Kokondei Shinchou in Japanese), which elevates the overall effect of the movie to that of a semi-documentary. For the most part, this approach works to a very interesting degree and is a refreshing change of pace. However, there were some scenes in the movie where I wished the narration could have been reduced a little bit, as it sometimes gets in the way of appreciating the beauty of the visuals on screen. Unfortunately, most of the attention that this movie received were some silly controversies about the fact that the movie shows the testicles of the male raccoons, but that was a minor detail if you compare with the charm and the originality of the story. Even when it is not perfect (Some consider this movie a inferior work of Ghibli )this movie was funny enough for me, and is one of the my favorite animes.