Pom Poko

Both Takahata and Miyazaki shared strong moral connections to their environmental surroundings - a type of sentiment we can feel in almost all of their pictures. Cases in point include Princess Mononoke (regarded as one of Miyazaki's most violent films to date, the topic of which is too dark to be included on this list), which depicts the tension between nature and man that exceeds apocalyptic tendency. We can say that the same message about the environment will be far easier for us to digest with this film, Pom Poko, one of Takahata's earlier releases.

Pom Poko is about the colony of tanukis (raccoon dogs) that live outside Tokyo and in a deep forest, threatened by Japanese suburban expansions. At the start of the movies, these animals fought among themselves - which led to quite funny battle sequences - then wizened up and turned all their pent-up frustration on human developers. Unfolding the dilemma from the animals' perspective, Pom Poko can serve as Japan's response to "The Secrets of NIMH" or "Watership Down".

It's important to remember that in Japan's societies, cartoony tanuki statues have always been very common, always standing tall and straight with scrotums and swollen bellies exposed. That's exactly how they are portrayed in this film - though they do return to their animal forms in some scenes, reminding us of some classic sequences in the comics "Calvin and Hobbes".

Year of Release: 1994

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%