It should be noted that in Japanese culture, cartoony-looking tanuki statues are quite common, standing upright with swollen bellies and scrotums exposed, and that’s just how Takahata depicts them for much of the film — although in some scenes, they return to animal form, a switcheroo gambit that recalls the way Calvin’s stuffed tiger transforms into the real thing in classic “Calvin and Hobbes” comics.
Both Miyazaki and Takahata shared a strong moral connection to the environment, which can be felt in nearly all of their films. In “Princess Mononoke” (by far the most violent of Miyazaki’s films, and ultimately too heavy to make this list), the tension between man and nature reaches near-apocalyptic proportions. The same eco-conscious message is far easier to take in the form of Takahata’s earlier film, about a colony of tanuki (wild raccoon dogs) living in the woods outside Tokyo who are threatened by suburban expansion. At first, the creatures start to fight among themselves, which makes for some hilariously cartoony battle sequences, before wizening up and turning their frustration on the encroaching human developers. Depicting the problem from the animals’ point of view, the film plays like Japan’s answer to “Watership Down,” or else Don Bluth’s “The Secret of NIMH.” It should be noted that in Japanese culture, cartoony-looking tanuki statues are quite common, standing upright with swollen bellies and scrotums exposed, and that’s just how Takahata depicts them for much of the film — although in some scenes, they return to animal form, a switcheroo gambit that recalls the way Calvin’s stuffed tiger transforms into the real thing in classic “Calvin and Hobbes” comics.