Like many Cordillerans, we were raised to believe in supernatural beings that often appear in nature. We were told to treat these beings with enough respect and fear so that we should not suffer ugly consequences if we fail to do so or that there is a reward if we did so. It is a practical society with practical beliefs.
For example, if a snake visits your house, you should never ever harm it. You should even give it some wine and rice. If you kill it, one of your family members will die. I was told that most of the creatures that enter your house (i.e. grasshoppers) are actually visitors.
When I was young there was a lot of magical often tragic stories of distant family members who suffered the consequences of maltreating these creatures. And yet something is ironic
As I mentioned earlier, the Cordilleran society is by large a highly practical one(at least the society I know). This society favors development, it likes building and constructing things, and hunting and breeding animals for food and profit.
This is somehow an irony shared with the Japanese society featured in the film Pom Poko.
Pom Poko about a group of playful raccoon dogs whose home, the forest, is threatened by human development. Like most Studio Ghibli movies, this one is steeped in magic. Some of the raccoons have the power to transform themselves into anything they can imagine. Thus they use these powers to wage a war for their survival against the humans who have the power to terraform the earth and destroy the raccoon's home.
Spoilers!
And so the humans, mostly the construction workers, begin experiencing unexplainable accidents and visions which cause some of them to leave their jobs and some even to lose to their lives.
But the raccoons would eventually lose. They would lose more lives, their home and their very identities as some raccoons will opt to live as humans. The film ends in the usual celebratory and happy gathering of the raccoons dancing in the night in a closed golf course.
Pom Poko manages to tip and balance its serious message and its playful voice. Presented in the trademark lushly colored art of Studio Ghibli, Pom Poko does not go overboard and be preachy with its overtly environmental message, nor does it also paint everything in black and white with the humans all evil and the raccoons all good, nothing of that. And while there is talk of death, nothing is every bloody in this animation. Even the sparse scenes of violence and a bit of love are veiled in comedy and color. It does however have a sort of pathos because the tragic fate of the raccoons and all other forest creature is just all too real when we are shown snapshots of destroyed forests, of dead raccoons run over by trucks while scavenging for food in the city that was never built for them.
This is also ironic. The magical raccoon dogs of Pom Poko are actually based on Japanese folklore, and in some scenes there was talk of how these raccoons were also feared and respected. And yet, the overall treatment of them, at least how movies shows, is quite the opposite.
In my own setting, I did wonder that if these supernatural beings are real then it would have been impossible to build so many developments, as many would have suffered those consequences.
But Pom Poko may have answered that.
And as I grew up the, stories and talks about supernatural beings have gradually faded.We only hear them rarely these days. Of course, one could always say that science and organized religion finally nailed the coffin of these beliefs and stories. But the fact that we no longer have grasshoppers entering our house should have made it obvious. In a city that mows its forests paves it, the creatures and perhaps their "supernatural" faded or chose to hide more than ever. That is the answer I read in Pom Poko.
Watching this in quarantine and having seen recent images of animals roaming empty streets and skies and waters getting clearer makes it harder for me to want the old normal back. I apologize to those who are eager to back to normal exactly as it was before. I can't explain.
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