Pom Poko, a movie by Isao Takahata and produced by Studio Ghibli, was the number one movie in Japan in 1994, grossing more money than any other that year. I don't know a lot about Studio Ghibli, except they've produced some excellent animations in the last several decades, including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky, and my favorite, My Neighbor Totoro. These animations are distributed by Disney in the United States, and if you have a young child, like I do, who watches the same movies over and over again, you'll soon see that these movies stand up to repeated viewings--that's not true of all movies.
Enough about Studio Ghibli. From a westerner's stand point, Pom Poko isn't one of their best films, but it's good, and it has one feature that I found of such fascination that I had to build a little web page to discuss it. (Perhaps "make fun of it in an inappropriate childlike manner" would be a better description.) The movie is about raccoons and based on Japanese folklore (and if you follow that link you'll see it's not really raccoons at all, but the movie characters refer to themselves as raccoons, so we'll stick with that).
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Right away as the movie starts you see that these raccoons have some interesting properties. As on the left, they can look like regular old raccoons, or, as they will, they can transform their shapes into something like a care bear, as you see here on the right. It's this latter shape they assume for most of the movie, but that's not the limit of their transformative powers, not by a long shot. Sometimes they become these ultra-weird little guys, like this fellow on the right, below, (but only when they're really excited, or alternatively, pole axed).
You can see there that they also morph into things like giant raccoon samurai. The morphing is all well and good, but that's not what we're really here for. We're here to discuss the one real quirk of this movie, and that is, or, should I say, those are, the "nads." What's that you say, nads? That's right, nads, go-nads, of the family jewels variety. This movie is replete with them, though they are referred to as "raccoon pouches," so as to play them down. Only the men have them, and they look just like, well, balls, you know, testicles, the dog's bollocks, as they say in England.
Yes, I did a double take when I first noticed this, called the wife over to confirm it. Yup, balls, and balls again. Balls everywhere, really, except for on the women folk, of course. Even the statues had testes--and big ones at that! Actually the statue is a reference to the folk tale base of these characters, and perhaps to remind us that, the folklore did touch upon this subject, and the writer/director therefore weren't just making this testicular plot device up. It's interesting to note the statue appears to have a penis, too, where the Pom Poko Raccoons do not. I guess that would have taken things just a little too far. (!?!)
In one scene, one of the main characters, Gonta, is trampled, and we see that in the press he is slapped in the face by a set of cojones so large they would give anyone a concussion. You might ask, was he really? No, not really, I took two consecutive frames (or very nearly), and put them together. You can see the original frames below. The thing is, the scene happens so fast, it really does look like he get's slapped in the face by a pair. The other thing to consider is the artists who had to draw a full frame whose focus point was a pair of testes. They had to be laughing throughout the making of this one, laughing or just feeling very uncomfortable.
Perhaps this all seems a bit strange to us here in the west because of cultural differences. Certainly, I've seen bits of Japanese television programming on YouTube that leave me going, WTF?!? But, kiddies, it hasn't even begun to get weird yet. No, it's not enough that they do have testes (and no wanger), but they also use them, yes, use them, and not in the usual way (or at least not exclusively so). For one thing, they sometimes use them as trampolines (note the poor raccoon on the right, bearing the brunt of the testicular torture--he's not even breaking a sweat, though he does appear a bit concerned with the proceedings).
Perhaps a little "history" here will help: Pom Poko is about raccoons standing up to humans as human development quickly destroys raccoon habitat. Gonta is one of the leaders. He's head strong, but it's not with his head that he leads, rather, it's his huge huevos that have that job. Here you can see him taking out a truck with them, blinding the driver and sending it over a cliff. Personally, I'd rather not wrap my testicles around the windscreen of a 10 ton vehicle moving at 60 mph with the express intention of sending it off the road. Leaves me feeling vulnerable, just thinking about it.
Finding all this hard to believe? This is a kid's show, right? Take a look at this video clip where the old master first shows the young cubs what they can do with their 'nads, ah, I mean pouch. Just click the play button (you might have to do it twice) and keep your eye on the red carpet...
If that's not amazing use of the scrotum, I don't know what is!
Ok, maybe I do--more amazingly yet, they use them to fly, or perhaps more accurately, to glide, like giant ball-gliding squirrels. Check it out below. They got airborne using a classic, you jump on one end of the teeter-totter while I stand on the other, Wile E. Coyote move.
As you can see from the sequence, this is actually an aerial assault on some hapless officers of the law. Unfortunately for our raccoon friends, things don't go well for long, and the police eventually gain a ball-riding/twisting upper-hand in the fight, until Gonta alone is left swinging his tremendous testes like an oversized blackjack. C'mon, really, who's that going to hurt, anyway?! It'd be like getting hit by a wet bean-bag chair. Might knock the wind out of you, at best...
And finally, for an encore, as it were, the old, old master uses his nads to form a ship to sail off to sea, both like and unlike a Viking funeral ship, laden with treasure, only made out of 'nads instead of oak. The raccoons onboard are celebrating, though they've lost the war, and the old old master has spent his reserves in the fight, and it's with a great sigh of relief that we learn his scrotum has retained its elasticity!
Pom Poko is more than a movie about rodentia testicles, but nobody else was covering that angle, and so I felt a powerful compulsion come over me. It's my belief that the world can rest easier, now that this information is on the internet.
You can see there that they also morph into things like giant raccoon samurai. The morphing is all well and good, but that's not what we're really here for. We're here to discuss the one real quirk of this movie, and that is, or, should I say, those are, the "nads." What's that you say, nads? That's right, nads, go-nads, of the family jewels variety. This movie is replete with them, though they are referred to as "raccoon pouches," so as to play them down. Only the men have them, and they look just like, well, balls, you know, testicles, the dog's bollocks, as they say in England. 
