Princess Raccoon

When the rare occasion comes along that you find yourself craving an insane Japanese folk musical, I recommend Princess Raccoon. This movie is great for two reasons. First, it's a pretty good film; even though the scenes consist mainly of cardboard cutouts, there is some beautiful cinematography and it plays with genres like rap and rock opera! Second, it doesn't translate all that well into English. So the curses come out the other end as "I won't give him a damn" and the subtitles for lines that are sung contain contain words like "facilitate" and "associated."

I think my favorite moment is the part it took Jen and I at least five minutes to figure out after the film had ended. When the Prince first enters sacred mountain, where raccoons and humans happen to be indistinguishable, he is chased by a lady as she grows larger and larger, yelling to the prince that she needs him for her raccoon soup. But we were pretty sure by this point that she is herself a raccoon. So after much deliberation, we decided that she is only pretending to be a human chasing raccoon, who is actually a man, so as not to betray her true identity. Either we're right about this or this movie is entirely without logic.

It's one of those foreign films that is interesting because once you come to such absurd explanations for what seems at first like total nonsense, it actually starts to make sense, making you feel just as crazy.