Amechiyo in Wonderland

Princess Raccoon (2005) tells the story of the wicked lord Azuchi Momoyama (Mikijiro Hira), a man so monstrously vain that when his private soothsayer, the Virgin Hag (Saori Yuki) tells him (with her powers of spooooky Catholicism) that his own son Amechiyo (Jo Odagiri) will soon surpass him as Fairest of Them All, he flies into a rage and decrees that the young man be banished to the desolate mountain beyond the enchanted Tanuki Forest. He dispatches his trusted servant, the bumbling ninja Ostrich Monk, to do the deed, but when Ostrich Monk stumbles into a hunter’s trap, Amechiyo is left alone in the woods.

He’s not alone for long, though. Amechiyo soon meets a beautiful, mysterious, and very strange young woman (Zhang Ziyi). At first, he doesn’t realize that she is in fact the Tanuki Princess, but once he’s captured by tanuki soldiers and locked up in the palace dungeon, he figures things out.

As the Princess’s loyal handmaiden/bodyguard Hagi (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is quick to point out, love between a Tanuki and a human is strictly forbidden. Still, it is the thirteenth moon of the year, when miraculous things happen, so the young lovers have a chance. If, that is, they can overcome tanuki prejudice, escape the murderous Azuchi, resist the terrible Catholic powers of Virgin Hag, conquer death itself, and find the legendary Frog of Paradise. So they do.

Princess Raccoon is a very strange film. It’s staged as a light operetta (the Japanese title is Operetta Tanuki Goten, for the most part, but the characters shift from a decorated stage to an open field to animated paintings. Similarly, the music shifts from the expected operetta to J-pop to hip-hop to samba to power ballads to an especially gratuitous tap number. Despite the stylistic mish-mash, though, the movie never loses sight of the story.

It’s hard to make any kind of qualitative statements about Princess Raccoon. If the idea of a psychedelic operatic kabuki fairy tale appeals to you, you should track it down. If not, I’m not going to try and change your mind.