Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple 1935
Early Japanese animation featuring a dancing tanuki (a Japanese raccoon dog).
Early Japanese animation featuring a dancing tanuki (a Japanese raccoon dog).
The boozy mercenary of the title, based on the actual historical figure of Naoyuki Ban (1567-1615), attempts to rid a haunted castle of spooks.
A farmer walking in the woods is frightened away by a shapeshifting fox, who then disguises himself as a samurai and makes his way to a temple, haunted by a young shapeshifting tanuki whose various attempts to frighten the fox/samurai away fail. The young tanuki telephones his father, and they join forces against the samurai.
A baseball game between the rabbits and tanuki (raccoon dogs).
Animation by Yuki Maeda. Music by Tsubasa Handa.
In Kyoto, humans and supernatural creatures live side-by-side. Soichiro Shimogamo used to be the head of tanuki society, but without warning one day he was made into tanuki stew, and no one knows how it happened. He left four sons behind who all live happily with their mother. What does fate have in store for this strongly bonded family?!
On a visit to his hometown, Souta Tawara meets a strange child who loves udon and frogs... and has ears and a tail?! Although ordinary at first glance, it turns out that this little tyke is actually a tanuki in a human disguise! So begins the tale of a gentle, warm, and slightly weird family in Kagawa prefecture, better known as "Udon Prefecture," where time passes at a less hurried pace than in the big city...
A little girl named Kohina ends up summoning a Kokkuri-san, a lower-ranking ghost in Japanese folklore. The Kokkuri-san she calls ends up being a white-haired handsome, young man. Although he had intended to merely haunt her at first, he becomes worried about her terrible eating habit of cup ramen for every meal, so he decides to haunt her in order to protect her.
If it looks like a dog and acts like a dog and insists it's a dog, it's…a dog? Probably? She adopted it anyway, and her life with this “dog” will never be boring!