My Neighbor Totoro

jpn Tonari no Totoro. 1988. Movie. 86 min. Comedy/drama/fantasy. dir Hayao Miyazaki. scr Hayao Miyazaki. mus Joe Hisaishi. des Hayao Miyazaki, Kazuo Oga. -bc

Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro is the gold standard for Japanese animated children’s films, on a par with the greatest Disney classics and arguably the best-loved anime film of all time.

A college professor and his two young daughters, nine-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, move to an old house in a farming village so they can be nearer to the girls’ mother, who is staying in a convalescent hospital in the area. One day, when Mei is alone playing outside while Satsuki is still in school, she follows two odd furry little creatures into the brush. She slides down a hole into the interior of a massive camphor tree and the den of a giant rotund, furry animal that she names Totoro after hearing it attempt to roar its name. She falls asleep on his stomach, and when she is awakened by an alarmed Satsuki, she finds herself back in the brush. Satsuki eventually meets Totoro herself during a memorable encounter at a bus stop one night in the rain, when Totoro boards the remarkable cat-bus, a giant cat with many legs (and mouse headlights) that opens up to allow passengers. One night soon after, in the light of the moon, Satsuki, Mei, Totoro, and the two little creatures gather to bring forth a mini-forest of giant trees from the acorns they’ve planted.

One day the girls get a telegram asking their father to call the hospital. In the flurry of phone calls and Satsuki’s tearful talk with Granny, a neighbor who babysits Mei during the day, Mei thinks their mother is in danger, so she heads out on her own to try to get to the hospital, clutching an ear of corn she picked herself that she’s sure will make Mother all better. Satsuki and the villagers are soon scouring the countryside looking for Mei. Eventually Satsuki decides to take drastic measures and rushes to the camphor tree to call on Totoro for help. With a simple roar, the cat-bus is summoned and Satsuki boards it, determined to find Mei on her own. . . .

The character design is fairly straightforward for all the main characters, with the exception of Mei, the four-year-old, and the only one to display any exaggerated features. Her head is about as big as her body and her mouth is wide like Totoro’s. Totoro himself is a big, fluffy, cuddly approximation of what a giant benevolent forest sprite would look like if a rabbit, koala, and bear were combined.

Key here is Miyazaki’s depiction of the natural world, a living, breathing, organic landscape, not necessarily dominated by humans. Nature abounds and living things are seen in every shot. Butterflies flutter about and a dragonfly lifts up when disturbed, recalling similar shots of giant flying insects in Nausicaä. A frog observes a scene and gives out a croak. Birds are everywhere. There is life even in spots of dust—“dust bunnies” (or “soot sprites” in the Disney dub) that seem to function as living entities. The trees are treated with respect. The giant camphor tree that houses Totoro has the majesty of a wise, benevolent ruling being.

During the scene where everyone searches for the missing Mei, we see the countryside bathed in light that gradually fades from late afternoon to early and late evening as the frantic search continues.

This is a film about a child’s innocent belief in fairies, magic, and the supernatural, and how this belief is enhanced by a natural setting. For four-year-old Mei, belief in such things is second nature and she is the first to experience the extra-normal in the film when she spots the two little mini-Totoros scurrying around the grounds, and when she sees the eyes open on a dust bunny. For nine-year-old Satsuki, however, such beliefs are still possible but harder to muster. This season marks her last chance to experience this kind of magic. In a few months, she won’t believe enough to be able to call on Totoro’s help as she does in the film’s climax.

Interestingly, the grown-ups in the film endorse the children’s beliefs, even though they themselves can no longer see or experience Totoro or the cat-bus directly. The father even offers a prayer to the camphor tree. The adults accept the existence of sprites and living spirits in nature in a fashion quite alien to the grown-ups and older children in most Western movies, in which a younger child’s account of a cuddly, furry creature in a tree who answers to the name of Totoro would be ridiculed.

The film unfolds at a leisurely pace yet never feels too slow. The film envelops the viewer in the experiences of the two girls as they explore their unfamiliar natural surroundings. These are city kids experiencing this kind of setting for the first time and Miyazaki is careful to show us the terrain from their point of view, and how it looks and feels at different times of day and in different types of weather, including pouring rain. The viewer is gradually drawn, along with the girls, into the world of Totoro, experiencing it as they do, slowly crossing that thin line between the real and the unreal and wondering if it’s all just a dream the girls are having. When the cat-bus speeds past two unsuspecting adults, for instance, they are unable to see it, but they feel the unmistakable sudden wind from its passing.

It’s a film that enchants children and reminds older kids and grown-ups of those special moments in childhood when they believed that anything was possible, that there could indeed be magic and benevolent natural spirits in the world. Enhancing the beauty of the film is the lovely music score by Joe Hisaishi, who has fashioned a particular melody associated with the camphor tree that houses Totoro and towers over the property. It’s a sublime piece of music that takes us into the heart of the movie and captures the very essence of a vibrant, harmonious spirit in nature.

Kazuo Oga’s art direction is a significant feature of Totoro and his work on many Studio Ghibli productions deserves singling out: he was art director on Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, and Princess Mononoke, and background artist and designer for Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Whisper of the Heart, Spirited Away, The Cat Returns, and Howl’s Moving Castle. Before Ghibli, he was art director on Barefoot Gen, Time Stranger, and Wicked City, and a background artist on Harmagedon, Dagger of Kamui, and Urusei Yatsura: Always My Darling.

The nighttime bus-stop scene, where Satsuki and Mei wait with an umbrella for their father’s bus, is one of the most celebrated set pieces in anime history. As Satsuki waits, holding up a sleeping Mei on her back under an umbrella, she hears a rumbling sound next to her. An animal’s feet appear, and she peers from under the umbrella, getting her first glimpse of the towering Totoro. She offers him the extra umbrella while he waits and he begins to play with it, jumping up and landing with enough force to shake the tree above, sending a torrent of drops pounding on the umbrella and eliciting a big laugh from him. Satsuki watches in awe as the approaching headlights are attached not to her father’s bus, but to a giant cat with twelve legs and a spacious interior that opens up to allow Totoro to enter.

Later, after Satsuki and Mei plant the acorns contained in the package Totoro has given them, we see Totoro and his two little underlings prancing about the garden trying to get them to sprout. Satsuki and Mei rush out to join them and participate in the ritual by which the acorns sprout into a mini-forest of giant trees in a matter of seconds, while Hisaishi’s score soars along.

Kanta, the neighbor boy, is Satsuki’s classmate and maintains an awkward silence around her. A quick glimpse of his workbook at school, covered in little drawings, and a scene of him playing with a model plane that he is building, reveal an autobiographical element in the film. If the film takes place in the early postwar era, circa 1950, Kanta is exactly the age Miyazaki was that year. It is common knowledge that Miyazaki has always loved planes and drawing, and, like the girls’ mother, Miyazaki’s mother was ill throughout his childhood.

When Mei slides down the hole that takes her into Totoro’s den in the interior of the camphor tree, she recalls the famous fall down the hole in Alice in Wonderland. A later reference to Alice is found in the resemblance of the cat-bus to the Cheshire Cat.

My Neighbor Totoro was initially released in Japan on a double bill with Grave of the Fireflies, a downbeat animated tragedy about children in Japan during the final days of World War II. Totoro didn’t fare well at the box office at the time, but sales of Totoro “plushie” dolls sustained interest in the film and it eventually became a big hit.

The film was released theatrically in the U.S. in a 1993 English dub by a small distributor, 50th Street Films, which was a division of Troma Inc., a company known primarily for R-rated exploitation films like The Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die. Totoro was released on home video in the U.S. by 20th Century Fox later that year, but only in its dubbed version. In 2006, Disney released a new English dub with Hollywood child star Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds) as Satsuki and her sister, Elle Fanning (Babel), as Mei.

advisory Viewers with icy hearts should be warned that this film may cause the ice to melt.