Welcome, everybody! This week I’m covering My Neighbor Totoro, one of only two Studio Ghibli films most everyone has heard of (the other being Spirited Away). It remains synonymous with Ghibli to this day, even providing the logo.

My Neighbor Totoro remains an excellent film, even by today’s standards. It’s a top tier achievement in cinema. But today I’m comparing it to the much more competitive category that is Miyazaki’s body of work. Despite some amazing visuals and strong emotional content, it’s held back by a lack of narrative focus.

Characters of My Neighbor Totoro

The Kusakabe Sisters

The main characters of My Neighbor Totoro are Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. They’re a pair of sisters who just moved to the area with their father.

Satsuki is the older sister. She still possesses a childish innocence, demonstrated by her ability to believe in Totoro. However, she also has taken on a burden at a young age. With her mother hospitalized and her father constantly working, it falls to Satsuki to take care of Mei.

Mei is a rambunctious child with adventure in her blood. Mei also isn’t old enough to attend school yet. That means she gets more time to explore, and she takes advantage. As things go, Mei is actually a fairly well-behaved child, but her tendency to run off on her own impacts the plot on several occasions.

Both girls are acutely feeling the absence of their mother. The one true point of conflict in the film comes about specifically because Mei misses her mother and Satsuki lets herself feel the same fear and pain for one moment.

Totoro and the Rest

Totoro himself serves an important role in the film, but he doesn’t actually appear all that much. He’s in four actual scenes, plus one or two additional shots. As to what Totoro is, that’s a great question that I’m going to talk about a little bit later.

There are a handful of secondary characters that bear mentioning. Both of the girls’ parents play a role. The girls are also cared for by a local woman they call Granny. Satsuki also has several interactions with Granny’s grandson, Kanta.

Also, Catbus. It’s a cat that’s a bus. With visible testicles. Catnuts, if you will.

Story of My Neighbor Totoro

My Neighbor Totoro is not a plot-heavy film. It’s a series of loose vignettes featuring the same setting and characters that culminates in a larger finale. However, the bulk of the film is focused on developing the characters and the world more than moving forward a central narrative.

My Neighbor Totoro opens as the Kusakabe family moves into a new house in the country so as to be closer to the hospital where the Kusakabe matriarch is being treated for a serious, long-term illness. The “plot” of the film revolves around the Kusakabe children exploring their new home and its surroundings. A smattering of brushes with the supernatural come to a head when Mei discovers a mysterious, gigantic, and furry creature living in a camphor tree near the new house. The rest of the film chronicles the occasional times in which the lives of the girls intersect with this creature, which Mei has dubbed Totoro.

Themes and Motifs of My Neighbor Totoro

Animism and Environmentalism

My Neighbor Totoro continues a pattern of animist and environmentalist themes in Miyazaki’s work.

The world of Totoro is one where people live in harmony with nature. The rural spaces the characters inhabit act as a liminal space between the cities and the wild. Neither is seen as inherently good or evil, merely different things that should live together.

This can be seen most clearly in the interactions between Totoro and the girls. When Satsuki first sees Totoro, she offers him an umbrella. An umbrella is a mechanical construct. It protects from the rain far more efficiently than Totoro’s leaf. In return, Totoro offers a bundle of seeds. He also returns to help make them sprout. It’s a literal transaction between nature and human beings that enriches both. This theme permeates the film, but it’s never as clear as in that moment.

Flying

Totoro, Satsuki, and Mei’s aerial escapade fits into a continuous legacy of flight fracturing into Miyazaki’s work. I won’t dwell on it here, just remember that this follows in the footsteps of Nausicaa and Castle’s airships.

Female Leads

There’s not much to talk about here either, as it’s simply another entry in a trend, but we’re far enough in to this Miyazaki retrospective that I’d like to start keeping track.

Children and Childhood

Miyazaki has had a focus on the positive potential of young people as far back as Castle of Cagliostro. However, My Neighbor Totoro marks the first time the leads have been quite this young, and also the first time that childhood itself has been quite this much of a factor. Totoro is fundamentally ABOUT the exploratory aspect of childhood that children need to learn. Moving forward, learning as one grows up will be a recurrent feature in these films.

Visuals of My Neighbor Totoro

I’m sure this comes as a shock, but My Neighbor Totoro is a beautiful film. But instead of dramatic science fiction landscapes and floating islands, My Neighbor Totoro finds its beauty in more mundane locales.

The setting of late ‘50s rural Japan makes for a visually appealing but comforting location. The roads interspersed through the fields of corn and rice are beautifully constructed. However, my personal favorite is the family house. It’s positively gorgeous, combining a rustic, worn-down aesthetic with a lovely architectural design.

Once again, the backgrounds are a real treat. I don’t think I need to go into any more detail, because they perfectly capture the setting as I’ve described it above. What’s taken a step up is the animation. The earlier films all look great by today’s standards, but My Neighbor Totoro represents another escalation in the studio’s craft. Movement is smoother, smaller details are more finely rendered, and there’s a veneer of polish on every scene.

Just look at the scene where Mei first stumbles onto Totoro. When he opens his mouth to roar, everything from the hair on his body to the enamel of his teeth to the spittle flying out of his mouth is drawn with great care and detail.

What Is Totoro?

I’d like to quickly address one of the most common questions about this film. Namely, the question as to what Totoro actually is. Two of the most common answers I see is that Totoro is either a yokai or a kami. And I could, if I was so inclined, go through exactly what the distinction there is and why Totoro might fit into either category.

But I’m not going to do that. Because the truth is that Totoro isn’t either of those things. Totoro is…Totoro. Miyazaki made him up.

He’s certainly informed by the cultural baggage rattling around in Miyazaki’s unconscious, so people seeing elements associated with classic Japanese myths aren’t seeing nothing. But inspiration doesn’t equal a hardline classification. And Totoro is as much a product of emotional resonance as any existing mythology.

I think the tendency to argue otherwise can come down to an unfortunate fixation on rendering other cultures down to their component parts, instead of accepting that they’re as rich and complex as our own cultural traditions. Mythological entities get blended together and pulled apart and refined to match the emotional content of a creator’s story. We need to just understand that when engaging with stories arising out of a different culture.

For comparison, you’ll note that we don’t get super granular when discussing new additions to the Western mythological canon. Not many are asking “But what ARE the toys in Toy Story?” Because we already know. They’re talking toys. They’re exactly what they’re shown to be in the films. We don’t have to diminish their meaning by rendering them down to their inspirations.

Conclusion

My Neighbor Totoro is a great film. In fact, it’s likely the most iconic Miyazaki film and Studio Ghibli film, with only Spirited Away being a real counter contender. But I don’t think it’s the best Miyazaki/Ghibli film. Ultimately, My Neighbor Totoro has the opposite problem to Castle in the Sky. My Neighbor Totoro sacrifices narrative focus for thematic richness. The result is still an excellent film, proving fairly definitively that you can make a superb work of narrative fiction without a strong overarching plot.

However, the truly elite entries in Miyazaki’s oeuvre balance both plot and theme. As a result, I’m placing My Neighbor Totoro in second place on my growing Miyazaki Rankings. It doesn’t combine both things quite as well as Nausicaä, but it’s still an incredible cinematic experience.

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