My Neighbor Totoro
Hayao Miyazaki’s films are always more about the emotional journeys of his characters- often young girls/women- than the fantastical elements that people often remember about his films. That’s a huge part of why his greatest films put him in the upper tier of great filmmakers, regardless of medium. Even after a steady diet of CG-animated comedies and adventures that come out of Hollywood, Miyazaki’s films endure as treasures because of not just the emotional core he finds in each story, but the remarkable artistry of his work. Whether it’s an all-time classic like “Spirited Away” or “Princess Mononoke” or something a bit below that like “Howl’s Moving Castle” or “Ponyo,” Miyazaki’s hand-crafted work is as powerful to experience emotionally as it is visually.
This was my first time watching his 1988 film, “My Neighbor Totoro,” and it captures much of the same heart and imagination as “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” which came out next for him, and “Spirited Away,” although that masterpiece has a decidedly more complex visual world. “Totoro” has a father moving into the country with his two daughters, Satsuki and Mei, while their mother is in the hospital. They find the house fascinating, especially when they walk into the kitchen, they see some black little fuzzy creatures scatter and move out of the kitchen. The old nanny that the father brings in to look after the daughters talks of spirits and “dustbunnies,” what she calls the black things, as if they are real things, and Satsuki and Mei will discover soon that, she might be right.
The wonderful thing about Miyazaki’s films like this and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Spirited Away” is that you do not question the reality of the world he builds, which is grounded both in terms of the real worlds elements and the fantasy co-existing. When Mei sees a curious-looking critter while looking around in the field by their house, she follows it into the woods with a gigantic tree in it, and she finds herself falling onto the big, fluffy body of the sleeping Totoro. Totoro is one of the most iconic characters in all of Miyazaki, and it’s easy to see why. The character design is remarkably tactile and delightful to look at, but also, Totoro’s personality is a joy. Miyazaki treats his fantastical creatures as animals, not really giving them human qualities to their personalities, and it’s one reason the realities of his films work so well. Not anthropomorphizing animals (save for something like Jiji, the black cat in “Kiki’s Delivery Service”), make his films more lived in than American animated fantasies often do, and it’s why something like this scene’s beautiful bus stop scene, where Totoro reacts like an excited dog over the sound of rain on the umbrella Satsuki and Mei let him borrow, is an all-time classic.
It’s not just Totoro, or the animation in general, that makes Miyazaki a grand master of animation and cinema, though. The unique thing about “My Neighbor Totoro” is how it doesn’t traffic in good vs. evil cliches. The biggest evil in the film comes from Satsuki and Mei’s illness, which keeps her hospitalized longer than anyway wants. The biggest drama in the film comes from whether their mother will get better, and late in the film when Mei goes missing when bad news comes from the hospital. Miyazaki’s films are, at their best, gentle reminders that it is issues weighted in our own world are often the ones that can cause us the greatest difficulties in our lives, and how we meet those issues reveal more about who we are than if some fantastic evil is invading our world. No film of his is more grounded in that idea than “My Neighbor Totoro,” and even if I still prefer “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke” in the larger body of his work, “Totoro” is probably one of the best films to get someone into a filmmaker’s complex work as any filmmaker has ever made.
