If the praise of other animation buffs hadn’t been enough to reassure me that I was in for a treat, then the poster would have done the trick. Go ahead, look at it, up close.
When it was new, My Neighbor Totoro was a work without precedent in Miyazak’s canon. After three features, and healthy portions of three television series, certain recurring elements had definitely established themselves (primarily in the three projects over which the director exercised an especially strong hand): a post-apocalyptic “used future” setting; the loving depiction of flight; a heavy thematic emphasis on the uncomfortable relationship between technology and machinery on the one hand, and the balance of the natural world on the other, with the post-technological human protagonists caught in between; central female characters who are somehow tapped into mystical energy; a central male-female relationship that is based on mutual respect and friendship rather than romantic feelings, that nevertheless hews closely to traditional gender roles (man=protector, woman=morally pure). There are hints of some of these things in Totoro, but hints only. This is instead a resolutely domestic story about a family living in a world not recognisably different from our own – Miyazaki has identified the setting as 1955, and in-film evidence tells us that it’s August in the then-farming community of Tokorozawa, but it could take place anywhere that there’s a big old house next to a sprawling forest just begging for children to lose themselves in its shade for a long summer day.
It is the story of the Kusakabe sisters: eight-year-old Satsuki (Hidaka Noriko) and four-year-old Mei (Sakamoto Chika). They and their father (Itoi Shigesato) have just moved to the country from Tokyo, to be nearer to the hospital where the girl’s mother (Shimamoto Sumi) is being treated for a grave illness (tuberculosis, by implication). While playing one day, Mei spots a peculiar white creature, the size of a rabbit, that leads her to a tunnel through the underbrush, and on the other side of this tunnel she finds a cave that is home to a large grey creature (Takagi Hitoshi) of the same shape as the white one: these, as well as the medium blue one, are the Totoros, the guardian spirits of the forest. The Totoros introduce the girls to a small world of magical beings, and as the Kusakabes settle into their new life, Satsuki and Mei are led to an ever-deeper understanding of the wonders of life around them.
Here’s another word to describe the film: delightful. Not in the sense that it is a delight for the viewer – although it is – but that the primary emotion expressed within the film is delight. My Neighbor Totoro is not a movie which does not know fear, but the fear within it is personal and specific: the fear of a young child who is faced with the possible loss of a parent. It emphatically lacks a fear of the otherworldly and the mysterious: Satsuki and Mei are first and above all thrilled to find that their new home is inhabited by strange black creatures called (in the English translation) soot devils. And Mei’s first response to finding this huge sleeping creature is not trepidation, but unbridled enthusiasm.
Visually, the film (designed by Oga Kazuo, soon to be a semi-regular Miyazaki collaborator) has the same gentleness of its narrative. I complained – or maybe, “observed with reservations” is a better way of putting it – that Laputa: Castle in the Sky was not as rich to look at as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Totoro is softer and more pastel yet. Described by Studio Ghibli’s top producer Suzuki Toshio as “nature painted with translucent colors”, there is a watercolor dreaminess to both the locations and the characters.
In 1988, the high cost of the film made it something of a huge gamble for the still-young Studio Ghibli (perhaps its slight running time – at 86 minutes, it’s Miyazaki’s shortest feature by far), and they released it as a double feature with Takahata Isao’s Grave of the Fireflies, hoping that the gravitas of the latter film would increase the chances that the untested idea of children and friendly monsters in the countryside might actually pull in some box office (perhaps also, Totoro was meant to offset the incredibly depressing Grave, as manifestly un-delightful as its sibling is euphorically happy). The double feature ended up losing money, in the short term, though both films have since gained well-deserved sterling reputations; and in the end, the big Totoro became Studio Ghibli’s official mascot. A fitting fate for a movie that sums up so much of what Ghibli is about: sincere, rich family entertainment, that uses the medium of animation to its fullest range of possibilities. If the studio, and the filmmaker, had never done anything else than this feature, their impressive reputations would still be fully deserved.