Hayao Miyazaki, “My Neighbour Totoro” (1988)
The film that brought Studio Ghibli to an international audience, “My Neighbour Totoro” may be charming and sweet, suitable for family viewing, but it doesn’t stand up to repeat watching. For its length, the film’s narrative is slow and thin, concentrating on the minutiae of daily existence, and its message about humans living in harmony in nature amounts to very little. Even the storm clouds that gather late in the film’s plot turn out to be embarrassingly insubstantial and the film’s story returns to humdrum tedium. In an idyllic post-war Japan, sometime in the 1950s, university professor Tatsuo Kusakabe and his two young daughters Satsuki and Mei – respectively nine and four years of age – move into an old farmhouse close to the hospital where Yasuko, Tatsuo’s wife and the girls’ mother, is recuperating from a long illness. Through various adventures together and individually, the girls discover that the house is inhabited by soot sprites which lead the younger child Mei to discover various friendly forest spirits living in the camphor tree and the forest behind the farmhouse. Chief of these forest spirits is a huge furry possum-like being that identifies itself to Mei as “Totoro”, the troll that lives in her fairy-tale books.
Over time, the girls become accustomed to living on the farm and being babysat by their elderly neighbour, whose grandson Konta has a bit of a love-hate relationship with Satsuki, but the girls’ cheerfulness masks an inner sadness: Satsuki takes her responsibility for her baby sister seriously to the extent that she quarrels with the younger child, causing Mei to run away; and Mei, for all her cheeky charm and pluck, misses her mother a great deal and is despondent when, all of a sudden, her mother cannot come home from hospital for the weekend as planned. This causes a rift between the sisters and Mei runs off to find the hospital. Though the rural community turns out to help find the youngster, and comb through a lake where a child’s shoe is found, Satsuki is at her wits’ end and in desperation calls on Totoro for help.
The film’s main assets lie in its (admittedly idyllic and idealised) depiction of rural life in 1950s Japan and the animated visuals that show an almost three-dimensional forest and realistic scenes of waterfalls and fish swimming in ponds. Miyazaki’s presentation of the natural world and its spiritual inhabitants is benign – Totoro and his friends only reveal themselves in times of crisis or when humans are most open to their presence and what they have to offer to humanity. That only young children can see Totoro and the forest spirits is a given: Mei is at the age at which children are exploring their surroundings with wonder and open minds, and Satsuki is transiting from that childhood of wonder to the adult world. Their parents, especially Yasuko, are essentially passive characters.
The medical emergency that causes a crisis turns out to be harmless after all but this in itself robs the film of the emotional depth it could have had. An opportunity to learn about loss, whether loss of a parent, loss of innocence or loss of childhood as one enters adolescence, is missed. Other themes in the film – being close to nature, being on good terms with the spirits of nature, and how one should thank the forest spirits for their forbearance and helpfulness in times of crisis – are stressed but the emphasis is not very deep.