With My Neighbour Totoro back in UK cinemas, here’s why it remains Hayao Miyazaki’s purest animated masterpiece.
You can tell how deeply a film has worked its way into the cultural psyche by the strange theories surrounding it. My Neighbour Totoro, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 ode to nature and childhood innocence, has since been tenuously connected to an infamous 1960s murder case. There’s also the theory that Totoro, the cuddly woodland creature of the title, is actually the God of Death.
My Neighbour Totoro has ended up with these curious interpretations in part because it’s such a wonderfully blank canvas. Rather than weave in character arcs or villains or upbeat sentiments (a Disney-esque “Believe in yourself and your dreams will come true” for example), Miyazaki simply captures a singular moment from a summer long gone; it isn’t so much a story as a distillation of what it means to be a child, in all its wonderment and indefinable fear.
Most will be familiar with the setting by now. A pair of young sisters, Satsuki and Mei, along with their easily distracted father, move to the Japanese countryside to be nearer their mother, who’s in hospital with an unspecified illness. There, the two siblings explore their dusty old house and the fields and woodland that stretch far beyond, encountering all kinds of fantastical creatures on their travels.
Amid all the exploration and sunshine, there are shadows: the mother’s sickness hangs thickly over the film, and while the possibility of the story taking a darker turn is only gently alluded to, there’s often the sense that a harsher reality lies just outside the frame. Miyazaki deftly weaves such themes as the brevity of childhood, the fragility of human life and the complexity of nature into one seamless image.
Already a veteran animator by 1988, with well over 20 years’ industry experience under his belt, Miyazaki’s previous feature films were often full of action and movement, from the astonishingly realised car chase of The Castle Of Cagliostro (1979) to the sweeping aerial sequences of Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind (1984) and Castle In The Sky (1986). With My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki goes in the opposite direction, contrasting long stretches of serenity and calm with only brief flashes of kineticism – Catbus’s agile sprint across fields; Totoro taking to the air on spinning top.
It’s a deeply personal film for Miyazaki, rooted in his own memories of rural life in Japan in the wake of the Second World War, and the loneliness he felt when his own mother was in hospital when he was little. The observation and detail in his animation is exquisite: the weight and volume of the mighty Totoro as he sleepily rolls over in a woodland glade; the way drops of water run from Satsuki’s umbrella as she shelters from summer rain.
The freedom and creative joy in Miyazaki’s work reflects Satsuki and Mei’s own reaction to the natural world; My Neighbour Totoro is told from a child’s perspective, but it also captures what it’s like to think back to a happy bygone time as an adult. It’s set in a particular era and location – a calendar on a wall indicates that it’s the summer of 1958 – but in that specificity, Miyazaki mines something universal.
It’s fascinating to think that Studio Ghibli was initially uncertain about how audiences would react to My Neighbour Totoro; hence why it was placed on a double-bill with Isao Takahata’s devastating animated war drama, Grave Of The Fireflies. Instead, it was a huge success; such that Totoro, the gentle guardian of the forest, has become one of the most beloved characters in all animation.
Of the character, Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata once wrote, “I think the single greatest benefit Hayao Miyazaki has bestowed upon us is Totoro, for Totoro is definitely not your ordinary celebrity-mascot character… Totoro lives in the hearts of all children throughout Japan, and when they see trees now, they sense Totoro hidden in them. And this is a truly wonderful and indeed rare thing.”
Had Miyazaki opted to retire after making My Neighbour Totoro for some reason, he’d still be remembered as one of Japan’s great masters of animation. Instead, he kept going – and going – celebrating his passion for aviation in Porco Rosso (1992), The Wind Rises (2013) and even Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) with its captivating broomstick flying sequences. He meditated on the destruction of the natural world in Princess Mononoke (1997), and returned to childhood adventures in Spirited Away (2001) and Ponyo (2008).
Among all of those classics, My Neighbour Totoro is arguably the purest of Miyazaki’s films. It’s a film that can be enjoyed by people of all ages and nationalities; it positively rewards watching again every few years, and will mean something different to the viewer each time they return to it. Spirited Away and 2023’s The Boy And The Heron may have won the Oscars, but it was Totoro that first captured our hearts.
My Neighbour Totoro is in UK cinemas from the 2nd August. Don’t miss it.
