My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Official trailer

My Neighbor Totoro is Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Japanese animated family film produced by Studio Ghibli. The film depicts two young sisters Satsuki and Mei moving with their father to a rural Japanese farmhouse to be closer to the hospital where their mother is recovering from a long illness. The girls discover forest spirits in the surrounding countryside including the title Totoro, a large furry creature who lives at the base of a giant camphor tree.

The film traces their adventures with the spirits across a summer while their family waits for their mother’s eventual return. Noriko Hidaka voices Satsuki. Chika Sakamoto voices Mei. Shigesato Itoi voices the father Tatsuo Kusakabe. Sumi Shimamoto voices the mother Yasuko. Hitoshi Takagi voices Totoro. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay. Studio Ghibli produced the film on a budget of approximately 3.7 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 41 million dollars worldwide across multiple releases. The work has been re-released theatrically and on home video continuously since 1988.

This is as close to a perfect film as I know. Nothing terrible happens to anybody, there’s no villain, and I’m completely absorbed from the move into the old house to the final frame. Miyazaki makes planting acorns feel like an event, and I’d take that over any explosion Hollywood has ever staged.

Few animated films achieve the level of gentle observation My Neighbor Totoro maintains across its full runtime. The work has no villain. There’s no major dramatic conflict. The mother’s illness reads as background concern instead of as plot driver. The girls explore. They meet creatures. They wait for news from the hospital. The plot is a series of small adventures connected by domestic continuity. The film succeeds because it trusts that ordinary childhood experience contains enough material to sustain feature-length storytelling.

Audiences who arrived expecting conventional plot structure sometimes complained about the absence of dramatic incident. Audiences who accepted the film on its own terms received material that conventional production rarely delivers. The work has aged into classic status across Japanese and Western audiences alike.

The Plot Refusal

Miyazaki refused conventional plot structure for My Neighbor Totoro. The film contains no antagonist, no chase, no buildup to climactic confrontation. The girls don’t save the world. They don’t rescue their mother through magical intervention. Totoro isn’t in danger. The events include exploring an empty house, planting acorns, riding the Cat Bus, getting lost briefly, and other small incidents. Each incident matters within itself instead of as setup for later dramatic resolution.

The refusal to provide conventional plot lets the film function as childhood itself.

Children experience their daily lives as accumulating moments with no plot to them, and the film holds that perspective instead of imposing adult dramatic conventions on it. I think this is the bravest choice Miyazaki ever made, and it’s why the film moves me as an adult. Viewers either accept it on its own terms or reject it for not delivering what they expected, and most eventually accept it.

The Mother’s Illness

The girls’ mother is recovering from an unspecified long illness in a hospital outside the village where the family has moved to be near her. The illness drives the family’s relocation but doesn’t function as conventional dramatic threat. The mother gets better. She comes home. The film doesn’t depict her recovery as miraculous or as result of the girls’ actions. The illness is part of the family’s circumstances instead of the film’s central conflict.

Miyazaki has stated in interviews that the mother’s illness was modeled on his own mother’s long battle with spinal tuberculosis during his childhood.

The autobiographical content gives the film specific personal weight without intruding on its narrative. The illness is the kind of background worry that children carry without being able to address directly. Children whose parents are ill receive the film with distinct recognition. The work treats their situation seriously without dramatizing it. The autobiographical foundation produces emotional content that pure invention rarely matches.

The mother’s illness moves me more than anything else in the film. Miyazaki never lets the worry take over, and that restraint makes the moments where it surfaces hit harder than any tearjerker I can think of. I admire a filmmaker who trusts his audience to feel something without being told to.

The Cat Bus

The Cat Bus is a creature that combines a bus and a large cat.

It transports forest spirits and occasionally human children who can perceive it. It has multiple legs, a hollow body that passengers ride inside, and a face with cat features. I adore it, and it’s the most delightful piece of creature design I know. Cat Bus merchandise sells across Japan and internationally, and I understand exactly why.

The character design represents Miyazaki’s approach to fantasy creatures generally.

The Cat Bus borrows from the shape-shifting cats of Japanese folklore but owes nothing to realistic biology, and Miyazaki invented the bus itself for this film. The combination of recognizable cat features and bus functionality produces something children immediately accept and adults find delightful through the same recognition. Most contemporary animated creatures try to look realistic. Miyazaki’s try to look invented while remaining emotionally recognizable, and that approach sets Studio Ghibli’s animation apart from conventional Western alternatives.

Is My Neighbor Totoro as good as people say?

It’s a 10. The plot refusal lets this picture function as childhood itself, the film treats the mother’s illness seriously without milking it, and the Cat Bus is the best creature Ghibli ever dreamed up.

My only complaint is that it ends. Anyone who cares about animation, Japanese cinema, or films that trust ordinary life to carry a feature should see it, and I’d put it in front of a child before almost anything else.

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