The iconic status of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animation was recently underscored by a smash-hit stage adaptation in London, and now the movie itself gets a theatrical rerelease. This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score. It’s the one whose realist situation is least cluttered by exotic fantasy creatures.
My Neighbour Totoro is about the enchantment of childhood and, as so often, presents us with a supernatural world which has made visible to children because of some pain or trauma in their ordinary lives, a world which exists midway between hallucination and reality. University lecturer Tatsuo (voiced by Shigesato Itoi) has brought his two young daughters, 10-year-old Satsuki (Noriko Hidaka) and four-year-old Mei (Chika Sakamoto) with him to a ramshackle rented house in the farm village of Matsugo, 25 kilometres from Tokyo, so that they can be close to the hospital where the girls’ mother is now a patient.
All three are happy enough, but Mei, while wandering in the local countryside, enters a kind of secret part of the woodland and encounters a huge, gentle creature with two little friends; she calls him “Totoro”, partly because of his roaring sound and partly because this is how she mispronounces the word “troll”. When Mei goes missing as a result of a bitter quarrel with Satsuki about their mum, it is Totoro who must save the day, along with his friend the “cat bus”, a feline creature that grins just like the Cheshire cat. Like so many Ghibli films, My Neighbour Totoro is surely influenced by classic English children’s literature: Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis and JM Barrie.
So what is wrong with their mother? Is it something physical, or psychological? The diagnosis is never spoken aloud, although the girls come to resent the euphemism that was first presented to them when she originally had to go into hospital: that she “had a cold”. Either way, it is their mother’s crisis which is the mysterious origin of Mei’s euphoric encounter with Totoro. The simplicity and realism of the way Mei is drawn is quietly amazing; her movements are like live-action drama, a miracle of sweetness and grace.
As for the father, he doesn’t get to see Totoro but he has a kind of innocent access to Totoro’s world, by virtue of his unaffected reverence for nature. In front of a giant camphor tree, he tells his saucer-eyed girls, “Trees and people used to be good friends.” My Neighbour Totoro is perhaps the least exotic and complex of the Ghibli canon; it has an unaffected frankness in its address to the audience, and the “performance” of Mei, though an animation, is rather remarkable.
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