My friend Michael and I both decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro last night for the first time. Michael is on a Japanese animation kick, and I'm going to see the stage production of My Neighbour Totoro in London in June and wanted to be prepared. Then we texted about it the next day. Here's what we said.
Michael: Just finished. I thought it was delightful.
Aaron: Yes, it was!! I love that cat bus. There was a little too much screaming little girls.
Michael: Oh I thought the whole time the screaming was going to be a fight for you.
Aaron: Little girls really do not need to scream that much. Hush up.
Michael: I was so immediately taken with Totoro, his little sprites, and their bus cat.
Michael: I didn't expect the plot to go in the direction it did. I expected more fantastical adventure and this was pastoral life interrupted by childhood fear. I also assumed Totoro would be a very different character. I can't remember the word for it, but his actions didn't seem to make normal sense. He was following his own whims and if he wanted to fly around on a top then baby, he was gonna. On a personal viewing level, it mattered a lot to me that the dad especially didn't scoff at the kids when they were insistent they saw Totoro. He honored it and said ok we better go show some respect!
Aaron: Your analysis here is wonderful. You're very right and I hadn't thought of all of this.
Michael: Tell me how it landed for you.
Aaron: In my viewing of kids movies recently I've been very preoccupied with the attitude the film takes. Most kids movies are not about the experience of being a child at all; they're about parenting. Totoro splits the difference by having two kids of different ages.
Michael: This felt almost completely about the childhood experience. You're so right in the way the parental experience is so commonly the background reasoning behind plotting.
Aaron: And Totoro himself is not the focus of this movie. The first supernatural figure we meet is the soot-mites, actually. And if we consider things that way, then the movie is much more about finding pleasure in the haunted house, learning to love ghosts, staying open to wonder and terror. Totoro appears at the bus stop when they're scared and lonely. He is a kind of embodiment of the scary figure in the dark or in the forest. But as it turns out, he's cuddly and helpful and magically gifted. (Contrast with the way Americans think about Jesus when they're kids.)
Michael: Oh that's such a good way to frame him. That lines up better with my surprise about him. He's unknowable, but it turns out to at least be in a fun way.
Aaron: What I love about Totoro (and maybe Miyazaki more generally) is its approach to the mysterious and unknown. He asks the child to head toward what scares her. In this case her mother's illness and a new house and her sister's absence.
Michael: I see that in a lot of his other work too. And the films don't demand the characters face those fears without flinching. The characters are allowed their breakdowns and acknowledgment of how overwhelming it all is.
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