Totoro Bus Stop in Ume, Saiki City, Oita, Japan. STA3816. CC BY-SA 3.0 http://bit.ly/2aBLIUF
I must have been around sixteen or seventeen when I watched Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro) for the first time on TV. First released in Japan in April 1988, it reached the public in the USA and Europe in the early ‘90s. Those were the very years of birth of the Internet, and those kiddos like me who had spent their childhood indulging in the few anime shows broadcast on the tellys – like Alps no Shoujo Heidi (1974), Haha wo Tazunete Sanzenri (1976) or, more recently, the still nowadays überpopular Dragon Ball – gasped in awe in front of what we were watching on the screen at that very moment. For many of us, it was our very first OVA (later on brought to theatres as well), and also the beginning of something utterly new.
Tonari no Totoro was created by Studio Ghibli (led officially until around 2013-14 by main director Hayao Miyazaki, although he hasn’t truly retired yet, in spite of his many announcements to do so) and it tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki, aged 10, and Mei, aged 4, who move in with their father to an old country house in Japan which needs restoration. Born and raised in Tokyo, the two young girls face this change with excitement as well as with agitation. Helped by the friendly neighbours of the rural village, the girls’ father, Tatsuo, a university professor, encourages the girls to participate in the moving and reforming process and to adapt to their new lifestyle.
The whole movie is a song to praise life in the countryside and the exhuberant beauty of nature, portrayed through the most delightful illustrations of the semi-abandoned rural mansion, the cultivated fields, the majestic camphor tree on the top of the hill and the lush forests nearby. Such magnificence is underlined by the solemn and emotional compositions of the OST, by Joe Hisaishi – a regular collaborator with Ghibli. Along the movie we know that the true reason why the family moved to the place is because the mother is in a nearby hospital, suffering from some sort of life-threatening illness that needs the healthier atmosphere of the country to heal (as Hayao Miyazaki’s mother was bedridden with spinal tuberculosis for more than nine years, it is assumed that the movie echoes this straining experience from his childhood).
Inmersed in that new environment, and being forced to carry on without the presence of their mother in their daily lives, the two little girls express their anguish for their mother’s well-being more or less clumsily, in accordance with their different age range. Helping them to walk through this emotional passage, and in full touch, for the first time, with the majestic charm of nature, the two sisters will make contact with a series of extremely kawaii supernatural beings: the susuwatari (‘black soots’, or ‘dust bunnies/goblins’) and Totoro: a huge, sturdy and fluffy bunny-like being that controls the winds and the growth of plants, generally appearing together with its smaller kin. Later on in the movie, the girls will also meet the Nekobasu (‘Catbus’), a furry, slightly creepy though cute hybrid of a cat and a bus, as the very name implies. Only the girls can see and interact with these supernatural beings as they help them reunite the family again together.
What was a novelty about Tonari no Totoro, as regards other anime or cartoons we were watching at the time (either too child-oriented or too packed with battles and superheros), was that it portrayed, in an utterly captivating, subtle and intelligent manner the colourful inner world of the two little girls: how they interpret life through play, how they learn about this new habitat, their perception of nature and magic, and how they relate, with Mei trying to copy everything Satsuki does and Satsuki wandering between the natural playfulness of her age and the responsibilities of her new role as her sister’s caretaker. And also how they adjust to their new school, mates, neighbours, guardians. Though undeniably sugar-coated (with much darker undertones), it’s such a legitimate portrait of childhood one could say that even the supernatural elements are not even that necessary for the magic of the movie to unfold. Infancy and its vision of things is the true enchantment of the film, for we all can relate to the two sisters’ adventures and games.
http://www.ghibli-museum.jp/en/
In a 2014 interview to Miyazaki by Robbie Collin for The Telegraph he states that his Tonari no Totoro, together with Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001), “are about kids who discover magical places and creatures hidden in reality’s cracks.” This is a recurring leitmotiv in many Ghibli movies, particularly the first ones – the most recent films, although they portray magical elements too, have a slightly more sombre, less innocent tint – and it relates directly to a coping mechanism in children who face problems or insecurities, which is to shelter psychologically in a world of imagination where everything is possible and the child doesn’t lack company, nourishment, or protectors. Somehow, the children who survive recall how this skill, this mind plasticity in terms of interpreting reality or reacting to life problems, allowed them to have more resources and/or use them more appropriately at that time. This is how great artists, writers, entrepeneurs are born.
The generation that grew up with the beautiful and moving films by Ghibli is around their 30s-40s now. I’m pretty sure that for most of us life has proved to be much tougher than we expected it to be, in those golden years of our childhood and adolescence, when we discovered Miyazaki’s movies for the first time. There’s war, an ongoing economic crisis, natural disasters, earthquakes that fatally affect nuclear power plants… the consequences, both in the short and in the long term, are still unknown, but they don’t paint a pretty picture of the future overall. That’s why most of us haven’t still left behind the memories of these movies from our youth, those emblematic childhood dreams; far from that, we’ve raised them, nostalgically, to the status of totems. I still remember in detail the very moment in which I watched, for the first time, how Totoro made the huge camphor tree grow in seconds; I can still feel in my heart the same awed, soul-stirring sentiment; I’m still moved when I hear Joe Hisaishi’s background music for that moment. And I’m not the only one with such a fondness: all year round, fans from all over the world visit the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (which features a huge sculpture of Totoro at the entrance, and the only place where one can watch a 13-minutes-long short film with Mei and a kitten bus as the main characters, Mei to Konekobasu). Besides, you can even visit a perfect replica of Mei and Satsuki’s house in Nagoya, Japan. The design and construction was supervised by Miyazaki’s son, Gorō. Visitors are lead through a 45-minute tour around the house, during which they can touch and feel everything, even the contents of the drawers. You can find there even the bottomless bucket Mei and Satsuki play with in the movie, near the water pump in the garden.
And if that wasn’t enough, there’s even a railway station in Japan (Nobeoka, Miyazaki) called Totoro Station. If that’s not true, heart-felt devotion towards a movie and all it symbolises, who knows what it could be.
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