"We had such a weird, mysterious, spectacular day!"

Rating: 7/10 (17 November 2017)

Director Hayao Miyazaki has certainly made his mark with the IMDb audience. If I'm not mistaken, "My Neighbor Totoro" joins four other of his films in IMDb's Top 250 movies. I've now seen them all, and probably come away from them with "Howl's Moving Castle" as the most appealing to me.
The version of this film I saw was the Studio Ghibli/Disney rendering, and perhaps it was a by-product of that translation, but I was surprised with the pronunciation of the name 'Totoro'. It was rendered as 'Toe' tuh ro' with the emphasis on the first syllable, whereas before I knew that, I would have pronounced it 'Tuh tor' ro, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Maybe that's anglicizing it, I don't know, but it sounded a little off to me.
What stood out to me were some of the concepts that came out of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", with elements like Mei falling down a tunnel (replacing the rabbit hole), and later on with the appearance of the smiling Cheshire Cat bus. I don't know enough about Miyazaki to know whether he was influenced by the Alice story, but he did something similar in "Howl's Moving Castle" when the Witch of the Waste was defeated by a bucket of water, a nod to Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". I acknowledge that it's difficult to come up with something creatively original and brand new, but those two examples suggest that Miyazaki borrowed some of his ideas from other sources.
The story itself is quite charming in it's way, and the two young girls role model an ideal family relationship. What bothered me was the way the story left their mother's condition unnamed except to say that she was ill and confined to a hospital. For some reason, the idea that some form of mental illness may have been involved kept intruding while I watched the story. There was nothing overt to suggest that, but neither was there a reasonable expectation offered that she would be out of the hospital any time soon, and I kept wondering about that.
What I liked most was the imagination that came up with 'soot gremlins' and the titled Totoro itself, along with those little ghost-like apparitions that followed along. Even though a haunted theme was mentioned more than once, it didn't seem to affect Satsuki and Mei, who were innocent enough not to be fearful of the unknown. That was probably the most charming aspect of the story, and if one were to ask about a recommendation to watch the film, I'd suggest following the acorns.