Miyazaki's Absolutely Hilarious, Culturally Significant Story of Existence, Location and Expedition, Rather Than Rivalry and Danger.

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2009)

This culturally significant Kodomo anime has become one of the most endeared of all family films without ever having been much popularized or sponsored, which is a testament to its magic. This is one of the tenderly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki, perhaps the greatest of the Japanese animators, yet his collaborator at the Ghibli Studios, Isao Takahata, who fashioned Grave of the Fireflies, may be his rival. Miyazaki has not until quite lately used computers to animate his films. They are drawn a frame at a time, the time-honored way, with the master himself providing tens of thousands of the frames.
Miyazaki's films are in particular viscerally entrancing, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the unique anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as minute as a fleck or as enormous as a cave. They also have an spontaneous authenticity in the way they mind minutiae.
The movie tells the story of two young sisters who share a wonderful bond. As it opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a boundless forest. Their mother, who is ill, has been moved to a hospital in this community. Now think about that. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American cartoon films would be. It has a resolute and loving father, in contradiction to the recent Hollywood affinity for selfish or absent fathers. Their mother is sick: Does sickness happen in American family cartoons?
A neighbor boy later tells them their new house is haunted. But not haunted in the American sense, with ghosts or forbidding creations. When the girls let light into the shadow, they get just a peek of little black fuzzy dots scampering to refuge. ''Probably just dust bunnies,'' says their father, but there is an old nanny who has been employed to look after them, and she suggests that they are ''soot sprites,'' which like empty houses, and will pack up and leave when they hear laughter. Perhaps I'm reading too much in, but during this scene, I feel like I caught a brief reference to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, as one sister stares transfixed at a crack in the wall.
Assent to how the father composedly receives their account of arcane critters. Are sprites and totoros for real? They surely do in the minds of the girls. So do other hilarious beasts, such as the Cat Bus, which bustles through the forest on eight fast paws, its big eyes working as headlights. Instead of letting the children be scared of hauntings and the soundness of their own minds, the elders teach them to like and enjoy it all. They go along with it rather than irrationally making them feel silly.
While it's not necessarily clear whether or not the adults actually consider them, not once does Miyazaki trot out the relic children's literature adage of The Adults Who Think The Child Is A Liar, So Child Is Going To Have To Save The World Without Them. This welcoming approach to accustomed Japanese spirit-creatures imparts a telling distinction between our two cultures. In America, there must always be something to fear, always a scapegoat, always something or someone to antagonize. No matter how equally violent or aggressive the history is of Japan, they do not thrive on fear factors. It is a beacon of great hope and pleasure to me that family films are the rudimentary place where cultural difference is easiest to discern in the movies.
My Neighbor Totoro is made of existence, location and expedition, not on rivalry and danger. This is made crystal in the engrossingly extensive sequences involving totoros, which actually are not Japanese myth, but were indeed created by Miyazaki specifically for this movie. In these sequences, Miyazaki gets no mileage out of any trite ideas about the dark and dreadful forest. It's only nature. Is the film sometimes corny and absurd? Yes, but it knows when to be quiet and real.
One of the funniest scenes I think I've ever seen on film occurs when the girls go to meet their father's bus. But the hour grows late and the woods grow dark. Without a sound, matter-of-factly, the giant totoro joins them at the bus stop, standing to one side as if it's been there the whole time. It starts to rain. The girls have umbrellas, and give one to the totoro, who is fascinated by the raindrops on the umbrella, and jumps up and down to render free a downrush of drops from the trees. Watch how coolly and constructively the scene has been handled, with the night, the forest, the lateness of the father seen as a circumstance, not an omen. The movie needs no villains. I remember that Winnie the Pooh also had no evil characters at first, but that in its new American version evil weasels have been interposed into his benevolent setting.
But it would never have won its worldwide audience simply owing to its fuzzy heart. It is also full of mortal humor in the manner in which it perceives the two exceptionally authentic, realistic little girls, and I refer to their characterizations, not their physicality. It is side- splitting in the scenes involving the totoro, and in the scenes with the ridiculous Cat Bus. It is a little tearful, a little hair-raising, a little out of the blue and a little enlightening, just like life itself. The film expresses a refreshing ideology with Miyazaki later deepens and defines in his more recent films. Look at the minimal amount of external things in these girls' lives, or their father's, or the nanny's. Their story exists as a situation rather than a plot, and suggests that the uncertainty of life and the makeshifts of invention afford all the enterprising escapades one needs.