Not especially interesting, but it carries with it a positive ethic even if it's little more than an animated aside.

Rating: 6/10 (20 March 2013)

My Neighbour Totoro is a sweet, pleasing little romp; an animation with some colourful landscapes and sweet, likable child leads whose frolicking and sheer bounce are often the engine room to the film's otherwise empty sense of energy. Sadly, and for all its plaudits, the film comes off as ultimately a bit of an inconsequence - it isn't exciting, nor particularly memorable: there is little conflict; little drama and the film is extraordinarily light on narrative and character. If I told you the film was about a child encountering monsters given these things, you might raise an eyebrow. However, if I told you the monsters, instead of being scary, were themselves scared of an energetic, boisterous human presence then you might be able to put two-and-two together in that the animation is less interested in delivering the generic thrills and spills that come with such a premise and more interested in exploration and revisionism. That's fine, of course; but when the charm of such an idea has worn off and the approach to have it both ways in its grounded depiction of a dramatic reality (alá Ocean Waves or Only Yesterday) mixed with fruiter, more escapist Ghibli fare driven by encounters with odd animals, we are not left with much in which to get interested nor with which to stay invested.
At its heart is a tale of a young child meeting creatures not of this world, but the creatures are more interested in catching up on sleep than anything else. They meet, hang out, learn to be in one another's presence, get along fine and that's the end of it. This is, of course, only to a face value; look deeper and you'll see that this is a film about a child being brave in the face of new surroundings; of learning how to act in the company of strangers; of accepting predicaments and, it seems, coming to quite enjoy eating one's vegetables.
Two playful young sisters named Satsuki and Mei are in the process of moving into a new home with their father in decades-ago Japan, an abode in the country; secluded and rural. Their existence is happy, jovial; they are easily excited and very enthusiastic in their nature. Upon arrival, there are some relatively uninteresting frolicking around; the kids get wind of would-be real/unreal creatures that already occupy the premises: little grey sprites that live in the walls and dart about when no one's looking out of fear of the fresh human occupants. This allows the film to play with a child's fear of the dark; their gradual discomfort of being in a new space and the sense of excitement abound with all these things combined as exploration beckons, and we're never sure if horror or soft-core adventure is the order of the day here. It's both – on occasion not either. Whatever the choice, rarely does the film feel like it's going anywhere or with the aspiration to truly take off.
The kids lack a mother. She rears up out of the blue later on, in an ill-advised manner when it's revealed she's suffering from depression. It's here the issues with the overall approach to My Neighbour Totoro rear up, since it was never that sort of film in the first place, and I find it difficult not to resent the piece for dragging us down that path when the whole subplot arrives. At the core of it lies a friendship Mei strikes up with the titular Totoro, her "neighbour" as it were, in that he lives nearby just beyond the bushes and undergrowth of the gardens. Totoro is an animal not of this world; a sort of egg shaped creature who looks a little like a rabbit but is about as big as a small tree He sleeps. He sleeps a lot. He says very little, and is enormous, but appears friendly in spite of the fact he could fit all of Mei inside of his mouth.
Where he is docile, she is this continuous presence of excitement and activity but the film cannot muster up much excitement or interest when these two of such a binary opposition come together. In spite of the character's inherent lack of anything at all that may be interesting, it hasn't stopped the companies shipping millions of Totoro die-cast toys; this is in spite of him essentially being someone so uncharacteristic, and so dull in their existence, that I'm hard pressed not to say they are the most lifeless, least likable Ghibli character I can think who's of a supernatural sort. Totoro has his obligatory access to all sorts of magic and friends and avenues to adventure, and Mei comes to interact with them. They fly around and plant seeds and everyone has fun. At least, it looked like they did. The film carries on. Everyone's getting along fine; no one believes Mei: of course they don't, although the father finds room to play along with the fantasy. The whole thing is sufficient, innocuous nonsense that's ultimately too childish to explore the darker passages inherent in within it, and too inconsequential to motivate much interest in the central fantasy tract.