could swear I’ve watched My Neighbor Totoro before but honestly, I hardly remember any of it. The movie is about Satsuki and her younger sister Mei, just recently moved to the country with their father. Their mother is sick in a hospital that’s a 3 hour walk away. Their new neighbors are Nanny, an elderly woman that acts as a surrogate grandmother to the girls, and Kanta, a boy Satsuki’s age who works in the rice fields with his family. The girls father is a professor at a university in the city.
But as with all Hayo Miyazaki stories, there’s the reality and then there’s the fantastic. The fantastic in this movie exists in Totoro, a fuzzy giant mythical creature that lives in the woods next to Satsuki’s house. Accompanying Totoro are other magical and wonderful creatures, including a giant cat that’s also the local spiritual bus.
Totoro is an interesting contrast to Miyazaki’s later movie Spirited Away. Both deal with girls moving into new areas, new situations and discovering a different plane of existence living in the midst of their “normal, everyday” experience. In Totoro, the magical world is innocent, benevolent and at perfect peace with the “real” reality. In the pastoral setting, they all exist in harmony. In Spirited Away, where the pastoral has been taken over by the industrial, the magical world has been tainted and it is selfish. Both movies are almost the same or at least similar story, just explored from different perspectives.
My Neighbor Totoro is a perfectly charming movie; sweet and inviting on its own. Of all of Miyazaki’s films, it’s probably the one that’s most safe. That’s a strange thing to call a movie, “safe.” It doesn’t have much of the danger and suspense that you find in Spirited Away, Mononoke or even Nausica of the Valley of the Winds and it isn’t as fantastical as Kiki’s Delivery Service or Castle in the Sky. Totoro may even be the most grounded of Miyazaki’s more popular work, building a real and human story with the kids and their parents.