Children's Classics: My Neighbour Totoro

The recent compost mix is giving me a clusterfuck migraine to put together, so I'm temporarily shelving it to write a few posts about something close to my heart, classic children's films.

Apart from the odd winning effort from Pixar (although a lot of their stuff is overrated in my book and lacking the glow of genuine wonder that infuses Toy Story), most children's films these days are soul-shrivelling affairs. Trite, cookie-cutter storylines, agonizingly wise-ass characters, jive-talking barely concealed racial stereotypes, endless banal references to adult pop culture and off colour humour are the order of the day in today's mid-term break cinema. It would appear that few directors - for whatever reason - are able to release a children's movie that doesn't have one wily eye on the adults in the audience. I blame Shrek. The rot that set in after this self-satisfied, undeservedly praised celebration of pop cultural flotsam is phenomenal. Since Shrek, we've been treated to all sorts of two-tiered muck, of which the accolade of most unholy example would be a close fought match between the green cretin's third offering and the truly rancid Shark's Tale. Surely, a basic rule of thumb to observe when creating a successful kids movie might be to not include smutty material that is clearly intended to fly over kids heads? Why taint innocence? Anyway, if the film is truly good, it should, and will, appeal to adults. Who doesn't like ET or Toy Story?

I'm going to start off my short bundle of posts with 'My Neighbour Totoro', a beautiful animated film which unfolds like a lucid visual poem. This film, directed by the Japanese auteur Hiyao Miyazaki is bewitching to the point of being mystical.


The plot of My Neighbour Totoro is strikingly simple. This is a film that has no bad guys, no romantic subplot, and no climactic finale. Indeed, such is the deliberate, gentle development of its storyline that I could well imagine it being laughed out of the studio of Pixar, where even the introspective Wall-E had to succumb to pressure to tack on a whizz bang ending.

The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. They move with their father into a new house near a large forest at a time when their mother is ill in hospital. Full of curiosity, the girls soon find out that the world around their house has magical secrets. They see tiny furry black creatures that live in the shadows of an old house nearby and tell their father. He calmly tells them that these are just dust bunnies, a type of sprite. Now, at this early point, Totoro has completely diverged from the cliched plotting of most kids films. The dust bunnies aren't the kids little secret. The Dad doesn't express disbelief, he just calmly accepts what they tell him. Things just happen to be.



Later, the girls meet Totoro, a giant furry forest sprite with a mouth like a sperm whale who lives with two smaller Totoros in a dreamily pastoral corner of the woods. It is the sort of mossy place of refuge from a hot summer's day that will be familiar to anyone who spent afternoons playing in the woods as children. He is a playful creature and loving, letting them sleep on his fuzzy stomach, and even flying through the sky with them at one point. Later still, they wait for a bus with him, and in a visually remarkable scene, they are all taken for a spin on a bus that is half cat. At another point, a giant tree grows overnight from a seed planted by the girls.

Little else happens. The children's mother remains in hospital. Despite a few clues that she will get better, we never know for sure, or even what her illness is exactly. We see a young boy get embarrassed around Satsuki earlier, as if he fancies her, but this too is never developed. Again, things just happen to be.

The magic of Totoro is in the details, and in the matter of fact way the benign magical creatures are presented. In its close up and often comic observances of the two girls playing together and noticing little things in the world around them, it communicates pure truths about what it is to be a child. It is lit through with a soft nostalgia. Yet, it doesn't hide from the bigger, sadder theme of the mother's illness.

The animation is gorgeous. The bucolic surroundings are rendered in watercolour and the Totoro creature is so expressively drawn that it has since become an icon in Japanese cartoon history.

Miyazaki went on to direct piles of other ambitious films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke which deal with grander themes such as the environment and Japan's links with its past mythology. Great as these films are, I think that for its gentle handling of a serious issue and the raw enchantment that glows from every single frame, he will never top Totoro. A masterpiece.

MP3: Joe Hisaishi-The path of the wind (music from the film)