āFor some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.ā
āMost films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They arenāt so much made for children as theyāre made to be not not for children. Itās perhaps telling that the genre is generally called āFamily,ā rather than āChildrenās.ā The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but theyāre not necessarily specially made for young minds.ā
āMy Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine childrenās film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsukiās shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows childrenās goals and concerns. Its protagonists arenāt given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.ā
āConsider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that sheās āoff to run some errandsā - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. Sheās seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play āflower shopā with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but weāre never bored, because Mei is never bored.ā
ā[ā¦] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoroās world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.ā
āMy Neighbor Totoro has a story, but itās the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, āAnd then what happened?ā This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazakiās process: he begins animating his films before theyāre fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those thingsāand there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.ā
A.O. Scott andĀ Lauren Wilford on āMy Neighbor Totoroā, 2017.Ā Ā
every time this shows up on my blog, Iām rescheduling it to show up again at a later date so I can keep remembering how important a childās perspective is.
