FILM
REVIEW – MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO
Far and away my favourite film of all time, and Japanese Anime at its finest. Two young girls move from the city to the countryside with their father, in order to be closer to the hospital where their mother is being treated for a life threatening illness.
The house is full of strange creatures called Dust-bunnies, little more than balls of soot with eyes, which only the children manage to see. An old lady who lives nearby and who has taken care of the house until the family arrived tells the children that they are very blessed to see such creatures, which are shy of order and the adult world.
As the father works on his company papers, and the older sister goes to school, the younger daughter takes a deep fascination in the local wildlife. She has been reading The Billy Goat’s gruff fairy tale book, and she then finds the three Totoro creatures (Totoro is a word roughly translated from the Japanese for the Gruff Troll in the well known story).
The two smaller Totoro lead the girl to the giant Totoro, which is asleep in a deep wooded valley. The girl clambours over the creature and wakes it up but it is more frightened of her than she is of it, and they soon become friends. The girl loses track of time as she plays with the Totoro, and eventually falls asleep by its side. When her father and sister find her (after being understandably worried by her disappearance) she is alone. They dismiss the Totoro as figments of her imagination and a dream. However, the girl convinces her older sister that the creatures might be real, and she becomes intensely jealous for not having met them herself.
She gets to meet the giant Totoro soon after this. When their father fails to return home from work on time, the girls head out to look for his late arriving bus in the pouring rain. They are delighted when a young lad (who has a crush on the older girl) gives them an umbrella to use while he goes home soaking wet. The bus arrives, but their father is not on it. Frantic with worry, the girls wait for the next bus. The younger girl gets tired and sleeps in her sister’s arms. Suddenly, the girls are not alone. Totoro stands beside them. The older girl gives him the umbrella for which he is grateful. He gives the girls a bag of seeds. They are astonished then when the bus arrives. It isn’t the bus with their father on, but a giant cat with glowing mice shaped headlights, and seats inside. The Totoro gets in, clearly visible through the window, and the Catbus runs off down the street. The older girl gapes in astonishment until the bus arrives with their father on it – he was just late escaping from work.
The girl’s plant the seeds left by the Totoro. That night, they both have same dream, about being involved in a very pagan dance around the garden and the woods while the flowers flourish into a very exotic forest and the Totoro fly them over it. In fact, when the girls awaken, the seeds have grown into a modest crop in the garden.
A few days later, the father again goes to work, and in his absence, the girls receive a message indicating that their mother is taking a turn for the worse and ay not be able to come home to them as soon as she had been led to expect. The father is notified, and promises to look into the matter, but the youngest girl gets very distressed and impatient for information. She decides that the Totoro crop might be healthy enough to feed her mother and takes some of it, as she runs away to go to her mother by herself.
Realizing that the girl will get hopelessly lost on the long journey (previously done by car and bicycles) the bigger sister gives chase. The whole community also look for her, even worrying that she might have drowned in the local rice paddies. The older girl finds her little sister, but both are too tired to move on. Suddenly however, the Catbus appears. They get in and it takes them along telegraph wires to the hospital. They eavesdrop and learn that their mother is OK. The information from he hospital was incorrect. The girls leave the gift of the healthy food for their Mother, who wonders where it came from. The girls go home by Catbus (invisible to all others). The community are delighted by their safe return. The closing credits show in pictures the Mother’s return. As she becomes more important to the girls, the Totoro and Catbus and Dust-Bunnies slowly fade into the background.
This is a delightful movie, with children retreating into a fantasy whenever he big world looks too bewildering, and that fantasy complimenting their growth and maturation in reaction to their situations. The Catbus in particular, probably based on Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, is amazing, and the sequence in which the giant Totoro casually waits beside the children at the bus stop is too beautiful for words.
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