Reviews of “Project Plan for My Neighbor Totoro” (1986) and related work
- Spin-off: “My Neighbor Totoro — Directorial Memo: Characters” (1987)
- Implementation: My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
- Document: “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece” (1988)
- Sequel: “Mei and the Kitten Bus” (2002)
“Project Plan for My Neighbor Totoro” (1986
)
Miyazaki Hayao (writer).
Read in Starting Point.
In this plan, the sisters are already two separate children and the outline of the story is complete as filmed, but the planned length is only one hour. In an addendum about the music, Miyazaki emphasizes that the opening theme should be reproducible by children “opening their mouths wide and raising their voices”.
References here: Starting Point: 1979–1996 (1996/2009).
text non-fiction Japanese production
‣ “My Neighbor Totoro — Directorial Memo: Characters” (1987)
Miyazaki Hayao (writer).
Read in Starting Point.
This version adds Kanta’s grandmother—as a sterner figure than she would be in the finished product—and unambiguously positions Satsuki as the main character. The father, Tatsuo, is a “writer”, not necessarily an archaeologist or historian as in the final script. Reading between the lines it is clear that the father represents Miyazaki himself, the absent-minded workaholic.
References here: Starting Point: 1979–1996 (1996/2009).
text spin-off non-fiction Japanese production
‣ My Neighbor Totoro (1988
)
Miyazaki Hayao (writer-director).
1950s Japan. A father moves out to the country to be closer to his wife. She’s in a rural hospital. Her disease, not mentioned by name in the film but in the directorial memo on the characters, is tuberculosis. Worried and imaginative, their two young daughters eventually meet the guardian of the nearby forest.
A children’s movie, though not in the contemporary Western sense of entertainment so insipid only children will swallow. “Supernatural adventure” has the wrong connotations. It’s charm beyond anything to which the name of charm is given.
Totoro borrows significantly from “Panda! Go Panda!” (1972), whose Papanda character is a talking proto-Totoro, halfway between Disney’s Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland (1951) and the final product. In “Panda! Go Panda! Creator’s Message” (1994), Miyazaki acknowledged this similarity and said that it lies in both characters making those around them happy “just by being there, without doing anything in particular”. Another similar character is the giant cat from episode 51 of Urusei Yatsura (1981). The lineage could be described as a secularized yurodivy along with what C. J. L. Almqvist called an animal coeleste, a creature of innocent power and holistic enlightenment, symbolic of nature. A human animal coeleste appears in Almqvist’s The Queen’s Tiara (1834).
Apropos of Totoro’s origins, its flying and the umbrella suggest a connection to Mary Poppins (1964). Indeed, Totoro fulfills roughly the same function as Poppins: It is a temporary, adult, supernatural visitor who plays with the children of a troubled family and then disappears. Some of the wishful thinking is preserved but there is no moral to this story and there are no bad people. Totoro doesn’t clean up your room or get your dad his job back. You don’t need to be upper class to afford its services, and it really doesn’t care about your tuppence. Almost everything the 1964 film does wrong, this one does right.
The Swedish dub is pretty good as these things go. The child actors occasionally butcher Satsuki’s name as both “Suzuki” and “Tzatziki”, but they mostly get it right.
References here: Ghibli movie titles, 2023-07-01, Totoro in Space, Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (1990), Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (1996), Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (2001/2005), Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (2001), “Room to Be Free: Speaking About Spirited Away at the Press Conference Held Upon Completion of the Film” (2001), Mai Mai Miracle (2009), The Secret World of Arrietty (2010), When Marnie Was There (2014), Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017).
moving picture implementation Ghibli Japanese production animation fiction
‣‣ “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece” (1988)
Miyazaki Hayao (interviewee).
Read in Starting Point.
I think Japanese people like a bottomless, enormous foolishness, especially in people who become important. These great fools are able to enfold those people who are scuttling about concerned with minutiae.
An interview, made for the Roman Album, ranging across many aspects of the film’s production, including run loops and why the children in the film are girls. The headline message, that it was not made for nostalgia, repeats “Panda in Process” (1982/1994) and is similarly dubious. As he would be doing again for Mononoke, Miyazaki brings up Nakao Sasuke’s concept of a “broadleaf evergreen forest culture” to step beyond Japanese nationalism, and compares the gods of Shinto and other animist religions, who tend to live in the shade, to US narratives like A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Dark Crystal (1982) where darkness is instead associated with evil.
References here: Starting Point: 1979–1996 (1996/2009).
text document non-fiction Japanese production
‣‣ “Mei and the Kitten Bus” (2002)
Miyazaki Hayao (writer-director).
Seen in 2018.
On the night of a gale, Mei is alone with a little bar of a hard caramel candy.
It’s a little painful. For years, Miyazaki seemed to resist the idea that the sisters ever saw Totoro again. Here, he embraces it. He shows some restraint, in that Mei hasn’t aged or gotten used to the supernatural, and the Todorovian blur is still there, but the escalation in worldbuilding is huge and flawed. The implication is that the many-legged, many-tailed cat of the original was not an old individual who, as per folklore, took an interest in a bus and learned how to change shape. Here, there’s a mini-bus, a train, an airship, and therein lies the implication that supernatural cats are somehow aligned with modern mechanized transportation. That is distasteful to me, devaluing the animals both as individuals and as natural creatures. Totoro instead becomes the sole individual among a huge number of insufficiently distinct creatures of his kind. These show less character than the exotic extras of the spirit realm in Spirited Away (2001).
I found those choices surprising coming from Miyazaki himself, but as sequel material goes, there is nothing particularly unusual about this short. I wish it had dealt more with family and less with the supernatural. Imagine Shōtotoro instead of Mei having a grand time in that kitten bus, careening through a network of foxholes and playing at building a literal どんぐり共和国 with Mei until she hears her mother’s voice. She’s home from the hospital: Mei immediately rushes off, scattering the acorns. Ōtotoro rearranges them into a final message and leads its suddenly melancholy young one, fading from view, in among the trees.
moving picture sequel Ghibli Japanese production animation fiction