Day Twenty-Four: My Neighbor Totoro

My first introduction to Hayao Miyazaki came when I was a freshman in high school, before I had any real idea of being a film nerd or majoring in film studies. My good friend Sonya--whom I still credit with a lot of the comradeship and encouragement that made me love film--asked me to see Spirited Away at our local arthouse theater (now closed), and I agreed despite not knowing anything about it. The film's mythical, shapeshifting creatures and long stretches of strange images accompanied by haunting music were new to me, and I remember being unsure of how to feel as Sonya and I sat in the theater while melancholy music played over the end credits. A few days later, I mentioned the film to a classmate who worked at that theater, and she said, "Oh, I loved that movie!" She paused and laughed. "That was a weird movie."

That kind of confused enchantment is a little less complex and ambiguous in Miyazaki's much earlier film My Neighbor Totoro, which is more uniformly cheerful and delightful, but the theme of young girls interacting with fantastic spirits and creatures is the same. And there's still a slightly gloomy undercurrent: the main characters' mostly cheerful lives are overshadowed by the fact that their mother is hospitalized with a mysterious ailment. It's kind of a common theme in kids' movies like this one: alien creatures stepping into a child's life to fill the void left by a missing parent (like Elliot's dad leaving the family in E.T., or Bastian's mother being dead in The Neverending Story). Maybe it's just because I'm most familiar with Miyazaki through Spirited Away, in which nothing is as it seems, but I felt a slight sense of menace throughout the film, expecting seemingly friendly characters to reveal themselves as monsters, or for the sullen neighbor boy to be harboring a dark secret (apparently he was just shy). Despite that slightly disturbing undertone, though, and even with the beautiful animation, My Neighbor Totoro is at heart a pleasant kids' movie about lovely fantasies coming true, and a very enjoyable watch.