My Neighbor Totoro

Unlike many cartoon children, Satsuki and Mei are neither smart-alecky nor cloyingly saccharine. They are credible kids: bright, energetic, silly, helpful, and occasionally impatient. Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki makes the viewer believe the two sisters love each other in a way no American feature has ever achieved. My Neighbor Totoro is enormously popular in Japan, and some of the character merchandise has begun to appear in America. The film has also inspired a Japanese environmental group to buy a Totoro Forest preserve in the Saitama Prefecture, where Miyazaki's film is set. --Charles Solomon

Satsuki (10), Mei (5), and their father have moved into a rural setting so that they can be close to their mother, who is ill (tuberculosis?), and is resting at a nearby hospital. The film talks about the girls experiences, mundane and magical as they wait for the time when their mother can return. Part of writer/director Hayao Miyazaki's brilliance is in not turning this into a tragic story or morbid story. Instead, we see the children's excitement in their new home, and the close affection that interpenetrates their family life. Only then does Miyazaki introduce the theme of the mother's illness. This helps us to keep focused on the children's strength, rather than any sense of impending doom.

When Mei chases a strange animal that looks like a cross between a rabbit and a teddy bear into the woods, she falls down a hole (just like Alice) and find a giant fluffy creature called a Totoro, who may or may not be 'the lord or the forest,' but in short order is the lord of our hearts. The Totoro is magic at its best, soft enough to sleep on, able to fly about the forest, grow giant trees and summon a cat bus that will always take you where you need to go. As a child's imaginary playmate should be, the Totoro is playmate, friend, and protection. For the two children, the Totoro and its other spirit friends are the creatures that shout love, the powers that keep things from falling apart.

The film is quite honest about the feelings of these children as they cope with their own fears for their mother. It is rare that a film speaks genuinely for children in this predicament, and attempts to set an effective coping model. This is special. It lifts the story to the level where it has something important to say to such children without making it the least bit preachy. In thinking over the film, I find that what is really magic isn't the Totoro's amazing powers, but the relations between the human characters. They are many and all think nothing of helping each other and sharing. Perhaps the real message isn't about Totoro's that live in trees, but the Totoro's that live in our hearts and the hearts of our friends. Highly recommended.