My Neighbor Totoro

####This review is spoiler free.

I watched this movie for the first time a couple of years ago with my mum. It was the depths of covid lockdowns and this movie brought a bright warmth to the house. For the following week, the cat was all but officially renamed the Cat Bus.

And so coming back to this movie it was only fitting that I sit down and watch it again with my mum. This time, as the credits rolled, the dog became the victim, who was made to dance to the ending theme as we called her Totoro (she’s big and fluffy, which is close enough).

My Neighbour Totoro is a house favourite, and there aren’t even any kids in the house. It’s an excellent and adorable movie. The childlike joy Miyazaki presents us is infectious and beautiful. Miyazaki can transcend his target audience, producing something anyone could love, something that will warm any house it is watched in.

But even after the immediate warmth of My Neighbour Totoro cools the film doesn’t become any less marvellous. What makes this film so special is that it is a kids' film. And actually a kids' kids' film. Mei is four years old and Satsuki is ten. That is the target audience. It’s gotta keep Mei and Satsuki hooked. You and I and my mum are secondary.

If you’re ever with a small child and have to sit and watch their tv shows and movies, it tends to go one of two ways. Often it’s an unenjoyable experience. Storytellers are very happy to abuse the fact that their audiences are uneducated. So you are left to endure loud and annoying characters doing loud and annoying things.

But there are, of course, great kids' movies out there. Pixar (and wider Disney) is the obvious example to point to. And so it can also go the other way, and follow the route that Pixar has perfected over the years, moving away from making films just for kids, and targeting a ‘universal audience’. This is good money-making; parents will take their kids so you’ve sold two tickets. Then you pitch a nostalgic film and you’ve captured the audience in-between: those too young to have kids but old enough to have grown up watching Toy Story. It worked on me. I went and saw Incredibles 2 at the cinema. The other tactic is adding more mature humour that goes over the kids’ heads, employed well by Dreamworks in films like Shrek.

But My Neighbour Totoro seems to do something different. Miyazaki, unlike almost any other storyteller I’ve encountered, reignites childlike innocence in his older viewers, without ever catering for them. There are plenty of movies that can make me a kid again - between The Lego Movie and Into the Spider-verse, it’s clear that Lord and Miller are great at this. But innocence? That is a rare thing to capture. Yet I giggled when Totoro knocked the rainwater down and I think I probably actually squealed when the Cat Bus showed up and then I danced around the room calling my cat Cat Bus when the film ended.

This movie does something bizarre to you. It makes you want to believe that soot-sprites are the reason old houses get dusty, that sudden gusts of wind are from creatures that we can’t see rushing around. That giant fluffy forest spirits make seeds sprout. But because we know that’s not how the world works, because we know that Miyazaki is just creating a world in which childhood imagination is really real, because we know it lets us give ourselves up and believe. Knowing that magic isn’t real never stopped a magic trick from being wondrous. For a moment we let the world be unexplainable, or, in Miyazaki’s case, be explained by the wonderful.

And so we can get whisked away by the film, and listen to the message Miyazaki wants to tell children. Which is to love the world. That even if mum is sick and she can’t come home, love the world. Put your faith in the world and love it. For me and my mum, when the world is hard to deal with, this film becomes a refuge to reignite that feeling.