My Neighbor Totoro
d. Hayao Miyazaki, 1988
My Neighbor Totoro is everything an animated film should be. It is touching, magical, beautiful, and even a little sad. The film is a celebration of the idea that films can be a creation instead of merely a reworking of an old story. Most animated movies are insulting to both kids and adults, both in their portrayal of the world as well as the nonsense morality lesson that usually comes with it.
My Neighbor Totoro does not have a particular lesson it wants to teach its audience. Instead, it is a beautiful portrayal of a couple of well-developed characters (a departure from the standard kids movies) with genuine emotion, something rare among all films, not just animated ones.
The movie revolves around the lives of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei. During the opening sequence, they are arriving at their new house. Their mother is ill in the hospital and their new home is closer to it, allowing them to visit and making safer for her mom once she goes back home. Shortly after getting settled, Satsuki, the older sister, and Mei, the younger one, discover that the house may be hunted. It is important to point out that it is not haunted in the way it would have been in an American animated film (creepy ghosts, etc.), but that it just means that creatures may very well live in and around the house.
My Neighbor Totoro shares the same quality as another great film about young characters, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. In both films, the protagonists discover that there may be a magical core to the world, and if that means that ghosts and other things exist, then so be it. The brilliance in both stories is the way Bergman and Miyazaki choose to present them, not by insisting on them too much, but by accepting them as the characters of the film do.
The hand-drawn animation of My Neighbor Totoro is fantastic, there are several scenes in the film that are, in my opinion, unmatched in their imagination. The film's brief running time (86 minutes) allows it to paint memorable sequence after sequence, without having many down moments.
Though My Neighbor Totoro is a beautifully crafted film, the real reason to why it is a genuinely great is the way it is able to wonderfully capture the innocence of childhood, something that no animated film that I've seen has done better.
