Review: “Totoro” still moves me

On Saturday evening (1/27) I went to see “My Neighbor Totoro” at UChicago’s student-run film society, Doc Films, in a special 30th anniversary screening.

Totoro was my introduction to Japanese animation and I remember it fondly. Like the protagonistic sisters Satsuki and Mei, I spent many sunny afternoons playing gardener or collecting flowers and berries in the forests on the margin of the school playground, all the while hoping to catch a glimpse of Totoro, but really any fauna would do.

It was this nostalgia that drew me to re-watch the film for the dozenth time, although the first on a large screen. As I rehearsed the familiar plot, I discovered new confusion. While I was holding back tears, first time viewers (or so I presume) were laughing around me.

What made Totoro tragic this time around? Was there something there that my younger eyes couldn’t perceive? Or perhaps the film, like a magic carpet, had shifted underneath me (or the world shifted around us?), transporting me to a different world, more bittersweet than gleeful, but no less magical.

(The following review contains spoilers)

Responsibilities

The Kusakabe family (daughters Satsuki and Mei; father Tatsuo) has packed their life into an improbably laden jalopy which rattles through the Japanese countryside. We later learn that they are moving to be closer to the hospital where their mother is convalescing. The light, the children’s voices, and the waltzing score (by Hisaishi) all radiate joy.

Tatsuo stands with his arms akimbo, beaming at their new home. Satsuki and Mei laugh as they cartwheel around the yard.

Satsuki seems in charge of the move: her father is well meaning but absent minded. He drops a piece of furniture. Satsuki braveyl opens the kitchen.

Satsuki’s acceptance of familial responsibility is heartfelt, and never evinces resentment or questioning, in a properly Japanese manner. In spite of her young age, she is often seen to act in loco parentis while her father is away, most critically when Mei goes missing for the second time.

Satsuki runs for miles looking for her, following the same roads as the moving truck did some months before. This time she is utterly alone. A farmer by the side of the road cannot help. Two passers-by on a motorcycle offer only surprise at the great distance she has just run. (This is one of those moments when I cried, others laughed)

After much searching, the ordeal ends in a sudden deus-ex machina. Totoro and his companions find Mei, reunite the Kusakabe family.

In the closing scene, the mother jokes that she wants to “spoil” the children when she comes home. They all laugh, and everything is back to normal. But how could it be? Having so lately contemplated the death of her sister and mother, how could Satsuki just “go back to normal?”

“Let’s laugh to keep ghosts away”

Near the beginning of the film, the girls and their father are taking a bath when a miraculously strong wind shakes the house. Their father puts on a silly faces and tells them to “laugh to keep the bogeymen away.” Their forced laughs turn to real ones as they play in the bath.

As I watched this scene I felt uncomfortable. These antics are a distraction: their emotion is forced. Laughter sublimates worry, but ultimately cannot resolve its causes. Tatsuo cannot inhabit his daughters’ world: he can only view it from the outside. He cannot air their innermost feelings.

Embodying Totoro

Satsuki is the only member of the cast who reflects on the possibility of loss. Only she voices her concern for her mother’s health. Maybe this is why she is most in touch with the magical world of “Totoro,” who appears when loss is near at hand.

Satsuki first encounters Totoro when her father fails to return home on the bus. Totoro appears beside her, waiting for his own (cat)bus. Before departing, he gives Satusuki a package of seeds, and when her father returns moments later her excitement at meeting Totoro has washed away her worry and fatigue. Later, Totoro and company help Satsuki and Mei sprout those seeds while they sleep, “setting down roots” in their new home.

Totoro embodies the way that imaginative play helps children to resolve worries which are beyond their capacity to express. Satsuki and Mei turn challenging situations into adventures with Totoro, allowing them to work through difficult emotions.

Teleology

Perhaps this (admittedly bizarre) reading of Totoro as a sort of friendly bogeyman, an embodiment of childhood anxieties is self-indulgently autobiographical.

But, as a more reasoned explanation, I’ll instead air some thoughts on the similarities between Totoro and Spirited Away, arguing that key themes introduced in the former are only fully explored in the latter.

Both feature a strong female protagonist (Satsuki/Chihiro) who, while in the process of moving house, enters a mystical land where her feelings of alienation and dislocation become embodied in fantastic beings (Totoro/Spirits) which she must supplicate in order to overcoming her fears and set down roots in her new home.

Viewed in this sense, Spirited Away is by far the more effective film. There, we feel a loneliness in Sen/Chihiro that we only glimpse in Satsuki, and the thematic material is much more evenly worked, the cast pruned to place the focus on the central drama of the heroine: Mei replaced by Chihiro’s parents, turned into pigs; the time in the spirit land akin to Tatsuo’s absence and the token character of the ailing mother is cut altogether.

This comparison suggests an indefensible teleological concept of Ghibli’s filmography. But maybe it’s an interesting supposition on this, the thirtieth anniversary of Ghibli’s most beloved film.

What’s wrong with cute?

Totoro remains popular with good reason. The luminous settings and earnest characters remind me of the magical (if perhaps totally imaginary) summers of childhood. Yet other scenes, like that of Mei sitting by solemn stone statues on a forlorn hillside in the setting sun, or of Satsuki frantically search for her sister, remain as well, unsettling me still.

I had hoped that Totoro would revive those childhood joys. Still charming as ever, Totoro had a different tone for me. I hope that it will be as different the next time.