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Selena Calderón

English 1301

Dr. Childs

October 3, 2012

My Neighbor Totoro Movie Review

Hayao Miyazaki’s movie, “My Neighbor Totoro,” has become one of my favorite movies, in the category of a film full of adventurous wonders that simply bring a smile to your face. Sitting through the movie, I was taken back to my childhood where there was a minimized amount of fear, and the joy of life is what meant the most. Miyazaki successfully grasped my attention in his way of portraying the two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei’s imaginative world. If modern day life could be as imaginative and problem free as that of a young child, it would be energetic and happy. Miyazaki accomplished to create an outstanding family film, bringing fantasy and reality together.

The film starts off, Satsuki, Mei, and their father, moving to their new home to be closer to their mother, who is being hospitalized for an unstated illness. When first arriving to their new home, Mei and Satsuki explore their surrounding areas, ignoring if they are of good conditions or not. When stumbling upon the wooden beam to the house, they fiddle around with it and express a positive outlook towards it not being fully secure. As young children, there is not much to bring your spirits down. However, in the film, Miyazaki shows that in a child’s perspective, if something is wrong with someone in close relation, as there is with Satsuki and Mei’s mother, whether minor or major, then they begin to worry. In the film, the characters look at the mother’s situation as a fact of life, leaving this to hold a sense of reality to the fantasized world Miyazaki created in “My Neighbor Totoro.”

Mei, wandering off into the forest, finds herself in the presence of the famous Totoro, after chasing around the miniature so called Totoros. She rests on his belly and later is awoken by her worried sister in the middle of the forest, where Totoro is no where to be found. When explaining to her sister and father, Mei realizes that they both do not believe her, for her father lives passed the stage of Ninjo, and now in Giri. Satsuki does not encounter Totoro until later in the film out by the bus stop when waiting for her father to get home from work and gladly accepts his presents that seems to comforts her.

A large Cat Bus is as well encountered in the movie that swiftly takes the girls on a memorable journey. Miyazaki shows that as the Cat Bus swoops by through the grass, those who live in the world of Giri, simply notice wind, rather than a large cat with eyes as headlights flying passed them. The Cat Bus as well takes the girls to see their mother in the hospital and take her an ear of corn to make her feel better. Mysteriously, while the girls are in the life of Ninjo, and their parents in Giri, their mother seems to imagine seeing the two girls in the tree and the corn is as well delivered to her. If reality is separated from the fantasized life of the children, how was it that the corn still managed to make its way to their mother?