It can be difficult to pin down what exactly makes Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) such a towering achievement of cinema, its simplicity and gentleness belying its power to attune us to the act of living. On the surface, it is a gentle and moving portrait of two little girls, sisters Mei and Satsuki, who move to the countryside and encounter a benevolent forest spirit, the titular Totoro (the Japanese pronunciation of “troll”). It speaks to the experience of being a child in a way that few films do, reflecting the wisdom of Christ’s words in Mark 10:15: “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Totoro is beloved in Japan—Miyazaki has been called the Japanese Walt Disney—and has, gradually over the past couple of decades, become a staple of children’s cinema the world over. This is somewhat surprising, because as Lauren Wilford aptly notes in her insightful piece on Totoro as a true children’s cinema, the film runs counter to common features of contemporary children’s cinema: it lacks the now-typical frenetic action of most children’s films, designed to stave off any threat of boredom and keep kids glued to the screen. But nonetheless, I likewise have rarely encountered young children, especially the very young, who find My Neighbor Totoro anything less than enchanting. It is true that the film lacks conventional narrative structure; rather than a clearly delineated plot, it is roughly broken into four episodic sequences. Though it lacks any on screen markers to indicate temporal transitions, it instead utilizes bucolic, Ozu-like insert shots of flowing water, nature growing, and household objects. These still life portraits of natural and domestic life sit alongside the film’s willingness to allow the explorations of a child to guide the flow of events.
Totoro’s soundtrack, by Miyazaki’s constant collaborator Joe Hisaishi, is also very important in accompanying the viewer through the film’s runtime. It plays as much a role in setting the tone and creating a sense of mystery and peace as do the delicate watercolors and images of nature. The soundtrack alone is among the most influential of its era, recalling the orchestrations of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s earlier film work but with an even more pronounced sense of evoking nature and the rhythms and optimism of childhood.
The film begins as Mei, Satsuki, and their father, a university professor, move to the countryside into a new home: an old, traditional Japanese rural house nestled amongst rice paddies and under the watchful shade of a truly massive camphor tree. In the first episode we join the girls as they explore their new home, and discover that the house may be haunted, encountering mysterious susuwatari or “soot sprites.” When the girls share their discovery with their father, he remarks that he “always wanted to live in a haunted house,” neither dismissing them or framing the encounter in terms of fear or antagonism. Rather, their father and their new neighbor, Granny—the kindly elderly woman who lives down the road with her grandson, Kanta—guide the girls through the rituals that govern the relations between the spirit world and the human one.
Only at the 20-minute mark of the film are we introduced to something like a central drama, when we learn that the girls’ mother is sick and in a nearby hospital when the girls and their father travel to visit her by bicycle. It’s easy to assume that because it is gentle and unassuming, that Totoro is saccharine or without more complex emotions. But My Neighbor Totoro is a children’s film that makes room for feelings of tension, fear, or sadness. It portrays the various concerns of children, about a new house, their parent’s health, or the startled moment when Mei runs into Granny for the first time and is slightly startled at the appearance of the old women, as a part of life and growing up. In an older viewer, it might attune one to the ebbs and flows of our emotional lives, but also to those moments of cathexis and release. It is in the encounters with the spirit world, of the Totoro, soot sprites, and strange and enchanting “Cat Bus,” that the children find their concerns given form, and the patterns through which to live with them emerge.
There is a conventional wisdom that holds that children are closer to the spirit world than adults. This sensitivity to spirit is often held to be pronounced the younger the child, as they have not fully conformed to the symbolic order. It is Mei who first encounters the smaller Totoros as she plays on the property while her sister is at school and her father works. Her curiosity and generosity of spirit leads her to follow the smaller spirit creatures into the woods where she encounters the now iconic big Totoro, a combination of cat and owl-like creature with a giant mouth and furry body. When she awakens back near their property and is discovered by her father and sister, they don’t deny her experience and instead make sure that they thank the forest spirits, whom the father identifies Totoro as a manifestation of.
It is true that the specificity of its portrayal of mid-century Japanese rural life and animism Shinto spirituality may be foreign to many western people’s understanding of spirituality and religion. Nonetheless, for anyone who believes that cinema can speak to the reality of our spiritual nature, My Neighbor Totoro portrays a way of living that honours childhood, nature, and the neighborly connections between both other people and the spirit world. In the world of Totoro, spirits are something we can acknowledge, in their mystery and in their guidance, but are also not something that we need not become overly fixated on. As we grow, we may recognize the roles that they play in different symbolic forms, from the emergence of the first sprouts of spring to the healing of our loved ones from illness.
Totoro isn’t merely a pretty film or safe and consequence free children’s time sink. In the final sequence we get the closest to genuine fear, as Mei goes missing attempting to walk to their mother’s hospital from the small village. Satsuki finds that Totoro and the Cat Bus help her and assist in the reestablishment of order, even if they themselves represent some otherworldly disruption of normalcy. By the film’s end, we should recognize that trying to decide if the creatures in the film are real, ala The Wizard of Oz, is misguided. Totoro and his friends are now a part of Mei and Satsuki’s growing understanding of the world, even if it’s possible that these encounters will become more rare as they grow up. Miyazaki’s film insists that one of the true signs of maturity is in not losing that sense of how the spirit world touches our own, through the patterns of the seasons and in the relationships we have with others. My Neighbor Totoro is a special film that dramatizes the interweaving of the spirit world and the patterns of everyday domestic life in a way that perhaps no other film quite does. For this reason, among others, it is one of the rarest of cinematic treasures and an essential spiritual film. — Anders Bergstrom (2025)
Arts & Faith Lists: