My Neighbour Totoro (1988)

The storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences.

Miyazaki Hayao, the co-founder and driving visionary behind Japan’s Studio Ghibli, is renowned for his world-spinning, fecund and furious animated fantasies: across his 11 features he has conjured pre-modern and post-apocalyptic, undersea and above-theclouds milieux teeming with angry earth gods and lost robots, apprentice witches and wracked wizards, flying pigs, runaway fish-girls and endless vivid bit-creations besides. (His Oscar-winner Spirited Away, nearby in this poll, spills forth a phantasmic bathhouse of troubled ghouls.)

My Neighbour Totoro is his less-is-more work: a pastoral, pantheist chamber drama, where the ‘chamber’ lies under the canopy of a great camphor tree that lords over the woods behind a tumbledown farmhouse. Into this adventure realm move two sisters, pre-school Mei and preteen Satsuke, with their inattentive dad, to be nearer their hospitalised mum. Each in turn encounters the spirit of the woods: a giant, furry, ovoid mammal with mighty powers of flying, horticulture and slumber. (He comes with two smaller surrogates, who may or may not indicate a further world of totori.)

The storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences: Satsuke and Mei discovering the farmhouse and its soot-sprite occupants; Mei tracking Totoro’s minions to his lair; the tired children, waiting in the rain for their dad at a bus stop, finding Totoro waiting too – for a twinkle-eyed cat bus; a village-wide hunt for Mei after a misunderstood message from hospital leads her to run away. My favourite is the nocturne in which the girls and Totoros conjure shoots from acorns with an incantatory dance, then soar triumphant through the trees on a spinning top. There’s no plot, just rousing impressions of innocence and experience.

So many films ask us to see the adult world through children’s eyes; My Neighbour Totoro summons wilder, wide-eyed wonder at the forces that inform us: life, nature, connection, change. And, of course, it hymns the uplift of imagination, with Joe Hisaishi’s entrancing synth tunes essential to the magic.

The film got two votes in Sight and Sound’s 2002 poll, 11 in 2012. A swift hit in Japan, it has spread its spell steadily across the world ever since; a third of a century after its release, many younger critics have grown up with it. It’s clearly an antidote to urbanisation and technology, and a rebuke to a world of environmental breakdown. It’s also a comfort and a reassurance that shows we still have artists who can create something timeless.

Nick Bradshaw

1988 Japan
Directed by
Hayao Miyazaki
Produced by
Toru Hara
Written by
Hayao Miyazaki
Featuring
Lisa Michaelson, Cheryl Chase, Gregory Snegoff
Running time
87 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for My Neighbour Totoro

Critics

Nicolas Barbano
Denmark
Nick Bradshaw
UK
Rasmus Brendstrup
Denmark
David Cairns
UK
Ramsey Campbell
UK
Gerard Casau
Spain
Dylan Cave
UK
Thomas C. Christensen
Denmark
Robbie Collin
UK
Jake Cunningham
UK
Sam Davies
UK
Peter Debruge
USA
Anton Dolin
Russia
Alex Dudok de Wit
UK
Rosie Fletcher
UK
Cristina Formenti
Italy
Hannah Gatward
UK
Gemma Gracewood
New Zealand
Elinor Groom
UK
Courtney Howard
USA
David Jenkins
UK
Dan Jolin
UK
Philip Kemp
UK
Lisa Kerrigan
UK
Eric Kohn
USA
Peter Kuplowsky
Canada
Michael Leader
UK
Matt Maytum
UK
Anna Möttölä
Finland
John Nugent
UK
Andrew Osmond
UK
Hannah Pilarczyk
Germany
Katie Rife
USA
Julian Ross
Netherlands
Iain Robert Smith
UK
Isabel Stevens
UK
Harriet Warman
UK

Directors

Pete Docter
USA
Geoff Dunbar
UK
Kazuhiro Soda
Japan
Tilda Swinton
UK
Nora Twomey