My Neighbor Totoro

Page last edited 436 days ago
From Drawn Feet Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The original film poster
The Final Film

My Neighbor Totoro (Japanese: となりのトトロ, Hepburn: Tonari no Totoro) is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten. It stars the voices of Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto and Hitoshi Takagi, and focuses on two young sisters and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan.

In 1989, Streamline Pictures produced an English-language dub for exclusive use on transpacific flights of Japan Airlines. Troma Films, under their 50th St. Films banner, distributed the dub of the film. This dub was released in 1993 to United States theaters, and the following year on VHS and LaserDisc in the US by Fox Video in 1994, and on DVD in 2002. The rights to this dub expired in 2004, so Walt Disney Home Entertainment re-released the film on March 7, 2006 with a new dub cast. This DVD release is the first version of the film in the US to include both Japanese and English language tracks.

The film explores themes such as animism, Shinto symbology, environmentalism and the joys of rural living. My Neighbor Totoro received worldwide critical acclaim, and has grossed over $41 million worldwide at the box office as of September 2019; the film also grossed significantly more from home video sales and merchandise.


Characters[edit | edit source]



Production[edit | edit source]

After working on 3000 Miles in Search of a Mother, Miyazaki wanted to make a "delightful, wonderful film" that would be set in Japan with the idea to "entertain and touch its viewers, but stay with them long after they have left the theaters". Initially, Miyazaki had the main characters Totoro, Mei, Tatsuo, and Kanta.: 8  The director based Mei on his niece, and Totoros as "serene, carefree creatures" that were "supposedly the forest keeper, but that's only a half-baked idea, a rough approximation".: 5, 103 

Art director Kazuo Oga was drawn to the film when Hayao Miyazaki showed him an original image of Totoro standing in a satoyama. Miyazaki challenged Oga to raise his standards, and Oga's experience with My Neighbor Totoro began Oga's career. Oga and Miyazaki debated the film's color palette; Oga wanted to paint black soil from Akita Prefecture and Miyazaki preferred the color of red soil from Kantō region.: 82  The finished film was described by Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki; "It was nature painted with translucent colors".

Oga's conscientious approach to My Neighbor Totoro was a style the International Herald Tribune recognized as "[updating] the traditional Japanese animist sense of a natural world that is fully, spiritually alive". The newspaper said of the film:

Set in a period that is both modern and nostalgic, the film creates a fantastic, yet strangely believable universe of supernatural creatures coexisting with modernity. A great part of this sense comes from Oga's evocative backgrounds, which give each tree, hedge and twist in the road an indefinable feeling of warmth that seems ready to spring into sentient life.

Oga's work on My Neighbor Totoro led to his continued involvement with Studio Ghibli, which assigned him jobs that would play to his strengths, and Oga's style became a trademark style of Studio Ghibli.

Only one young girl, rather than two sisters, is depicted in several of Miyazaki's initial conceptual watercolor paintings, as well as on the theatrical release poster and on later home-video releases. According to Miyazaki; "If she was a little girl who plays around in the yard, she wouldn't be meeting her father at a bus stop, so we had to come up with two girls instead. And that was difficult.": 11  Miyazaki said the film's opening sequence was not storyboarded; "The sequence was determined through permutations and combinations determined by the time sheets. Each element was made individually and combined in the time sheets ...": 27  The ending sequence depicts the mother's return home and the signs of her return to good health by playing with Satsuki and Mei outside.: 149 

Miyazaki stated that the story was initially intended to be set in 1955, however, the team was not thorough in the research and instead worked on a setting "in the recent past".: 33  The film was originally set to be an hour long but during production it grew to respond to the social context, including the reason for the move and the father's occupation.: 54  Eight animators worked on the film, which was completed in eight months.

Tetsuya Endo noted numerous animation techniques were used in the film. For example, ripples were designed with "two colors of high-lighting and shading" and the rain for My Neighbor Totoro was "scratched in the cels" and superimposed for it to convey a soft feel.: 156  The animators stated one month was taken to create the tadpoles, which included four colors; the water for it was also blurred.