IMDb #127 Review: My Neighbor Totoro (1987)

Source: Wikipedia

A father and his two young daughters move to an old house in the country, which stirs up the local population of magical and possibly imaginary creatures.

How does Miyazaki, an elderly Japanese workaholic, so effectively capture childhood whimsy? Probably in an electrified cage, hooked up to an automatic milking machine constantly pumping rainbow-hued imagination-goop from its bulging udders.

Toss back a warm glass, friends, things are going to get weird.

Japans's preemptive retaliation for Pan's Labyrinth features the Miyazaki hallmarks you might recognize by now. Lush art and animation. Obligatory flying sequences. Spunky heroine(s). Great music courtesy of longtime collaborator Joe Hisaishi. And, this time, a profound absence of violence or harsh language or anything remotely objectionable, barring a brief scene of communal bathing probably put in to freak out the Americans.

So the kiddos whiz around the house like tiny drunk people and discover weirdness popping out of nooks and crannies. Living coal-dust puffballs snuggle in the walls and attic and under the floorboards. A cat-bus with spotlight eyeballs and luminescent mouse taillights wanders the hills. Near the huge tree out back, the toddler tumbles down a tunnel and lands on the tubby belly of a fuzzy snoozing beastie. The eponymous Totoro.

Wacky inexplicable adventures occur.

Yes, it's a perfect children's movie, but it doesn't lie to its audience for a minute. Yes, kids, there's awful shit in the world, and magic shit won't make the awful shit go away. Their mom's sick and dying and the family has to prepare for that. Sure, magic can make plants sprout sky-high in seconds (then suspiciously creep back to millimeters-high in the morning) but can't fix their money issues for them.

The hardworking dad looks baffled but remarkably accommodating to all this weirdness he can't see.

Does that mean none of the magic is real? People who ask that question, I attribute the same amount of credibility as the theorists who propose that Totoro is a metaphor for the nuclear bomb. In the unlikely scenario that's true, it remains far from the strangest thing to spring from Miyazaki's bottomless weirdness reservoirs, or wherever he gets his ideas.

86 minutes.