My Neighbor Totoro
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Date released: 1988
What I Knew About This Movie
I saw this movie 25 years ago and I don’t remember almost anything about it. There are a couple kids living in a forest and they meet Totoro and Catbus?
Post-Viewing Thoughts
I’m interested in the narrative differences between the West and Japan. Based on a lot of the Japanese literature and movies I’ve seen, unless they’re working in a Western genre, it seems like there isn’t an expectation of character change in Japanese narratives.
My Neighbor Totoro is a good example of this idea:
At the end of the movie, the mother is still sick and still not at home
The sisters act much the same at the end of the movie as they did at the beginning
I don’t think this is a bad thing, it’s just different from the shape of stories that we grow up with in the West. Everything from folk tales to giant blockbusters seem to have the transformation of the characters as one of the defining characteristics of the story. I want to look up how writing is taught in Japan.
Is it that this movie is mirroring the idea of the permanence of nature and the Earth? That short of cataclysm, the world has a way of keeping thing balanced and in a form of stasis?
I really love how large nature is in this movie. It dwarfs everything but nobody is threatened by it. In fact, everyone seems to benefit from being together with nature.
