My Friend Totoro

Animation is labor-intensive and so, to avoid unnecessary expense, many cartoons employ generic backgrounds.  When the Roadrunner dashes cross-country, the buttes and cacti in the background just recycle in a loop of generic and abstract landscape.  In Hiyo Miyazaki's My Friend Totoro (1988), the teams of animators don't seem to imagine landscapes so much as they document, with photographic verisimilitude, real places.  In the 80 minute long film, characters sometimes amble or run along dirt paths and lanes.  Each of these thoroughfares is minutely particularized -- we see not just the yellowish dirt and gravel of the lane, but the incision of ruts in the dirt, the way that the rains have eroded the friable clay, constellations of gravel and pebbles as precise as the array of stars in the sky.  A tree is just not a green thing on a brown stick -- each of Miyazaki's trees is a exact replica of a living, breathing presence in the landscape.  I don't know any film so intensely committed to providing the experience of place:  landscapes, dwellings, weather, all of these aspects of the world are intensely imagined and expressed with intense quiddity --  there is an odd Heideggarian aspect to this film:  to dwell means to inhabit a place and exist in a particular relationship to it.  In My Friend Totoro displays to us artifacts of human existence in a lush, intensely green landscape:  the hills above the rice paddies which are painted in cells of luminous color like a canvas by Paul Klee, are full of ancient paths, strange weathered shrines, dense, mysterious thickets, and, breathing over the pastoral locus amoenus are winds just as precisely characterized as the sticks on the ground, the toad on the pebbled path, the enormous thunderheads billowing up over the humid hills and valleys.

These reflections on Miyazaki's film may obscure the fact that My Friend Totoro is a cartoon designed, it seems, for children with babbling pop tunes and titles showing dancing caterpillars and spiders among friezes of acorns.  The film's plot is like that of a bittersweet Ozu picture:  a young father with two daughters moves into an old farmhouse on a hillside overlooking a valley cultivated in rice paddies. The house has flocks of miniature goblins, furry black things called "soot sprites" -- these creatures are unsettling and scurry around like cockroaches but they are benign.  An elderly woman with the features of a witch (she's a neighbor) tells the two girls that she used to be able to see these spirits when she was a child -- apparently, adults can't perceive the presences that inhabit the landscape.  It is revealed that the family's mother is convalescing from some serious illness in a hospital about three-hours walk from the farmhouse.  The father is a professor and works in a nearby city (never shown in the film).  The pastoral landscape, as in Ozu, is contaminated by signs of urban civilization -- big powerlines on steel towers march across the countryside (and occasionally provide highways for spirits), buses stop at bus-stops, and there is a  little trolley-like train that we sometimes glimpse on ridges, profiled against the setting sun.  During the day, the father goes to work at the University and he, also, seems labor late into the night.  During the summer vacation, the two daughters, Sutsuki (who seems to be about ten) and the five-year-old Mai explore the landscape.  Near the house, there's a huge camphor tree immemorially old and towering, a world in itself with buttress roots, strange cavities and a  vast impenetrable crown of leaves looming over the landscape.  Mai keeps finding acorns strangely dropped to lead her into the thickets under the camphor tree.  In a glade, she sees a two peculiar and partially translucent spirits -- they are owl-shaped with tufted horns and walk on two legs.  Following the spirits, Mai falls (like Alice into Wonderland) down a sort of rabbit-hole that leads her to hidden alcove in the tree where a Totoro is sleeping.  A Totoro is an enlarged version of the little owl-shaped spirits, covered with yellowish fur and with a most featureless head -- the creature is big as an elephant, has slit eyes, a broad grin that emerges sometimes from beneath it's fur and no nose to speak of -- the Totoro is gentle and sluggish; Mai falls asleep pillowed on its belly.  The whole encounter seems like a dream and the next day when Mai tries to locate the creature to show it to Satsuki, she can't find the hidden alcove in the tree.  One evening, Mai and Satsuki go to wait for their father's return at a bus stop in the dark woods.  It rains and their father is not on the bus that appears in the storm.  (These sequence is a  virtuoso exercise in depicting how rain falls, trembles in droplets on trees overhead, and, then, falls again.)  The girls decide to wait for the next bus.  Suddenly, they discover that the big Totoro is standing beside them waiting for the bus.  But when the bus arrives it's a disturbing, surreal creature -- the Cheshire cat grafted to a monstrous caterpillar and hollowed out so that you can ride inside; the cat's eyes shine like headlights.  The Totoro gets on this grotesque bus and vanishes.  The next bus appearing in the rain holds their father to whom the girls excitedly describe their adventure.  He seems distracted -- the plan is that their ailing mother will return on the weekend.  A sinister telegram arrives suggesting that the mother has suffered a relapse.  Mai, then, sets off by herself to hike to the hospital but gets lost.  Oddly, she is carrying an ear of corn from the old woman's garden as a talisman and healing gift for her mother.  Mai gets lost and, even, is presumed drowned, but the Totoro and the bus-cat arrive to rescue her and take the two girls to a vantage where they can see their father and mother conversing in the hospital.  The adults can't see the girls or the supernatural critter but they do find the magical ear of corn inscribed as a gift for the mother on the windowsill of the room.  In the closing credits, we see the mother arriving in a taxi-cab and the family happily reunited and bathing together in the ancient bath-house next to the farm dwelling.  

The story is clear and reasonably compelling.  Much of it is mysterious to Western eyes.  The children are mostly happy although sometimes slightly concerned for their mother -- she is shown to be attractive but with an uncanny skull-shaped head.  In its mise-en-scene, the film resembles Ozu to some extent -- there are "empty frames" showing places that people have left or details in nature that don't advance the narrative.  (One image of a bicycle outside of a house in the rain seems a copy of pictures in Ozu's movies.)  The remarkable aspect of the film is the use of animated imagery to provide an intensely pantheistic vision of reality -- everything in the film is somehow alive and alert with spiritual energy.  Pools are full of dark tadpoles that look like soot sprites.  The humidity piles up cumulo-nimbus clouds on the horizon that thrust upward and glow from within with pinkish light.  Moths torch themselves around lights and we see snails on grass, toads on dirt pathways, a sinister-looking goat that tries to eat Mai's corn offering to her mother.  When it is thought that Mai has drowned, we see a tiny pink sandal in the pond, the water around it subtly disturbed by hovering dragonflies.  When the Totoro takes the children on an aerial ride over the nocturnal rice paddies, we see how the breeze created by the flying spirit shimmers in the moonlit water.  Miyazaki is capable of remarkable, expressionistic abstraction -- in an early scene, when a great wind blows, we see the vectors of energy as turbulent masses of shadowy black contending with green conical forms.  The film is extravagant with weather, fluxions in the air, and patterns of light and shadow. 

Miyazaki's later, and more ambitious films, are exhausting.  Spirited Away, a typhoon of monsters and ghosts, is very long and, although scene-by-scene fantastically brilliant, there's just too much of it -- the abundance of visual riches is more than what the audience can assimilate.  By contrast, My friend Totoro is perfectly proportioned.  The opening scenes in which the children explore the old farmhouse with its annexed bathing facility and encounter traces of supernatural presences is remarkably gripping and exquisitely designed.  (With its sense of wonder with ominous overtones, the opening scenes of this film are similar to the picnic at the abandoned amusement park that begins Spirited Away).  The impulse of Totoro is profoundly animistic -- the film is an animated exercise in Animism, as it turns out the film's Animist sensibility is perfectly wedded to the picture's design as a animated feature.  This is a very great movie, a fully realized masterpiece of animated film, and highly recommended.