Tonari no Totoro

The non-human things are the Totoro.

If you have never watched this movie, your life is incomplete. I am convinced of this.  Perhaps you watched it in English under the 20th Century Fox or Disney translations which have the title "My Neighbor Totoro."  I grew up watching the 20th Century Fox translation but own the Disney translation because it's cheaper and because it has the Japanese language track.  I don't watch it in English.  I watch it in Japanese.  It's a Japanese movie.  THE Japanese movie of my childhood.

Dust bunnies!

Anyway, for those of you whose life has never been awesomed (not a word, but I'm using it) by this movie, I will give a short plot summary.  These sisters named Satsuki and Mei move to a new house while their mom is still in the hospital with some unnamed disease (I believe movie trivia states it to be tuberculosis.).  The house turns out to be infested with dust bunnies, but they all leave when the family laughs in the ofuro.  Anyway, one day while the older sister Satsuki is at school, the younger sister Mei finds a little Totoro, then a medium one, and follows them to the tree in the nearby shrine area where she falls down into the home of the Totoro and lands on the big one.  And when I say big, I mean if I were to pick another childhood character to pit him against, I'd have to choose Clifford.  Everyone else is too small.  Anyway, Satsuki comes home and wakes Mei up sleeping in the middle of the tunnels of bushes behind their house.  Dad believes Mei about the Totoro but Satsuki doesn't.  Of course, Satsuki changes her mind when one day Totoro appears beside her while the girls wait to pick up their dad from the bus stop because he forgot his umbrella.  Cue most iconic scene of the movie:

Just another ordinary day, chillin' while waiting for the bus

Forget the TARDIS; I want a cat bus!

Since leaves don't make substantial umbrellas, Satsuki just gives Totoro her Dad's umbrella, which he takes with them before he is whisked off on a cat bus but not before leaving them a packet of seeds out of gratitude.  These seeds only end up growing after all the Totoro arrive one night and still don't return the umbrella (despite having it with them!) and lead the girls in a series of stretching exercises which makes it grow into a tree as big as the one the Totoro live in and then whisks them off on a spinning top on a cross country trip.  The girls wake up in bed the next morning with only tiny little sprouts in the garden.

One day, the girls find out their mom, who was about to come home, has to stay in the hospital for longer.  Mei runs away to see her mom and give her an ear of corn, and no one can find her until Satsuki enlists the help of the big gray Totoro and the cat bus who not only find Mei but take the girls to see their mother.  Cue credits and warm fuzzy feelings all around.  (And watch the credits.  The song is catchy and there's pictures giving the further story.)

Plot synopsis over.  Now the fun can begin!  Forget Narnia; I'm still waiting for a tunnel in the bushes to lead me to a Totoro tree.  My family had the perfect Totoro tunnel in the front yard of where we used to live in Japan, but no trips in there ever landed me right on top of a Totoro, no matter how much I wished.  I don't want a unicorn for a pet.  I want a Totoro.  I wore gigantic leaves on my head because they are Totoro umbrellas.

An edible plant (in some people's minds) or a Totoro umbrella?  Let your imagination decide.

For the record, that plant is not a rhubarb.  It's edible (theoretically), but it doesn't taste like rhubarb, and I prefer to wear the leaves on my head and pretend I'm a Totoro.  Or rather I did as a kid.  Even I would feel silly doing it as an adult.

I have a Totoro plushie, a Totoro keychain, a Totoro toy that you pull its tail and it wiggles forward, and a Totoro music player hanging on my wall.  And I don't consider myself obsessed.  It's just about the only Japanese movie I like.

Me, age 6

Anyway, Totoro now brings back a bit of nostalgia for me.  The movie takes place in the 1950s but was made in the 1980s.  However, pieces of Mei and Satsuki's world still existed when I moved to Japan.  We lived in an old traditional-style house like theirs.  I still knew places that were dirt roads.  The grandmas in the rice paddies were starting to fade away by 1996, but I did not find the people in the movie doing that as unusual.  Even the plants and the scenery matched that of the town I lived in.  Nowadays, though, my family has moved up north and to a larger city.  Oh, we still see rice paddies and traditional houses, but dirt roads are long gone for us now.  Up north is a different culture from down south in Japan, and time and technology have passed.  That's not a bad thing, though.  The world is making progress, and that is a good thing.  Still, when I watch Tonari no Totoro, I am transported back to a time when I was little, when I could imagine, when dirt roads and forests were all around me.  Inside, I am a child again.

Isn't that why we watch kids' movies as adults, though?  Because the child inside us never died.