My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

rating: ****

the story: Sisters attempting to handle the illness of their mother find unexpected solace in a magical creature.

review: So, my niece has become positively obsessed with My Neighbor Totoro in recent months.  My relationship with the works of Hayao Miyazaki is not perfect by any means, but thanks to repeated viewings of Totoro, I think I've finally found the movie that at last helps me see the magic that has helped him become the Japanese version of Disney.

It's perhaps worth noting that the version of Totoro I've been watching is a Disney product, the 2005 English translation with Tim Daly as the dad and sisters Elle and Dakota Fanning as Mei and Satsuki, respectively.  Mei's the younger of the two and responsible for all the best moments in the movie, including and most importantly discovering Tororo in the first place.  Totoro, unlike virtually everything else I've discovered in Miyazaki movies, is a harmless, lovable giant ball of fur.  Miyazaki appears to my untrained eye an animated disciple of the peculiar, post-WWII, Godzilla-fueled purveyor of monster imagery in modern Japanese pop culture.  The wider anime and manga material around him doesn't really match his depth or ambition, which is probably half the reason Miyazaki began to stand out in the first place, but curiously Totoro is more like that stuff than his typical work.

Besides Totoro is the Catbus, which is also entirely innocuous and unquestioningly helpful in Mei's adventures.  Mei and her sister get to be typical little girls for most of the movie.  They move into a new home at the beginning, and their first discovery is the presence of soot sprites (or gremlins), which Mei eventually tries to capture with an enthusiastic handclap (no luck, alas, just soot).  They moved to be closer to the hospital where their mother has been recovering when an undisclosed illness.  My only real criticism of Totoro is the ill-defined nature of the mother's predicament.  It's tough to compare with something like A Monster Calls, which tackles a similar story with far more gusto. 

But clearly there's whimsy and fanciful spirit in Totoro that A Monster Calls can't match, either, a perfect encapsulation, in some ways, of childhood, of its inherent magic, that even Disney and Pixar have never been able to capture.

So maybe in time I'll forget my quibble.  My Neighbor Totoro might be an unqualified classic.  Hail Miyazaki!