There is no doubt that My Neighbour Totoro – just now out on Blu-ray – is a fantastic children’s movie. It is about a Japanese family in the 1950s. The mother has come down with tuberculosis and has been sent to a sanatorium. The father and the two young daughters are moving to a country place in order to be closer to the mother, and the movie particularly focuses on how the two young girls react to the new surroundings; the local people and the natural beauty and mystery of rural Japan. The girls, Satsuki and Mei, meet strange forest spirits which are silent but friendly. In the last part of the movie, a letter arrives from the sanatorium which makes the father rush there, and the two girls then enlist the forest spirits to get them to the sanatorium in a hurry as well.
Being a movie for young children, however, there is never anything really scary going on; none of the spirit creatures are the least bit dangerous and there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with the mother after all. This lack of real conflict can be slightly annoying to an adult viewer, but one has to acknowledge that it is a good idea for a children’s movie to project a sense of wonder and reassurance, and to show that nature is something to be fascinated and not frightened by.
My Neighbour Totoro is a movie that has become a modern fairy-tale classic, mainly in Japan, but undoubtedly beginning to achieve the same status in the West. The best part of the movie, for me, is the first half hour, before the forest spirits are introduced, when we follow the two girls eagerly playing and exploring their new country home and natural surroundings. Their happiness and playfulness are infectious and delightful, and seeing this makes you understand the almost unbearable pleasure that grandparents must take in seeing their grandchildren just being children.
There is an amazing amount of extras on this new Blu-ray release. If you ever wanted to go on a trip to see the locations that appear in this animated movie, you actually can. Because its scenery is taken from Miyazaki’s home area, the lush Sayama Hills, no more than an hour away from Tokyo. It’s part of a huge natural park area, much of which was artificially designed, but which gives an appearance of almost wild, unspoiled nature. Sceneries from My Neighbour Totoro abound in this landscape, as the 29-minute feature Locations of Totoro demonstrates. This feature is part of a longer Japanese documentary on the locations of animated movies.
If you want to watch the entire movie with the storyboards inserted into a quarter of the screen, this Blu-ray awesomely allows you to do that, too.
There are an additional six featurettes filled with interviews with Miyazaki himself, his composer, the producer and the 2005 American voice cast, and although each of these are only a few minutes long, there is quite a lot of info crammed into them. Furthermore, the disc contains trailers for both this and other Studio Ghibli movies, and textless versions of the opening and closing sequences.
Truly, this is the definitive version of this movie yet released! It is out on a Blu-ray + DVD version in the UK on November 12.
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Voice cast: [Japanese:] Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto, Sumi Shimamoto and others. [English:] Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Lea Salonga and Pat Carroll.
Runtime: 87 min.
Country: Japan
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