Anna Daniels
Hayao Miyazaki followed his groundbreaking hit Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind with 1986’s Castle in the Sky, a wonderfully animated film that’s most definitely deserving of your time. That being said, there’s way more to ’80s anime than just Ghibli, so we’re going to skip past the studio’s first official feature (which, again, we can’t recommend enough) and get right to 1988’s My Neighbor Totoro, a landmark movie for Miyazaki.
This iconic anime revolves around two sisters who’ve just moved to the countryside to be closer to the hospital that’s treating their sick mother, and while they’re there, they meet a magical creature. Miyazaki reportedly alarmed investors when he announced that he was going to make a 1950s-set film about two little girls and a forest spirit named Totoro, but he proved the skeptics wrong as the picture (and the titular character) would come to define Studio Ghibli in the years to come.
According to Helen McCarthy, author of Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (via Little White Lies), My Neighbor Totoro “extended the studio’s positive green and social credentials by tying itself so firmly into a simpler time and a society ruled by nature.” It was this simplicity that made the film so special. Plus, there’s an interesting layer of ambiguity, too. The fantastical Totoro doesn’t feature all that often, with the focus remaining largely on his human neighbors. The forest spirit only shows up when the girls need him, leaving some viewers convinced that he’s actually a product of their imaginations.
Written by: Looper
