Wednesday, February 24, 2010
My Neighbor Totoro
Coming in to see My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, I really didn’t know what to expect. I know a lot of Americans that have seen the movie when they were younger and I thought that maybe Totoro would be only for children. I thought it would be very mainstream and commercial without a lot of important meaning. I was wrong. Although the film looks very cute and innocent at first (with cute imaginary characters and little girls constantly running and laughing) it is clear that it has a sad undertone and feeling of the postwar Japan. For children watching this movie it might be fun to see the animation and the discovery of the new world of Totoro, but to the adults watching the film it is clear that Totoro is only found in the imagination of the two girls. Every time one of the girls (or both) sleep or wish for happiness, Totoro shows up. With the exception of Totoro and his little friends, the movie looks too ‘real’ to be all cute. The family lives in poverty, in an old, rusty house without money to for example send the kids to expensive boarding schools, but the kids need to stay in the country. The dad is busy every day at work and if he is not at work he deals with papers. The mom is very sick and in the hospital and presumably in the end she dies. At the end of the movie, though, we don’t see her death because the kids imagine her getting better. The cat bus shows up and takes the kids to the hospital. Obviously the cat bus doesn’t exist in real life so there is a good reason to believe that the hospital trip is made up by the kids. They see the mom get better, but the viewers know that the mother didn’t get better and that the hospital wouldn’t give out a telegram if the mom just had a cold. Telegrams get in service when a person dies or something else bad happens. I think of Totoro as happiness for the kids and also the hope. Maybe Miyazaki’s hope that Japan will grow fast from the post- war situation into a beautiful blooming tree, just like it did in the little girl’s dream. In my opinion, Miyazaki knows that that kind of a big recovery is not possible and that the only thing that is left is hope. The film reminded me of the play Waiting for Godot, with Totoro being the Godot, but in a little girl’s mind, Godot comes sooner than a grown person’s does because the children have bigger imagination and more hope that things will just somehow change.
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You make a lot of assumptions there, saying that Totoro was all made up in their imagination and that the hospital trip was made up by the kids. I would have to disagree and say that Totoro is real to the girls and real in the film. How else did the girls leave the corn next to the window? There was no indication that the hospital trip was a dream sequence. Also, being a happy film (to me at least), it is depressing to view Totoro as just an escape for the girls to avoid the real world.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this reading is very depressing Chadwick, but it is hardly wrong. This not a very long stretch, saying that these things are in the mind of the girls. It reminds me of the end of the Pan's Labyrinth and the question of whether Ophelia actually went through the wall with the magic chalk or not. It could be magic or it could just be her believing and pretending. just because we see evidence that she used the chalk, doesn't mean that it worked. It could have worked in her mind but not in real life. Don't you remember playing around as a kid and actually being somewhere you weren't. I remember one windy day in elementary school I was pretending to be in a haunted house with some friends, and we were legitimately scared, even though we had the control over it. Sometimes our minds, especially in the case of children, carry us away. Hana's reading of Totoro, although depressing, makes a lot of sense with the film and, in my opinion, gives it more overall significance. I did not read the film this way when I first saw it, but that is probably because i was forcing it into Disney's assurance that everything is all right in the end.
ReplyDeleteWell...Although the reading is certainly valid for the most part.. Didnt the credits sequence support the idea that the Mother survived her illness, and Did come home? I mean.. Was everything from that point on a projected, imagined future? I am not so sure that is the case
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