My neighbor totoro

My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Tonari no Totoro^?) is a 1988 Japanese animated film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film—starring actors Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto, and Hitoshi Takagi—tells the story of a family and their interactions with a forest spirit they call "Totoro" in post-war Japan. My Neighbor Totoro won the Animage Anime Grand Prix Award, the Mainichi Film Award, and the Kinema Junpo Award for “Best Film” in 1989. It also received an special at the Blue Ribbon Awards of that same year. It is the fourth feature film made by Studio Ghibli, of which Totoro is its logo. It was chosen by the British magazine Time Out as the best animated film in history.

The film and its character Totoro have become cultural icons. The film was ranked number 41 on the list of "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in the British magazine Empire in 2010, while Totoro ranked number eighteen in the category of best film. animated character. Also, in a list of the best animated films made by Terry Gilliam in Time Out magazine, the film was ranked number one. In a similar list made by the editors of Time Out, My Neighbor Totoro was ranked number three.

The Totoro character made cameo appearances in several other Studio Ghibli films, as well as in other media, being recognized as one of the most popular characters in Japanese animation. Totoro was ranked 24th out of IGN's top 25 anime characters.

Plot

Japan, 1958. University professor Tatsuo Kusakabe and his two daughters, Satsuki and Mei, move to an old rural residence to be closer to the hospital where the girls' mother, Yasuko, is recovering from tuberculosis. Satsuki and Mei discover that the house is inhabited by tiny soot creatures called susuwatari—small, dark, soot-like spirits that live in abandoned places. When the girls and their father feel comfortable in their new house and the susuwatari see that they are good people, they leave the residence, presumably in search of another place to live. One day, Mei spots a white rabbit-like creature and follows it under the house. She later discovers that it is actually a small spirit, which together with another creature leads her through a forest path and later to the hollow of a large camphor tree. There, she meets and befriends a much larger version of the same type of spirit, whom she identifies as "Totoro" based on a series of roars it emits. Mei falls asleep, and when she wakes up she finds herself back in the patio of her house. Despite her many attempts, Mei is unable to show the Totoro tree to her family. Her father comforts her by telling her that Totoro was the "guardian of the forest" and that she would show up whenever he wanted.

The house of Satsuki and Mei, as seen in the film. Expo 2005.

Detail of the house of Satsuki and Mei.

One rainy night, the girls plan to wait for their father's bus and worry when he doesn't show up. As they wait, Mei falls asleep and Totoro appears next to them, with Satsuki seeing him for the first time. Totoro only has a leaf on his head to protect himself from the rain, so Satsuki offers him the umbrella that he had brought for his father. Totoro is enchanted by both the umbrella and the sounds made by the raindrops. In return, he gives a bunch of nuts and seeds to the girls. A bus in the shape of a giant cat pulls up at the stop and Totoro rides away on it. Shortly after, his father's bus arrives.

The girls plant the seeds, but they don't seem to bloom. A few days later, they wake up at midnight to find Totoro and the other two creatures performing a ceremonial dance around planted nuts and seeds. The girls join in the dance, after which the seeds sprout and grow to form a giant tree. Totoro takes his colleagues and the girls on a ride. The next morning, the tree disappeared, but the seeds sprouted, leaving Satsuki and Mei wondering if it was a dream or not. Soon after, the girls discover that her mother's visit has to be postponed due to a regression in her health. A disappointed and worried Satsuki tells Mei the bad news about her, who she refuses to accept. This leads to an argument between the sisters, with Mei deciding to go to the hospital on her own to bring an ear of corn to her mother, believing that she would heal her.

Mei's disappearance prompts Satsuki and the neighbors to search the surrounding area for her. Finally, a desperate Satsuki goes to Totoro for help. Delighted to help, Totoro summons the catbus, which takes her to where Mei is. After the girls' reunion, the catbus takes them to the hospital to see their mother. The girls overhear a conversation between their parents in a tree outside the hospital, and discover that her mother had only been kept in the hospital for a mild cold and her health was not in danger. They secretly leave the ear of corn on the windowsill, where she is discovered by her parents, and return home. In the end credits, Mei and Satsuki's mother returns home, and the sisters play with other children, with Totoro and his friends as unseen observers.

Characters

The names of the girls refer to the month of May. Mei (メイ) is the phonetic transcription of may in English, while Satsuki (サツキ) was the former Japanese name for the fifth month. In the original idea, only a six-year-old girl appeared, but it was decided to split the character into two sisters. This caused some confusion among the fans, who on more than one occasion came across images and posters where Totoro waits for the catbus in the company of a little girl who does not appear in the film. In the original posters only Satsuki and Totoro appear waiting for the catbus, Satsuki has different hair.

• Mei Kusakabe (traction, Kusakabe Mei^?): The youngest of the four-year-old Kusakabe sisters. Cheerful and curious, thanks to her they discovered Totoro. Because of the absence of her mother, she constantly seeks the attention of her older sister. In the original bent, Mei pronounces the words wrong, so he says Totoro instead of saying torōru that is how it is pronounced troll in Japanese.

• Satsuki Kusakabe (oriented traction, Kusakabe Satsuki^?): With eleven years of age, she is Mei's older sister, who tries to take care of her while trying to adapt to her new environment and assimilate her mother's illness; all this makes her start to mature very soon.

• Tatsuo Kusakabe (oriented sacrifice, Kusakabe Tatsuo^?): He is the father of the girls and husband of Yasuko. He works in the archaeology and anthropology department at the University of Tokyo. He always looks happy with his daughters.

• Yasuko Kusakabe (أعربية, Kusakabe Yasuko^?): Tatsuo's mother and wife. Because she has TB she is transferred to a rural hospital. Her husband and daughters moved into the country to be closer to her. Like Mrs. Kusakabe, Miyazaki's mother in 1947, suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which kept her in hospital for approximately nine years.

Bulls

Figure Dai-Totoro.

The Totoro (トトロ, Totoro^?) are three spirits of the forest that live inside a gigantic thousand-year-old tree, more specifically, in a camphor tree.

• Great Totoro (, Dai-Totoro^?): The largest, grey and the best known of the three.
• Medium totor (中國, Chū-Totoro^?): Blue.
• Little Totoro (⋅, Chibi-Totoro^?): White, similar to a rodent.

Other characters

• Kanta ⋅gaki (, ⋅gaki Kanta^?): A neighboring boy of the Kusakabe, of the same age as Satsuki. Because of her shyness, she seems not to get along with the girls. This character shares Miyazaki's hobby for airplanes.

• Obaa-chan (ROMING, Obaa-chan^?): One of Kanta's grandmothers and neighbor of the Kusakabe. She works by cultivating her garden and caring for the girls when her father is absent.

• Gatobus (ス Recovery, Nekobasu^?): As its name indicates, it is a spirit-cat (bakeneko) that has taken the form of a bus. Go to Totoro's call, who uses it as a means of transport. Among other peculiarities: it can fly, it has six pairs of legs and powers that allow it to move at incredible speeds without being seen.

• Susuwatari (ceptological discourse, Susuwatari^?): His name means «Something very black and dark». In the English fold, it was translated as "dust bunnies" (pelusa). They are small creatures living in uninhabited houses, building invisible holes and turning everything to dust.

Production

The film's art director was Kazuo Oga, who drew and designed Totoro when Hayao Miyazaki showed him an image of Totoro on top of a mountain. Miyazaki wanted to give Oga a chance to raise his standards, which he took as a challenge to his career and artistic experience. Thanks to My Neighbor Totoro, Oga's career enjoyed greater popularity and prestige. Miyazaki and Oga debated what the color palette for My Neighbor Totoro was going to be. Oga favored softer colors reminiscent of Akita Prefecture, while Miyazaki preferred warmer tones to make the colors more like the Kantō region; in the end it ended up being a mixture of both. Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli's main producer, stated that "it was nature painted with translucent colors".

Oga's meticulous approach to the film led the International Herald Tribune to define his style as "[updating] the traditional animist perception that the Japanese have of a fully and spiritually alive nature."

"Located in a period that is both modern and nostalgic, the film creates a fantastic universe, but strangely believable of supernatural creatures that co-exist with modernity. A large part of this comes from the evocative antecedents of Oga, which give each tree, hedge and curve of the road an indefinable sense of familiarity that seems ready to sprout in sensitive life."

Oga's work on the film was the beginning of a longstanding collaboration with Studio Ghibli. The studio assigned him jobs that matched her skills, and his signature style became one of the studio's icons.

As Miyazaki commented, the film's opening sequence was not planned in the storyboard: "The sequence was determined through modifications and combinations determined by timing. The elements were created one at a time and combined into the timesheets». In turn, the ending sequence shows the girls' mother returning home and her good health is given to meet when she is seen playing with Satsuki and Mei in the garden.

Voices

Dakota Fanning, English-speaking actress of Satsuki.

Elle Fanning, English-speaking actress of Mei.

Tim Daly, Tatsuo's English voice actor.

The dubbing studio in Spain was Tecnison S.A., whose headquarters are in Madrid, while the dubbing studio in Mexico was Estudios Tokio, from the City of Mexico.

Character	Voice actor	Voice actors	Voice actors	Voice actors
Totoro	Hitoshi Takagi	Juan Perucho	Juan Alfonso Carrelero	Frank Welker
Satsuki Kusakabe	Noriko Hidaka	Sandra Jara	Jahel Morga	Dakota Fanning
Mei Kusakabe	Chika Sakamoto	Eva Díez	Belinda Martínez	Elle Fanning
Kanta ⋅gaki	Toshiyuki Amagasa	Amparo Bravo	Emilio Treviño	Paul Butcher
Nanny	Tanie Kitabayashi	Ana Díaz Plana	Love Santini	Pat Carroll
Tatsuo Kusakabe	Shigesato Itoi	Ignacio Gijón	Carlos Enrique Bonilla	Tim Daly
Grandma of Kanta	Reiko Suzuki	Begoña Hernando	Angela Villanueva	Debbie Reynolds
Mother of Kanta	Hiroko Maruyama	Amparo Valencia	Mayra Arellano	Melanie McQueen
Yasuko Kusakabe	Sumi Shimamoto	Laura Palacios	Diana Perez	Lea Salonga
Gatobus	Naoki Tatsuta	Juan Antonio Arroyo	Carlos Enrique Bonilla	Frank Welker
Labrador	Shigeru Chiba	Juan Perucho	Juan Alfonso Carralero	Evan Sabara
Woman tractor	Yūko Mizutani	Begoña Hernando	Love Santini	Lara Cody
Tractor man	Daiki Nakamura	Juan Antonio Arroyo	José Luis Orozco	Steve Kramer
Professor	Machiko Washio	Begoña Hernando	Diana Perez	Three MacNeille

Global distribution and reception

My Neighbor Totoro was hugely successful upon its Japanese release in 1988. The cultural impact was so great that Totoro became the studio's mascot and is as popular with Japanese children as Winnie the Pooh. the Pooh for Western children. Hayao Miyazaki, who had already directed Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky, decided to start writing the script and taking charge of the address of My Neighbor Totoro just after finishing the second movie. It was a parallel production to another work by the studio, The Grave of the Fireflies, by his mentor Isao Takahata. Both films were released on the same date and one after the other. It was done this way to "demonstrate the face and tail of the subject matter that both dealt with". Not only that, with the success of the film, the studio found another way to raise money that was merchandising.

It was released in the United States in 1993, making it the first Western country to receive the film. American critics welcomed the film very well, and newspapers such as The New York Times defined it as "a beautiful and artistic masterpiece". In 2005, My Neighbor Totoro was re-released on DVD, distributed by Disney with a new English dub, featuring voices like Dakota Fanning in the role of Mei.

In Europe the premiere of My Neighbor Totoro was later. Finland was the first European country to release the film in 1995. In Spain the film was released directly to VHS in 1996. France released the film in December 1999, re-released it again in theaters in August 2002. the French re-release of the film, My Neighbor Totoro was released in Switzerland and Belgium in the summer of that same year. In the United Kingdom it was released on DVD in March 2006. In Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland and Turkey it was released in 2007. In 2009 it was released in Italy and Spain, in September and October of that year respectively. being in Spain the first time that My neighbor Totoro was released in theaters, and it was released in DVD format on December 9 of that same year.

In Latin America, the film was released on VHS throughout the 1990s (in Brazil it was released in 1995). Although the dubbing of the film was lost, it has been possible to recover it thanks to free video portals. In Mexico it was re-dubbed for its DVD release on May 15, 2010, through the distributor Zima.

Such was the success in its original release that Totoro makes brief appearances in other studio films, such as Whispers of the Heart or Pompoko. In the movie Toy Story 3 , Totoro is one of the toys that appear, although he does not have a relevant role. This cameo is due to the admiration that John Lasseter, creative director of Pixar, has for the work of Hayao Miyazaki.

When it was last re-released in Japan in 2006, singer Aya Matsuura composed two songs about the film, which are included on the 2006 re-release DVD.

Short film

Mei and the Buscat (めいとこねこバス, Mei to Konekobasu^?), written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is a short film made in 2003 that narrates the adventures of Mei Kusakabe and the Busminino (descendant of the Catbus).

Awards and nominations