Every medium, every genre, every profession has that guy (or gal); he will never be as popular as the rest of his colleagues, because his work is too outside the mainstream, but absolutely none of the others want to be subjected to a face-to-face match with him. Deep down, they all know that he’s better and could wipe them all off the map the second he felt like it. In the world of feature-length animated films, I don’t think that there’s any question but that figure is Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese maestro who has frequently been compared with Walt Disney in terms of obsessive bravado about his work output (and the subsequent quality of that output). Disney seems to have gotten the message, because they are now rereleasing a number of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films, only with their name above it on the cover in the hope that people will confuse it with their own output (one can only assume, as they’ve recorded an all new English soundtrack). My Neighbor Totoro is one of the titles being released, and it’s as good a place to start as any for those unfamiliar with Miyazaki’s work.
Satsuki and Mei (Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning, respectively) are two small Japanese sisters who go to live in the countryside with their father (Tim Daly) while their mother (Lea Salonga) recuperates from a disease. Upon their arrival, they find that their home is filled to the brim with susuwatari, tiny round soot creatures that scatter when you enter a room like cockroaches. All of this is explained to them by Granny (Pat Carroll), the elderly woman who acts as the landlord for their new home. Mei, however, soon comes into contact with something even stranger: Totoro (Frank Welker), a huge furry creature with rabbit ears that isn’t much of a talker but sure loves to bellow strange sounds and cause magical things to happen.
If this plot sounds airy and thin, that’s because it is. Scenes never work together to build any kind of momentum, and at the end of the film, Satsuki and Mei have learned the true meaning of absolutely nothing. Whereas few American films, animated or not, could pull off anything like that, it seems to come as second nature to Miyazaki. Where another director would have packed the film from wall to wall with unappealing sidekicks and half-baked subplots, Miyazaki takes the barest of premises and grounds it in his rock solid sense of time, place, and character, drawing out the interactions of Satsuki and Mei with the fantastic world around them into believable, even mundane territory. Mei and Totoro hang out together, they wander around the forest, they have various encounters with a catbus (you have to see it to believe it); basically, they do the kinds of things that people do already. The fact that is so frequently ignored by Hollywood and other dream factories is that even if there were (or are) magical creatures or powers existing in the world around us, people would still be doing roughly the same things that they’re doing now, only with different gimmicks. Miyazaki knows this, and uses it to open up a world that feels more immediate and fresh than almost any ‘far, far away’ that film has offered us, certainly more so than any that introduced insurmountable odds and then tidied them away by bringing in yet another magical spell (looking at you, Harry Potter).
What truly separates Miyazaki from his colleagues, however, is his almost unnatural ability to compose a frame. The only word to describe Miyazaki’s command of environment is naturalistic, and comparable to the work of Terrence Mallick. Mallick, however, has the benefit of getting to shoot hours and hours of footage and then editing it into a feature film. Miyazaki and his animators have to come up with all of that before they draw it and set it into motion. This concerted effort, this focus, is evident in every single scene that they set, and all the more remarkable for how consistently they maintain this quality throughout the entire film (granted, it’s less than 90 minutes long).
If you’ve never seen a Miyazaki film, My Neighbor Totoro is a good place to start. If you have, the DVD transfer here does the film justice, and is probably the best way to see it short of an actual 35 mm print. And never fear, purists: the original Japanese soundtrack is available in addition to the newly done English soundtrack.
DVD Bonus Features
Original Japanese Storyboards - A feature-length presentation of the original sketches.
The World of Ghibli - An umbrella title for both "Behind The Studio" a series of short documentaries on Miyazaki (all of which are worth while), and "Enter The Lands", an interactive game that was clearly meant for the child audience.
"My Neighbor Totoro" is on sale March 2, 2010 and is rated G. Animation. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Starring Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Frank Welker, Tim Daly.
