My Neighbor Totoro

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  My Neighbor Totoro, a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, opens on a family driving to an old house in the countryside, their belongings stacked in a truck. Two girls - Satsuki, around ten years old, and Mei, around four - peer out at the trees rushing past. Their father, university professor Tatsuo Kusakabe, is moving them closer to the hospital where their mother, Yasuko, is recovering from a long-term illness. What waits for them in that house, and in the camphor forest behind it, would turn this film into one of the most beloved animated works ever made.

  The questions that follow are not about magic or monsters. They are quieter than that. Who are these forest spirits, and why do two small girls gain their trust when no one else can? What does a 1988 film about postwar rural Japan say to audiences across languages and decades? And how did a studio produce, in just eight months, a work that Akira Kurosawa named among his favorites and that critics voted the greatest animated film of all time?

• 2. A World Built From Soil

  ›

  Art director Kazuo Oga joined My Neighbor Totoro after Hayao Miyazaki showed him a single original image of Totoro standing in a satoyama - the traditional Japanese landscape mosaic of forests, fields, and villages. That image was enough. Oga and Miyazaki immediately disagreed about the film's color palette: Oga wanted the dark soil of Akita Prefecture, while Miyazaki preferred the red earth of the Kanto region. The finished film threaded between them, and producer Toshio Suzuki described the result as "nature painted with translucent colors".

  The International Herald Tribune recognized Oga's work as updating "the traditional Japanese animist sense of a natural world that is fully, spiritually alive". The paper observed that Oga gave each tree, hedge, and bend in the road "an indefinable feeling of warmth that seems ready to spring into sentient life". That quality would go on to define the visual signature of Studio Ghibli across many subsequent films.

  Miyazaki had his own exacting approach to every detail. Rain in the film was not painted but scratched directly into the animation cels, then superimposed so it would carry a soft feel. Ripples in water were rendered using two colors of highlighting and shading. The animators spent one full month on a sequence involving tadpoles, using four colors and deliberately blurring the surrounding water. Eight animators completed the entire film in eight months.

• 3. Designing Totoro

  ›

  Miyazaki's earliest conceptual watercolor paintings for the film show only one young girl, not two sisters. The theatrical release poster and several early home-video releases preserved that single-child image. Miyazaki later explained the problem plainly: a girl playing alone in the yard would have no reason to meet her father at a bus stop. Two sisters solved the narrative, though he called the adjustment difficult.

  Miyazaki based the younger character Mei on his own niece. He described the forest spirits, the Totoros, as "serene, carefree creatures" who served as forest keepers - but he held that description loosely, calling it "only a half-baked idea, a rough approximation". The film's initial cast was more compact than the finished version: early on, Miyazaki worked with only Totoro, Mei, Tatsuo, and a character named Kanta.

  The story was initially intended to be set in 1955, but the production team did not pursue rigorous historical research and settled instead on a vaguer sense of "the recent past". The film was also originally planned to run only an hour, but it grew during production as the team worked through the family's situation - the reason for the move, the father's occupation, and the shadow of the mother's illness - in ways that responded to a broader social context.

• 4. Animism, Shinto, and Satoyama

  ›

  Totoro lives in a camphor tree inside a Shinto shrine enclosed by a sacred Shinto rope. Scholar Eriko Ogihara-Schuck identifies this as making Totoro a kami - a spiritual entity with animistic traits, referred to in the film as mori no nushi, the master of the forest. When Mei returns home after her first encounter with Totoro, her father takes both girls to the shrine to greet and thank him. Ogihara-Schuck notes this mirrors standard Shinto practice following contact with a kami.

  Cultural historian Timo Thelen situates the film within a broader Japanese discourse about satoyama landscapes. Thelen argues that My Neighbor Totoro presents these traditional mosaics of nature and village life as an "absolute satoyama" - an idealized fusion of culture and the natural world held in harmonious balance. The film's own environmental influence became direct: a Japanese conservation campaign called the Totoro Hometown Fund Campaign, started in 1990, used the character as a mascot to raise funds protecting satoyama areas in Saitama Prefecture. In August 2008, the fund held an auction at Pixar Animation Studios selling more than 210 original paintings, illustrations, and sculptures inspired by the film.

  Phillip E. Wegner reads the film differently, as an example of alternative history, pointing to its utopian quality and its depiction of a postwar Japan where the social fabric holds. Scholars have also connected the hospitalized mother and the girls' fear of losing her to Miyazaki's own childhood, marked by his mother's chronic illness and the lingering weight of wartime devastation.

• 5. Music and the Fairlight

  ›

  Joe Hisaishi, who had worked with Miyazaki on both Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky, composed the score for My Neighbor Totoro. Hisaishi drew on a set of contemporary composers - Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage - as he shaped the film's sound. He described Miyazaki's films as "rich and personally compelling". For the recording, Hisaishi hired a full orchestra and made a Fairlight instrument central to the soundtrack.

  The soundtrack was first released in Japan on the 1st of May, 1988, by Tokuma Shoten. It included the musical score but omitted five vocal pieces performed by Azumi Inoue, among them "Stroll", "A Lost Child", and "My Neighbor Totoro". Those pieces had appeared earlier on a 1987 Image Song CD containing songs that were not ultimately included in the film itself.

  Music scholar Kunio Hara, writing about the Totoro soundtrack, called the title song "My Neighbor Totoro" a "sonic icon" of the film and argued the music arouses "a similar sentiment of yearning for the past". When the stage adaptation opened at the Barbican Centre in London in October 2022, Hisaishi returned as composer, completing a creative partnership with the material that stretched more than three decades.

• 6. Release and Reception

  ›

  My Neighbor Totoro did not open alone. Miyazaki's film was released in 1988 on the same bill as Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Miyazaki's colleague Isao Takahata, with both productions financed by executive producer Yasuyoshi Tokuma. That pairing was later described as "one of the most moving and remarkable double bills ever offered to a cinema audience".

  In Japan, the film sold 801,680 tickets in its initial 1988 release. By 2005, according to animation scholar Seiji Kano, its total box-office gross in Japan had grown substantially. French cinemas had sold 429,822 tickets since 1999. In China, a theatrical release did not arrive until December 2018 - thirty years after the original - delayed by longstanding political tensions between China and Japan. Chinese audiences had largely encountered Miyazaki's films through rampant video piracy. In its opening weekend ending the 16th of December 2018, My Neighbor Totoro debuted at number two on the Chinese box office behind Aquaman and ahead of Padman.

  Film critic Roger Ebert placed the film on his list of Great Movies, writing that it "is based on experience, situation and exploration - not on conflict and threat". Ebert added that it is "a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself". Steve Rose of The Guardian awarded the film five stars, and Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa named it among his personal favorites. In 2012, critics at Sight and Sound voted My Neighbor Totoro the greatest animated film of all time. Ten years later, in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, it ranked jointly 72nd among all films ever made.

• 7. Totoro Beyond the Screen

  ›

  Totoro became Studio Ghibli's official mascot and logo, a role the character has held ever since. The Independent described him as capturing "the innocence and magic of childhood more than any of Miyazaki's other magical creations". The Financial Times took the comparison further, writing that Totoro "is more genuinely loved than Mickey Mouse could hope to be in his wildest - not nearly so beautifully illustrated - fantasies". Empire ranked Totoro 18th on its list of the greatest animated characters of all time.

  The character's reach extended into taxonomy. An asteroid discovered on the 31st of December 1994, was formally named 10160 Totoro. In 2013, researchers in Vietnam discovered a species of velvet worm and named it Eoperipatus totoro, noting in the paper that Totoro rides a many-legged animal that, in the collectors' view, resembles a velvet worm.

  In Japan, by April 2012, My Neighbor Totoro had sold 3.5 million VHS and DVD units. In the United States, it sold more than 500,000 VHS units by 1996, and a 2010 DVD release went on to sell a further 3.8 million units. In the United Kingdom, the film's Studio Ghibli anniversary release appeared on the annual list of best-selling foreign-language films on home video for five consecutive years, reaching number one in 2018 before placing second in 2019 behind Spirited Away. In 2023, the film returned to cinemas across 970 United States locations to mark the 35th anniversary of its first theatrical release.

• 8. Stage and Continuing Life

  ›

  In May 2022, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Joe Hisaishi announced a stage adaptation titled My Neighbour Totoro, adapted by British playwright Tom Morton-Smith and directed by Phelim McDermott of Improbable. When tickets went on sale on the 19th of May, 2022, they broke the Barbican Centre's single-day box-office record - a record previously set by the 2015 production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The production ran from the 8th of October, 2022, to the 21st of January, 2023, and won six Olivier Awards.

  A second London season followed, running from November 2023 through March 2024. The show then moved to the Gillian Lynne Theatre for a run beginning the 8th of March, 2025, with the closing date later extended to the 30th of August, 2026.

  A short sequel, thirteen minutes long, was written and directed by Miyazaki. Chika Sakamoto, who had voiced Mei in the original film, returned for the sequel, and Miyazaki himself voiced Granny Cat. The story follows Mei through a night of adventures with Kittenbus, the offspring of Catbus. First screened in Japan in 2003, it is shown regularly at the Ghibli Museum but has never been released on home video - keeping it, for now, a rare experience tied to a single place in Tokyo.