My Neighbor Totoro

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, or My Neighbour Totoro on UK DVD box titles, is a 1988 film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli.

Troma Films produced a 1993 dub of the film co-produced by Jerry Beck. It was released on VHS and DVD by Fox Home Video. Troma's and Fox's rights to this version expired in 2004.

An ani-manga version of My Neighbor Totoro was published in English by Viz Communications starting on November 10, 2004.

The film was re-released by Disney on March 7, 2006. It features a new dub cast. This DVD release is the first version of the film in the United States to include both Japanese and English language tracks, as Fox did not have the rights to the Japanese audio track for their version.

Characters

• Satsuki Kusakabe - An 11-year-old girl. Satsuki is the traditional name of the fifth month of the Japanese calendar, the equivalent of the English May.
• Mei Kusakabe - Satsuki's four-year-old sister. Her name deliberately echoes her sister's, reflecting the fact that the story originally featured one girl, who was then divided into an older and younger sister.
• Mr. Kusakabe - The girls' father, who works in the archeology and anthropology departments of a Tokyo university.
• Mrs. Kusakabe - The girls' mother, recovering from an unnamed illness at Shichikokuyama Hospital, which is noted for its tuberculosis treatment program. (Miyazaki's mother had tuberculosis when he was a boy.)
• Totoro - A grey, friendly forest spirit, at least three meters tall. Totoro is Mei's mispronunciation of torōru, the Japanese version of the English word troll. There are two similar, smaller creatures in the film, also referred to as totoro; the big grey Totoro is named "Ō-Totoro", the middle is "Chū-Totoro", and the smallest is "Chibi-Totoro". (These names do not appear in the film itself, but are used in ancillary materials.)
• Kanta - A preteen boy of their village, ambivalent towards Satsuki. This character resembles Miyazaki in his fondness for cartoons and airplanes.
• "Granny" or Nanny - Kanta's grandmother, who sometimes takes care of the girls.
• Catbus or Nekobasu - a cat that has become a bus, based on the Japanese belief that if a cat grows old enough, it gains magical shape-changing powers, and is called a bake neko. [link] Bake neko are mentioned in several Ghibli films.

Plot

My Neighbor Totoro.

In the 1950s, a Tokyo university professor and his two daughters move into an old house in rural Japan, so as to be closer to the hospital where his wife is recovering from an illness. The daughters find that the house is inhabited by tiny animated dust creatures called soot sprites, which their father rationalizes as makkurokurosuke — an optical illusion seen when moving from light to dark places. (These creatures are referred to as "dust bunnies" and "soot spirits" in the 1993 English dub; in the Disney version, they are called "Soot Gremlins". In the English subtitles of the first Japanese-language version to find its way to America, they were "Black Soots".)

Mei, the younger daughter, discovers two small magical creatures outside the house, which lead her into the hollow of a large Camphor Laurel tree. There she meets and befriends a large version of the same kind of spirit, which calls itself in roars "totoro". Her father later tells her that this is the "keeper of the forest".

One rainy night, while the girls are waiting for their father's bus, they encounter the giant totoro, who is looking rather forlorn with only a leaf on his head for protection against the rain. When Satsuki, the older daughter, offers him an umbrella, he's delighted at both the shelter and the sounds it makes as water hits it. He gives the girls a bundle of nuts and seeds in exchange for the umbrella, and then departs on the Catbus, an enormous grinning cat who has taken the shape of a bus.

After the girls have planted the seeds, they wake up one night to find the three totoro engaged in a dance-like ritual around the planted nuts and seeds. They join the totoro and the seeds sprout and then grow into an enormous tree. The big totoro then takes the girls for a ride on a magical flying top. In the morning, the girls find that there is no tree in their yard, but that the seeds have indeed sprouted. "It was a dream but it wasn't a dream!" they shout.

The final encounter with Totoro in the film occurs when Mei, distraught when she learns that their mother's visit home has been cancelled due to apparent worsening conditions (a suspicion which proves to be unfounded), sets off on foot to the hospital and gets lost. Desperate to find her sister, Satsuki returns to the camphor laurel tree and pleads for Totoro's help. He summons the Catbus, which rescues Mei and whisks her and Satsuki over the countryside to see their mother in the hospital. When the Catbus departs, it fades away from the girls' sight.

The closing credits feature scenes of Satsuki and Mei playing with other human children, with the totoro as unseen bystanders. Miyazaki has asserted that the girls would never see the totoro again, but that the spirits would always be watching over them.

Release history

The DVD Cover for Disney's recent dub of My Neighbor Totoro.

My Neighbor Totoro was released as a double feature with Grave of the Fireflies. There are two theories for this: one was that Totoro would not be successful. Another theory is that Grave of the Fireflies (directed by Miyazaki's longtime colleague Isao Takahata) was believed to be too depressing for audiences by itself, and thus needed a lighter animation to accompany it. The late Yoshifumi Kondo provided character designs for both films.

In 1993, Fox released the first English-language version of My Neighbor Totoro, produced by John Daly and Derek Gibson (the producers of The Terminator) with co-producer Jerry Beck. Fox and Troma's rights to the film expired in 2004. Disney's English-language version premiered on October 23, 2005; it then appeared at the 2005 Hollywood Film Festival. The Turner Classic Movies cable television network held the television premiere of Disney's new English dub on January 19, 2006, as part of the network's salute to Hayao Miyazaki. (TCM aired the dub as well as the original Japanese with English subtitles.) The Disney version was released on DVD on March 7, 2006.

As is the case with Disney's other English dubs of Miyazaki films, the Disney version of Totoro features a star-heavy cast, including Dakota and Elle Fanning as Satsuki and Mei, Timothy Daly as Mr. Kusakabe, Pat Carroll as Granny, and Lea Salonga as Mrs. Kusakabe.

Trivia

• The main Totoro has become a mascot for Studio Ghibli, gracing the studio's logo at the start of their films.
• The character of Totoro made a cameo appearance in one episode of the Gainax TV series Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo (His and Her Circumstances), which was likely director Hideaki Anno's way of paying tribute to Miyazaki. (Anno worked as a key animator on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984 and considers Miyazaki a mentor.) In fact, Gainax reportedly invited the animator who did the original key animation for Totoro to work on that scene, although they never revealed the animator's name. In addition, one KareKano character, Tsubasa Shibahime, is a huge Totoro fan.
• There is a real park in Higashimurayama, Tokyo that is named Hachikokuyama which was used as the inspiration for the mountain where Satsuki and Mei's mom was hospitalized.
• Asteroid 10160 has been named "Totoro" by Takao Kobayashi. The name was approved by the International Astronomical Union.
• The 2005 World Expo in Japan featured a "Totoro" house which was a recreation of the house in which Satsuki and Mei lived in the movie.
• Ken Jennings, the winner of the most games in the history of the TV game show Jeopardy!, carries a small plush "Totoro" figure in his pocket for good luck.
• The widely-distributed promotional image for the film seen above, of a girl standing next to Totoro at a bus stop, is different from the corresponding scene in the movie. It was made from an early sketch, when there was to be only one six-year-old girl in the story. Before production actually began, Miyazaki decided to split her role between two sisters instead. Their names represent their origin as they have the same meaning, Satsuki being an older Japanese word for the fifth month, May.
• Miyazaki made a 20-minute "sequel" to the film, Mei and the Kittenbus, that was never distributed or broadcast. It was shown exclusively in the Ghibli Museum and then only for a short time.[link]
• Episode XXXIII of Samurai Jack has Jack encountering an annoying creature whose design is clearly influenced by the big Totoro. The episode also includes an artifact called the Crystal of Cagliostro, which is almost certainly a reference to Miyazaki's earlier film The Castle of Cagliostro.
• Totoro made a brief cameo appearance on Comedy Central's Drawn Together in the episode, "A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special".

Credits

DVD case cover for My Neighbor Totoro from the original 20th Century Fox release. The Walt Disney Company has issued a re-release with a new voice cast.

Direction, Original Story & Screenplay

Hayao Miyazaki

Music

Joe Hisaishi

Production

Studio Ghibli

Executive Producer

Yasuyoshi Tokuma

Producer

Toru Hara

Cast

Character	Disney English version	Streamline English version	Japanese version
Satsuki Kusakabe	Dakota Fanning	The late Lisa Michelson	Noriko Hidaka
Mei Kusakabe	Elle Fanning	Cheryl Chase	Chika Sakamoto
Professor Kusakabe	Timothy Daly	Steve Kramer	Shigesato Itoi
Mrs. Kusakabe	Lea Salonga	Alexandra Kenworthy	Sumi Shimamoto
Kanta	Paul Butcher	Kenneth Hartman	Toshiyuki Amagasa
Nanny	Pat Carroll	Natalie Core	Tanie Kitabayashi
Totoro	Frank Welker	The late Hitoshi Takagi	Hitoshi Takagi

See also

• My Neighbor Totoro Soundtrack Collection
• Mei and the Kittenbus

External links

• [My Neighbor Totoro] review by Roger Ebert
• [My Neighbor Totoro page at Nausicaa.net]
• [Synopsis & Media] at the FilmFantastic Film Festival
• [Transcript of My Neighbor Totoro]; a comparison of the Fox English dub with a more literal translation of the original Japanese
• [DVD Image and Audio Comparison]: contains stills comparing the quality of the Japanese and American DVDs. Also contains clips of both dubbed versions for comparison

Studio Ghibli Films
Pre Ghibli Films
(1968) • Puss 'n Boots (1969) • Flying Ghost Ship (1969) • Animal Treasure Island (1971) • Alibaba and the 40 Thieves (1971) • Yuki's Sun (1972) • Panda Go Panda (1972–1973) • Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1977) • Chie the Brat (1981) • Gauche the Cellist (1982) • Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Ghibli Films
Castle in the Sky (1986) • The Story of Yanagawa's Canals (1987) • My Neighbor Totoro (1988) • Grave of the Fireflies (1988) • Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) • Only Yesterday (1991) • Porco Rosso (1992) • Ocean Waves (1993) • Pom Poko (1994) • Whisper of the Heart (1995) • Princess Mononoke (1997) • My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) • Spirited Away (2001) • The Cat Returns (2002) • Howl's Moving Castle (2004) • Tales from Earthsea (2006)
Studio Ghibli Shorts
The Sky-Colored Seed (1992) • Nandarou (1992) • On Your Mark (1995) • Ghiblies (2000) • Ghiblies Episode II (2002) • Mei and the Kittenbus (2003) • Koro's Big Day Out (2003) • The Whale Hunt (2003) • The Invention of Destruction in the Imaginary Machines (2004) • Imaginary Flying Machines (2004) •  (2004) • The Day I Harvested a Star (2006) • House-hunting (2006) • Monmon the Water Spider (2006) • The Night of Taneyamagahara (2006)
See also...
Masashi Andō • Hideaki Anno • Ghibli Museum • Mamoru Hosoda • Megumi Kagawa • Kazuo Komatsubara • Katsuya Kondō • Yoshifumi Kondō • Yoichi Kotabe • Goro Miyazaki • Hayao Miyazaki • Yoshiyuki Momose • Tomomi Mochizuki • Yasuji Mori • Hiroyuki Morita • Mamoru Oshii • Shinji Otsuka • Yasuo Ōtsuka • Toshio Suzuki • Isao Takahata • Kazuo Oga • Tsukasa Tannai •

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