The Works of Hayao Miyazaki: The Japanese Animation Master by Gael Berton

Author:Gael Berton [Berton, Gael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9782377842889
Publisher: Third Editions
Published: 2020-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

WHY CAN ONLY THE GIRLS SEE TOTORO?

Adults cannot hear or see the Totoros, just like other forest spirits (soot gremlins, Catbus and probably many others). They can only feel the spirits’ movements as gusts of wind, such as the Catbus’ end-of-film trip or Totoro’s flight on his top. Or in the case of the soot gremlins, which reappear in Spirited Away, the adults see them as just inanimate bits of soot. Nonetheless, when the girls say that they have seen those gremlins, Kanta’s grandmother explains that she could see them too when she was young. After the girls’ incredible night-time adventure with Totoro and seeing the plant sprouts on waking up, Satsuki thinks she had dreamed it all whereas Mei assures her it was real. The two girls’ personalities giving each one a different belief on waking offer an interesting perspective: at the age of four, Mei is still very young and can incorporate the ethereal and fantastic into her reality, while Satsuki, being ten years old, is portrayed as sensible. After all, she has basically taken on the role of homemaker while their father, who is painstakingly working on his second book, does not appear to be a patriarch very concerned with the daily tasks. On certain occasions, Satsuki has to adapt to his absence and grow up faster than is normal of a child of her age.4 An interesting fact is that in the movie’s preparatory stages, Satsuki and Mei were actually to be a single girl of six years of age. Then, Miyazaki chose to divide the character into two distinct characters,5 in order to exhibit the different perceptions that would exist at their ages of ten and four. The end of the movie rests on this discord of age and maturity between the sisters to validate the existence of the forest spirits. Satsuki needs to call on what could be deemed childish imaginings to find her little sister. Miyazaki has clarified this point by adding that the girls would never see Totoro again, hence his total absence from the end credits. According to the director, if Satsuki and Mei had stayed in Totoro’s world, they would not have been able to return to the real world. Their mother’s return home punctuates the end of this enchanted chapter in the girls’ lives, during which the forest spirits were able to support the girls during the difficult episode of their mother’s illness and absence.

For all that, Totoro’s existence is only questioned from a Western point of view. From the start, the movie plays on the adult audience’s nostalgia for the countryside. They, like the girls’ father, may doubt the phantasmal nature of Mei’s first encounter with the spirits of the forest. But it is during the famous bus-stop scene that the magic enters reality: the physical weight of Mei ends up proving Totoro’s presence to a Satsuki who is awake under that burden. Miyazaki gives one final, tangible proof of these paranormal phenomena through the engraved ear of corn left on the hospital windowsill, dismissing any chance of it all being a dream.

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