My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ Tonari no Totoro), 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, under their 50th St. Films banner, 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.

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 variously called "soot gremlins" or "soot sprites". In the English subtitles of the first Japanese-language version to find its way to America, they were "Black Soots".)

When Mei, the younger daughter, plays at outside the house, she discovers two small magical creatures, 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 identifies itself by roaring at an indescribable volume. 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 to give him an umbrella, they encounter 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 her father's umbrella, he's delighted at both the shelter and the sounds made upon it by falling raindrops. The girls give the giant the umbrella as a gesture of friendship, and receive in return a bundle of nuts and seeds. Totoro then boards the shape-changing Catbus with the umbrella.

The girls plant the seeds,but they don't sprout for a few days. One night, they awaken at midnight to find Totoro and his two miniature colleagues engaged in a dance-like ritual around the planted nuts and seeds. They join in, the seeds sprout and then grow into an enormous tree. Totoro then takes his colleagues and 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 Totoro and his friends as unseen bystanders. Miyazaki has asserted that the girls would never see Totoro again, but that the spirits would always be watching over them.

Totoro and Shinto

In the film, Mei refers to Totoro as an obake. At another point in the film, Satsuki talks to Mei about what she has just met. Mei says "totoro" and Satsuki asks whether she means a troll. Mei responds in the affirmative and repeats "totoro", which seems to imply that totoro is a childish mispronunciation of the Japanese version of troll (tororu). This would fit with other features of the film which mix traditional with modern/western influenced elements (eg. the house, the cat-bus, totoro's umbrella). Whether the Westernisation is in the perceptions of the urbanised family who are the main focus of the film remains a moot point because the film is deliberately vague about the distinction between perception and reality.

Many people interpret totoro as a kami spirit of the Shinto religion.[citation needed] Shinto kami are often guardian spirits of the land, concerned with natural phenomena like wind and thunder and natural objects like the sun, mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. There are no clearly defined criteria for what should or should not be worshipped as kami, and they have no defined shape.

Totoro's home is in a shinto shrine, which is demarcated by a shimenawa rope around his tree, and a torii on the path leading to the shrine.

Release History

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, Lea Salonga as Mrs. Kusakabe, and Frank Welker as Totoro and Catbus.

From Wikipedia