The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hayao Miyazaki · a film · 1988 · about 86 minutes · Studio Ghibli · in Japanese, as Tonari no Totoro
Mode
A child’s summer told without plot machinery; pastoral, ghost story and family drama in one
Mythos
The guardian spirit of the tree; the child who follows small creatures into the other world; the lost child found by the spirit’s vehicle; the gift left that cannot be explained
Phase
One late spring and early summer, from the arrival at the old house to the night the mother’s window is reached
Presentation
Animated feature in colour, drawn by hand, in Japanese, about 86 minutes; two sisters, a father, a village, a tree and its spirits
Register
From a toddler’s mischief to a mother’s possible death; comedy, stillness and dread in one even tone
Scale
One family, one village, one tree
Governing Proposition
Two sisters move with their father to an old house in the country to be near their mother, who is in hospital with an illness no one names, and spend a summer beside a forest spirit who is kind. The wager of the film is that a drawn feature can be made without a villain, a quest or a set piece, out of a child’s time and a child’s attention, and that a child’s fear of a parent’s death can be shown as wonder held beside dread.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Two sisters and their father arrive at an old house in the country, a little ruined, beside a wood in a farming district, in a year of the past the film does not state. Satsuki is the elder, Mei a small child. Their mother is in a hospital some way off, with an illness that is never named. The film begins with a move, as many children’s summers do, and the reason for the move is set down once and left under every scene.
The house is full of soot sprites, susuwatari, small black balls of dust with eyes that scatter into the dark corners. The girls are frightened, and one night the father laughs aloud in the bath, and the girls with him. The sprites leave the house. The scene is the hinge of belief: it tells the children, and the viewer, that this house admits spirits and that this adult will not mock them. The father never once denies what his daughters see.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film at Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten, with Toru Hara producing, and it was released in Japan on 16 April 1988, on a double bill with Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies: one cut, in Japanese, about 86 minutes. Joe Hisaishi wrote the music, and the opening and closing songs, “Sanpo” and the title song, are sung in Japanese. Kazuo Oga directed the art and painted its backgrounds. Noriko Hidaka voices Satsuki, Chika Sakamoto Mei, Shigesato Itoi the father and Sumi Shimamoto the mother.
Movement II
In the garden Mei sees a small creature, then a middle-sized one, and follows them. They lead her through a tunnel of green into a hollow beneath the great camphor tree beside the house. There, asleep, lies a grey bulk with a fixed grin and a roar. Mei climbs onto his belly and falls asleep on it, and she names him: “Totoro!” The child has followed small creatures into the other world, and found its guardian at home.
The father does not laugh at her story. He takes both girls to the tree, which carries a shimenawa rope round its trunk, and he bows before it and gives thanks. The tree is a shrine, and the film treats it as one: the guardian of the place sleeps inside it, and a father teaches his daughters the courtesy owed to it, the same courtesy the village keeps with its land.
Around the meeting runs the ordinary life of the village. The girls visit their mother in hospital, and the visit plants a fear that no one speaks. They wash clothes at the stream and help in Granny’s garden, and Kanta’s mother calls at the door. These interludes are the film’s seasonal fabric, and they are texture more than load: one or two of them could go and the film would close. The days pass at a child’s pace, and the long holds, Mei crouching to look at tadpoles, teach the viewer to keep her time.
Movement III
Night, rain, a lamp at a country bus stop. Satsuki stands holding an umbrella, waiting for their father, and Mei sleeps on her back. Beside them, under the dripping trees, a clawed foot appears. Totoro has come to wait too, with a leaf on his head against the rain. Satsuki gives him an umbrella. A frog sits at the bus stop. For long stretches nothing happens, and the film keeps the wait at its length, the empty time the Japanese call ma.
Drops from the trees strike the umbrella, and the spirit listens to them. Then he leaps, and lands, and the whole canopy of the trees falls on him at once in one drumming of water. It is the meeting the film turns on, and it is made of almost nothing: rain, a lamp, an umbrella, a child holding still. The sound bears as much weight as the image: the drops on the umbrella, the frogs, the wind.
A bus arrives that is a cat, and Totoro boards it and is gone into the dark. In return for the umbrella he has given a parcel of seeds. The exchange is an offering and a gift, given and received as at a shrine, and the film does not explain it. The umbrella for the seeds is the film’s whole economy: the spirit receives what the child can give, and returns what the child can plant.
Movement IV
The girls plant the seeds, which are acorns, and wait for them to grow. One night Totoro and the smaller spirits are in the garden, and the girls join them in a slow dance around the planted ground. The sprouting is willed upward, and the shoots rise into a tree that fills the sky. Then they fly on a spinning top over the moonlit fields.
By day the garden shows small green shoots. The film declines to say whether the night was dreamt, and the shoots stand in the earth as evidence. Belief and the ordinary sit together without strain, as the house sat with its soot sprites and the father with his daughters’ stories. The night of the seeds is the film’s height of joy, and it is willed by children.
Then a telegram comes from the hospital. Satsuki breaks: weeping to Granny, she says that their mother might die. It is the moment the film says what it has been about. The illness has never been named, and the children’s world of spirits has been the shape their waiting took. Wonder was not a replacement for dread; it was held beside it all summer, and the telegram releases what the hospital visit planted.
Movement V
Mei goes missing on the way to the hospital with an ear of corn for her mother. The village searches into the dusk. A small sandal is found in a pond, and for a moment the film reaches terror. Satsuki runs to the camphor tree and asks Totoro for help. This is the one passage where the film’s even tone is tested, and it holds: the dread lives inside the same kind world as the bus stop.
Totoro sends the Catbus. It pours across wires and paddies, finds Mei waiting by the stone jizo at the roadside, and carries both girls over the country to the hospital. Here the film turns to a more conventional form of resolution than anywhere else, a rescue by vehicle, plainer in its making than the bus stop or the night of the seeds. The spirits have not solved the illness. They have sent what a child could have asked for.
The two sisters sit in a tree outside the hospital window, unseen, and watch their parents laugh. On the sill is an ear of corn, and the gift is left unexplained, as the parcel of seeds was. The field has reached the sickbed. The closing song is sung over the end of a summer in which the fear was carried to the end and not broken, and in which the world stayed kind.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine resists it. The soot sprites are the hinge of belief: the father’s laugh in the bath drives them out, and tells the children that this house admits spirits and this adult will not mock them. The hospital visit plants the fear the telegram releases. The rain at the bus stop is the meeting the film turns on, and the seeds given for the umbrella become the night growth of the tree. The scale is compelled: a short film for a child’s span, with nothing padded. What holds the figure is the middle: the washing at the stream, Granny’s garden, Kanta’s mother at the door are texture more than load, and a tighter film would survive the loss of one or two.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What the film brings into the open is how children carry a fear they are not told the size of. The mother’s illness is never named, and the children’s world of spirits is the shape their waiting takes: wonder held beside dread rather than replacing it. Satsuki’s break, when the telegram comes and she weeps to Granny that their mother might die, is the moment the film says what it has been about. There are other disclosures: an adult who never denies what his daughters see, and a countryside where people, land and the gods keep one courtesy. But the film articulates its condition once and otherwise lets it be felt, as safety, summer and a kind world. The rubric ranks the mood below the meaning, and the figure stands well below the bar.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation of the warm kind, and frequent. The bus stop at night: rain, a lamp, Mei asleep on Satsuki’s back, a clawed foot beside her, then the drops from the trees drumming on the umbrella until the spirit leaps and the whole canopy falls on him at once. The night of the seeds, the sprouting willed upward in a slow dance and the tree rising to fill the sky, and the flight on the top over moonlit fields. The Catbus pouring across wires and paddies. Two children in a tree outside a hospital window, watching their parents laugh. Terror is reached once, briefly, in the dusk search. The register is gentle by design, and the film rises often but rarely to awe; the last rescue rises less than the bus stop.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Totoro is a forest spirit made entirely particular: a grey bulk with a fixed grin and a roar, asleep in a hollow under a camphor tree that carries a shimenawa rope, receiving an umbrella as an offering and returning a parcel of seeds. The tree is a shrine and the film treats it as one; the father bows before it. The structure bears weight: the child who follows small creatures through a tunnel of green into the other world, the guardian at the threshold of dusk, the lost child found by the spirit’s vehicle, the gift on the sill. Held at the bar because the myth is of protection only: it carries no cost and no shadow beyond the fear it soothes, and its gods ask nothing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the grammar of feature animation, Disney’s and Toei’s and Miyazaki’s own adventure films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky. The turn is toward a feature with no villain, no quest, no peril until the last reel, and long passages of nothing: a child sitting, rain falling, a frog at the bus stop. A drawn feature built on ma, empty time, and on a child’s attention was a wager against the medium’s commercial logic; it was released on a double bill, and its fortune came later. But the quotidian mode was not new to cinema: Ozu and Hiroshi Shimizu had filmed children’s ordinary days long before. The swerve is the carrying of that mode into animation, and it falls short of the bar.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. In live action Totoro is a costume and the Catbus an effect; drawn, they share the same line, light and weight as the farmhouse and the rice, and that sameness is the film’s claim that the spirit world is part of the visible one. The form teaches through tempo: the long holds, Mei crouching over tadpoles, the wait at the bus stop, make the viewer keep a child’s time. The episodic, seasonal construction is the instrument of the disclosure: the dread arrives inside an ordinary day, as it does for children. What holds it at its figure is the last movement, where the Catbus as rescue turns to a more conventional form of resolution than the rest, and the instrument becomes a container.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Thirty-eight years of return, by children who watch it many times and by adults, and it has sustained readings on several fronts: Shinto and the kami; the satoyama, the ecology of the edge between village and wood; the mother’s illness under the summer; the question, never answered, of whether only children can see Totoro. The form repays attention too, in the way the sisters’ first meetings with the spirit mirror one another. But the yield is of a recognised kind rather than inexhaustible. The meanings are few and clear, and return deepens the feeling more than it opens new meaning. The persistent rumour that the ending is a death is a story about the film, not a depth in it, and nothing is credited to it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a drawn feature could hold ordinary time, an unnamed illness and a child’s attention without plot machinery, and could make a creature whose meaning lies wholly in his presence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film defined Studio Ghibli, whose emblem Totoro became, and through Ghibli much of what Japanese and then world animation took as its serious mode; animators at Pixar have named it a touchstone, and Totoro appears as a tribute in Toy Story 3 (2010). The limit stands: its pressure on live-action cinema was indirect, and its influence on children’s films outside animation, though real, is harder to trace. It meets the bar and does not pass it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Thirty-eight years, and the film as released survives whole: one cut, the Japanese original, with restorations for home video and theatrical revival counted as repair. The English dubs of 1989 and 2005 are added soundtracks laid on the same picture; the original remains in circulation, and nothing is charged to them. Presence is of the widest kind: continuous television broadcast in Japan, home video and streaming across the world, and a creature known far beyond the film. Box office and merchandise are evidence of presence only. The surface is set deliberately in a past period and depends on no technology of its moment, so nothing in it has dated against its year. Survival is credited at the widest figure for its span.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts. Kazuo Oga’s backgrounds are exact landscapes: the camphor tree, the paddies after rain, dusk over the fields. The animation of children is observed, not stylised: Mei’s gait, her running and stamping, Satsuki’s posture with her sister on her back. Water and wind, the rain at the bus stop above all, are finely made. Joe Hisaishi’s score is economical, and the sound, drops on the umbrella, frogs, wind in the grass, bears weight. The cutting holds each wait at the length a child sustains. The costs are those of a small production of its time: limited animation in places, rough joins between episodes, and a final rescue plainer in its making than the bus stop or the night growth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs: the visible world is ensouled and kind, and fear lives inside it without breaking it. Take the two most distant elements, the comic sublime of Totoro’s roar and the dread of the dusk search with a small sandal in a pond. They obey the same physics: the spirits never solve the illness and never act beyond the children’s need, and when Totoro helps, it is by sending what a child could have asked for. The father’s belief, the village’s care and the spirits’ care are one order, and the tone holds from a toddler’s mischief to a mother’s possible death. What holds the figure is that the range is bounded by design: no cruelty and no adult world enter the frame to test the law harder.
Score: 8.5 / 10
For a short form it holds more than it seems to: a family under the strain of illness; a farming village and its labour, in rice planting, Granny’s vegetables and the journey to and from the city; the sacred, in the shrine tree and the stone jizo by the road where Mei waits; the natural order of season and growth; and, implicit, Japan’s rural edge before it was paved, which the period setting makes a quiet elegy. These are integrated, not listed: the seeds tie the sacred to the garden, and the ear of corn ties the field to the sickbed. What holds the axis lowest: history and the state are absent, and consciousness is a child’s. The form reaches no further, and the figure says so.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Made at 8.6. A film that survives whole in its one cut, with a presence of the widest kind and a surface set in a past that cannot date; and a making in which Kazuo Oga’s landscapes, the observed movement of children and the sound of rain on an umbrella carry the argument. Behind them, at 8.5, the warm heights of the bus stop and the night of the seeds, a guardian spirit built rather than evoked, a drawn form that holds the spirit world in the same line as the farmhouse, and a law of a kind world that holds from a toddler’s mischief to a mother’s possible death.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: family, labour, the sacred and the season are integrated through a few objects, but history and the state are absent and consciousness is a child’s. Then The Unconcealment at 8.0, a condition articulated once, in Satsuki’s break, and otherwise felt as mood; and The Bottomless Well at 8.1, meanings few and clear, where return deepens the feeling more than it opens new meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short and The Unconcealment at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 100.1, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of My Neighbour Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, となりのトトロ) as released in Japan on 16 April 1988, in its one cut, in Japanese, about 86 minutes (some listings give 88 with logos and credits), from the arrival at the old house to the ear of corn on the sill: written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten, produced by Toru Hara, with art direction and backgrounds by Kazuo Oga and music by Joe Hisaishi. The English-language dubs of 1989 and 2005 are different soundtracks and scripts laid on the same picture; they are not the object, and nothing in them is credited or charged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and no shot count or timing is claimed. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film; English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense. Only the name Mei gives the spirit is quoted; other speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the credits below the heads of department, the year and place in which the story is set, the source of the mother’s illness in the director’s own family, what is carved on the ear of corn, what the end credits show, the history of the film’s financing, and later short films and stage versions, are not given.