Hayao Miyazaki's second film on the list after 'Spirited Away' is the ideal gateway into his work for the younger set. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Apropos of this, Alan Booth was an English expat living in Japan in the 80s (whose Roads to Sata is a minor travelogue classic) and also the film critic for the English language Asahi Evening News in the 80s . For completeness, his comments on Totoro (made in passing for a slightly disappointed review of Kiki’s Delivery Service) from 1989 - which is probably the earliest English language review of it :
“Not all readers will agree, but I feel the most serious mistake I have made in the eleven years since beginning this column (apart from beginning it at all) is not to have reviewed last year’s animated blockbuster, Tonari no Totoro. The mistake was doubly serious since the film’s director, Hayao Miyazaki, had established a very respectable track record with his two previous full-length animated features, Kaze no Tani no Naushika and Tenkū no Shiro Laputa, the first of which in particular had been both a runaway success at the box office and a cult item akin to the Ginga Tetsudō films of Reiji Matsumoto. My four-year-old daughter and I have since watched Tonari no Totoro so many times on video that I have completely lost count of them and I still think, as I did when I first sat enchanted by it, that it is one of the finest animated children’s films ever made. It has a magic not easily conveyed in words, and I fully expect to be watching my copy until every inch of image has been rubbed off the tape.”
I’m not in the habit of scanning copies of long-defunct English language Japanese papers, btw, some friends of his put together a collection of his writings about five or so years ago including it and I was reading it just a month or two ago… (This Great Stage of Fools which has some fascinating contemporary reviews of 80s Japanese cinema including Akira (he liked) and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (he loathed)
Strangely, the original dub is the only version seen (many times) in my household. I got it on DVD in the early 2000s and only learned there was a new more definitive version a few years ago. I'd love to give it a try, but as someone who loves the movie, it's strange to know most people strongly dislike the form I've known it in for so long.
Yeah, I grew up on the original dub and it's still what I hear in my head when I think about the movie. I did watch the Fanning dub once but it felt weird.
At the risk of coming across as a curmudgeon, this and most Miyazaki films bore me. I acknowledge that he cooks up some wonderful, fantastical aesthetic delights. But his characters, including the two girls in this film, are consistently paper thin. I find myself struggling to understand what it is they really want most of the time, and I certainly have even less of a clue who they were before the inciting incidents that set them down these paths of telegraphed wonder and whimsy. And it's not like I hate anime, either! I just compare Miyazaki's works to movies from Mamoru Hosoda or Satoshi Kon, where the character work is so deep and rich, and I just prefer that so much more. There, I said it—this movie is a bore!
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed your insights on the movie from the sight and sound poll. I would probably subscribe to these posts alone. Your comment about P.T. Anderson not having a consensus greatest film got me curious, so I looked up 10 popular ranking sites, Metacritic, Time, AV Club, etc and found 5 different picks for his top film. There Will Be Blood had the most consensus, with 5 top places. I am interested in anyone's thoughts on why there is I so much division over Anderson's work. Keith and Scott, if you wanted to throw together an article discussing and ranking his movies yourselves, that would be delightful, too.
It is worth noting that There Will be Blood was slightly outside the top 200 in 2012 and did make the Director's list in the top 100. I didn't, so I assumed it was probably his most consensus pick. I didn't check this time, but I was under the impression it slid further down. Admittedly, he's had a number of films since then, so maybe it became less of a consensus pick. But it does touch on the ongoing, interesting topic of why do some films rise or fall in popularity (I guess seeing them decline in comparative popularity is the more interesting question in my mind).
I didn't really understand what made Totoro so special until I showed it to my kid, who was 2 1/2 at the time. The only copy I had at the time was a... let's say legacy holdover from a time of loving abroad, and it was the Japanese dub with subtitles.
We tried it anyway, with us gently narrating when we felt they needed it, but they were immediately tuned into it and we watched it multiple times that way. They just completely connected with it without being about to actually understand every word.
It just works on some other level, maybe one I don't really understand because I'm not a small child. But it respects its audience and is okay with just being quiet and gentle, with stopping event for thirty seconds to show us the wind blowing in the trees, to let us hear the cicadas, to just be.
I’ve seen Hisaishi live in concert performing his Studio Ghibli music twice, and it is a fantastic experience. He doesn’t have a weak soundtrack among the bunch, although maybe PORCO ROSSO and PONYO are borderline. The rest are sublime. I don’t know why SPIRITED AWAY made the Sight & Sound list, but I know why TOTORO did. It’s Miyazaki’s best movie. That Totoro’s profile became Studio Ghibli’s logo shows just how much this movie means to Miyazaki. Great observations here, Keith and Scott. I also started showing TOTORO to my daughter when she was very young and she also loved it and has subsequently watched every Miyazaki movie. She actually watched PRINCESS MONONOKE when she was pretty young and it’s now her favorite Miyazaki. I went to a screening of TOTORO at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, and I was disappointed to see in the program that it was the English-dub version. Then suddenly, Miyazaki himself appeared in the room, walking up the aisle to the front, and stated that he had brought the film reels in the original Japanese to New York because that’s how it should be seen. People went nuts.
Apropos of this, Alan Booth was an English expat living in Japan in the 80s (whose Roads to Sata is a minor travelogue classic) and also the film critic for the English language Asahi Evening News in the 80s . For completeness, his comments on Totoro (made in passing for a slightly disappointed review of Kiki’s Delivery Service) from 1989 - which is probably the earliest English language review of it :
“Not all readers will agree, but I feel the most serious mistake I have made in the eleven years since beginning this column (apart from beginning it at all) is not to have reviewed last year’s animated blockbuster, Tonari no Totoro. The mistake was doubly serious since the film’s director, Hayao Miyazaki, had established a very respectable track record with his two previous full-length animated features, Kaze no Tani no Naushika and Tenkū no Shiro Laputa, the first of which in particular had been both a runaway success at the box office and a cult item akin to the Ginga Tetsudō films of Reiji Matsumoto. My four-year-old daughter and I have since watched Tonari no Totoro so many times on video that I have completely lost count of them and I still think, as I did when I first sat enchanted by it, that it is one of the finest animated children’s films ever made. It has a magic not easily conveyed in words, and I fully expect to be watching my copy until every inch of image has been rubbed off the tape.”
Very cool find.
I’m not in the habit of scanning copies of long-defunct English language Japanese papers, btw, some friends of his put together a collection of his writings about five or so years ago including it and I was reading it just a month or two ago… (This Great Stage of Fools which has some fascinating contemporary reviews of 80s Japanese cinema including Akira (he liked) and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (he loathed)
Strangely, the original dub is the only version seen (many times) in my household. I got it on DVD in the early 2000s and only learned there was a new more definitive version a few years ago. I'd love to give it a try, but as someone who loves the movie, it's strange to know most people strongly dislike the form I've known it in for so long.
Yeah, I grew up on the original dub and it's still what I hear in my head when I think about the movie. I did watch the Fanning dub once but it felt weird.
At the risk of coming across as a curmudgeon, this and most Miyazaki films bore me. I acknowledge that he cooks up some wonderful, fantastical aesthetic delights. But his characters, including the two girls in this film, are consistently paper thin. I find myself struggling to understand what it is they really want most of the time, and I certainly have even less of a clue who they were before the inciting incidents that set them down these paths of telegraphed wonder and whimsy. And it's not like I hate anime, either! I just compare Miyazaki's works to movies from Mamoru Hosoda or Satoshi Kon, where the character work is so deep and rich, and I just prefer that so much more. There, I said it—this movie is a bore!
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed your insights on the movie from the sight and sound poll. I would probably subscribe to these posts alone. Your comment about P.T. Anderson not having a consensus greatest film got me curious, so I looked up 10 popular ranking sites, Metacritic, Time, AV Club, etc and found 5 different picks for his top film. There Will Be Blood had the most consensus, with 5 top places. I am interested in anyone's thoughts on why there is I so much division over Anderson's work. Keith and Scott, if you wanted to throw together an article discussing and ranking his movies yourselves, that would be delightful, too.
It is worth noting that There Will be Blood was slightly outside the top 200 in 2012 and did make the Director's list in the top 100. I didn't, so I assumed it was probably his most consensus pick. I didn't check this time, but I was under the impression it slid further down. Admittedly, he's had a number of films since then, so maybe it became less of a consensus pick. But it does touch on the ongoing, interesting topic of why do some films rise or fall in popularity (I guess seeing them decline in comparative popularity is the more interesting question in my mind).
I didn't really understand what made Totoro so special until I showed it to my kid, who was 2 1/2 at the time. The only copy I had at the time was a... let's say legacy holdover from a time of loving abroad, and it was the Japanese dub with subtitles.
We tried it anyway, with us gently narrating when we felt they needed it, but they were immediately tuned into it and we watched it multiple times that way. They just completely connected with it without being about to actually understand every word.
It just works on some other level, maybe one I don't really understand because I'm not a small child. But it respects its audience and is okay with just being quiet and gentle, with stopping event for thirty seconds to show us the wind blowing in the trees, to let us hear the cicadas, to just be.
I’ve seen Hisaishi live in concert performing his Studio Ghibli music twice, and it is a fantastic experience. He doesn’t have a weak soundtrack among the bunch, although maybe PORCO ROSSO and PONYO are borderline. The rest are sublime. I don’t know why SPIRITED AWAY made the Sight & Sound list, but I know why TOTORO did. It’s Miyazaki’s best movie. That Totoro’s profile became Studio Ghibli’s logo shows just how much this movie means to Miyazaki. Great observations here, Keith and Scott. I also started showing TOTORO to my daughter when she was very young and she also loved it and has subsequently watched every Miyazaki movie. She actually watched PRINCESS MONONOKE when she was pretty young and it’s now her favorite Miyazaki. I went to a screening of TOTORO at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, and I was disappointed to see in the program that it was the English-dub version. Then suddenly, Miyazaki himself appeared in the room, walking up the aisle to the front, and stated that he had brought the film reels in the original Japanese to New York because that’s how it should be seen. People went nuts.