And yet kids around the globe have always understood “My Neighbor Totoro” so implicitly that it’s as if they’re seeing their own imaginations reflected back at them on-screen.
And yet kids around the globe have always understood “My Neighbor Totoro” so implicitly that it’s as if they’re seeing their own imaginations reflected back at them on-screen. Some of that magic can be attributed to the movie’s aesthetic virtues: Joe Hisashi’s reassuring score is full of tunes that stick to your bones for life, while the hand-drawn animation is vibrant and detailed in a way that continues to humiliate even the most artful CGI (the summer breeze in Studio Ghibli’s films is more expressive than any of the main characters in “Frozen”). But those effervescent joys, which can be found in so much of Miyazaki’s work, become singularly potent in a movie that takes the mysterious beauty of our world as its main subject.