@@SurasmitaMeher-ch3lo i think it's just like "why does proof hold us back from believing something is true" i might be wrong though cus he worded that like he was plato
This is basically my ontology of the film. Adults can't see any direct evidence of Totoro, so the laws of the universe gently reassert themselves whenever he has done his work. Without really breaking anything Totoro has done. Totoro and the universe are on good terms with each other. Edit 1: You only learn this through the final Catbus scene though. Before that there is an uneasy tension. Not on the part on the film, but on the part of the viewer. The tension is there exactly because the film seems not to mind any of it. Edit 2: It's also interesting that the adults in the movie apparently know this fact. Their behavior could easily be taken as just entertaining the kid's imagination, but to me they seemed sold on the magic in a way that goes beyond this.
@@lavamatstudios Yeah the dust guys just created ash to the adults. The Cat Bus was appearing as wind to adults. It happens but needs to fit into the laws of our universe from the adult's perspective.
@@stromagedon I would have loved a scene of the dad just walking out with my morning coffee and just going "Oh! Cool. Ok." and going back in the house.
While adults, like the viewer, may react to sprouts with indifference, the kids in the movie see them as something magical. They are more sensible to the beauty around them.
I agree with that reading in isolation, but like the essay says you have to find a way to connect it to the end. If the big tree is a metaphor for children being able to view simple things in the world with a sense of wonder, then what is the cat bus taking her to find her sister and visit there mom in the hospital a metaphor for?
@@robynhoodie emmm, wild guess, but it is metaphor for the same thing "children being able to view simple things in the world with a sense of wonder": ride on an actual bus they used to get to the hospital becomes this crazy journey, but still somewhat grounded in reality - it is still a bus.
@@antoniogureev I do remember imagining things running on the power lines during car rides to occupy myself. I did consider that (or a police car) and the only reason i dismissed it was because they move across the rice fields rather then near the road. But again, imagination, it still fits.
Can confirm. Also this concept is explored in the Vietnam war story compilation "The Things They Carried," which is very sad and graphic but also illustrates how adding fantastic or exaggerated elements to a story can make the feelings the reader takes away more true to the lived experience of the storyteller
Hopping onto this comment 2 years late… but anyway, I agree! Also, this “emotional logic” I think is best described as intuition: the combination of intellectual and emotional interpretation of events, resulting in a personal discovery of the truest truth that the artwork presents, at least as it pertains to your personal understanding. It’s the way fiction, and all art for that matter (movies, music, painting, etc) should be interpreted in my opinion, and we all do it naturally anyway.
In New Zealand indigenous frameworks we teach our kids that mythology is a tangible part of our ancestral history. Doesn't matter if people think it's fiction, all that matters is that we have a connection to it. That's what My Neighbor Totoro reminded me of.
Yes but language is important. It's not tangible as in, you could have touched these gods with your hands because they existed or something, but tangible as in at some point in history, peoples' experiences and interpretations and education and whatever else caused them to concoct some conceptual comfort and attach it to seemingly random but ultimately predictable phenomena. Like imagine some of the first "conscious" bipeds carefully stumbling about dry land and then *thunderclap* OH SHIT no worries brethren it's just the babadook. Nowadays we're just like OH SHIT no worries bruh it's just thunder. Imagine far into the future we figure out how to harness that atmospheric difference in potential for energy usage those people would be like *nothing happens* OH SHOOT hey bruzzlezork have you read about the old partner's tale of thunder? --imo--
@@lexscarlet I mean, in your world-view that would be correct and I'm not saying that rational explanations are meaningless; they have their place. I'm just saying that human beings aren't rational, they are driven by emotion, story and interaction. Mythology (our subjective history) is one way that my people tie value to ancestry. One of my distant ancestors is Paoa, the legend of him creating our rivers is larger than life but it is real in the sense that those rivers exist and the person who made them in the story existed. My region, mountain and rivers have stories that directly tie to who I am and my origins. This world view empowers (gives mana to) our children in a way that informs their self-worth.
It's also important to note that both 'wake up' implicitly assuming that the night sequence 'happened' to both of them- they don't wake up thinking that it was a dream that they'd experienced individually.
The scene is similar to the fairy stores of the middle ages in Europe. They had a vision into the fairy realm, so to speak. Shinto has similar concepts.
I love the idea of fantasy being conveyed by the way the events are presented, and not just the events themselves. I haven't seen this movie since I was like 6, but we would watch it all the time at my grandparents' house, so watching clips from it now makes me *feel* it more than *remember* it. Which seems to work pretty well with the message of the film. Awesome video!
I always looked at it like Totoro's "work" as having the same relationship to the world he exists in as a children's book which explains something real but exaggerates to make the concept easier to understand. That is to say it's real, just not necessarily exact. The point isn't that the trees are big, it's that they exist. What they did definitely happened, we just end up seeing the "everyday" result of the extraordinary action taken - because actually doing it is extraordinary.
i think this film is literally ment to be a children's film. not in the sense that it's pg and whatever. but in the sense that the only way you can really understand is if you were a child. when i was young and watched this the tree scean it just was. i was a bit confused that the big tree was gone so i thought. we'll totoro couldn't just let a big tree sprout from no where. he wanted to girls to have fun but in the end reverted it to keep the balence. now that i'm older i see it as a dream. but that dream called out to totoro. so he helped them and grew the plants. and i just kinda accepted. anyways it takes a child to accept and understand what happened. and as re growl we become to logcial. this film to me is the essence of child-like wonder and imaganation like you mentioned.
I think another interesting thing about the movie, which supports the points made here, is that we have "Granny" as a character that can corroborate the idea of Totoro's existence, or at least the existence of spirits in general. when Satsuki and Mei talk about the little black soot balls, Granny immediately recognizes what they're describing, and is like "ah yes! soot sprites! I used to see them too when I was little!" as in, these things have a name and a history of being observed. it's interesting because of the layered implications. on the one hand, it kind of sounds like a parent telling a child about santa clause, or the tooth fairy... certainly the kids believe they exist, but only up to a certain point. eventually they get old enough to see the world in more logical terms, and the belief in the myth fades away. which suggests that these spirits run on Tinkerbell fairy logic. you can't see them anymore when you stop believing in them. and I guess, specifically in the case of Satsuki and Mei... you see them when you need something to believe in. you see them when you need them most. in a way, it does make its own kind of sense. santa clause and the tooth fairy are characters manufactured around a ritual, like the exchange of gifts, or receiving some kind of small prize, but soot sprites correspond to a natural occurrence. the existence of dirt accumulating in a home didn't need an explanation, but if soot sprites exist, then it has one. or, to reverse engineer it a little, if you're looking for evidence that soot sprites are around, it's there, but it makes sense that other people would overlook it. Granny even says that they appear most often in abandoned houses, which makes sense on the level of a spirit not wanting to live somewhere that people already live, but also on the level of a house getting cleaned more regularly when people live in it. the logical exists alongside the fantastical. but then you can add to that by thinking of things from a shinto perspective. there's this belief in the idea of respecting all things because all things have a spirit. and while I don't think Satsuki and Mei's dad believes that there's a giant troll that looks like a teddy bear running around, I do think that he believes in the positive effects of considering all things with kindness. the idea that a thing can give its utility, or some general peace of mind, to you, and that you should treat it well in return, breeds a kind of positive emotion... it's like a comradery between yourself and your environment, and it makes you more empathetic to the world around you. it humbles you by emphasizing the idea that every thing has its own dignity, and your own dignity cannot be assumed superior. nature is a give and take that all things participate in, ourselves included. whether this is a strictly correct reading of how the world works or not, the result is a sense of good will, and I think that's worth cultivating, regardless of one's belief in a rigid truth. in a way, the real, factual existence of spirits has nothing to do with it. the feeling of putting your own graciousness and kindness into the world is fulfilling when you fully commit to the sentiment of it. but if you're more committed to being cynical, you'll never understand it. when you're watching My Neighbor Totoro, I think the level of belief that you have in Totoro speaks to which character's position you're relating to most in the movie. Satsuki and Mei believe in Totoro because they are young and willing to do so. most of the other kids in Satsuki's class are probably at their "did you know santa isn't real?!" phase, and for them, Totoro would be strictly not real. and for Mr. and Mrs. Kusakabe, and Granny... well, at the very least, the idea of Totoro produces a real emotion in Satsuki and Mei. that's as real as Totoro needs to be. it's a kind of open mindedness that comes with real maturity. not the kind that makes you stop believing in santa clause, but the kind that makes you teach your kids that he is real. because you only get so many years of believing before you don't anymore, and no one ever really grows up to regret them. in a way, I think that second stage of maturity is similar to how Satsuki was considering their mother's health in the argument between her and Mei. Satsuki's "maturity" had her considering the real possibility that their mother might die... but she would need a different kind of maturity to try and reassure Mei, rather than trying to force her to see the bleaker, more logical possibilities too. it's natural to be anxious when things seem to be going wrong, but Mei didn't need to be sad before anything truly bad had actually happened. and in a way, Satsuki's worry that their mom will die could be just as unrealistic as Mei's firm belief that their mom will get better. until the movie answers that question with factual events, there's no way to know for sure. I think My Neighbor Totoro gives us permission to decide how real we want Totoro to be in this movie. it gives us permission to believe that he is real without having to feel ridiculous about it. because it is a movie, and the possibility of Totoro being real in the universe of this movie isn't off the table. we can believe what we actually want to believe about Totoro... not just what's proven true.
This change in epistomology is propably why My Neighbour Totoro works just as well as Xanax for me. It doesn't portray fantasy as something to be hammered into contemporary ways of understanding the world (unlike Harry Potter for example, in the way Olly described in his witchcraft video, fantasy that is build on top of a strict positivist ideal of education, a "bourgeois magic school"). It's not just the aesthetics of this film that put me at peace, it's the very way it "knows" things. In that sense, it is similar to latin-american Magical Realism. Which is why I've started telling myself stories about my life again. Every time I have to move a spider out of my apartment, I respectfully clap my hands three times and I apologise to the Spider council for evicting one of them. Sometimes, when I find random coins in my apartment, I accept that as the spiders trying to pay rent.
I always found the logic of Totoro to make more sense when considering the cultural context. The way you're describing how "the sprouts are proof that Totoro exists" sounds way less like the logic of a kid's imagination, and much more the logic of a culture where nature is considered of spiritual and traditional significance, such as Japan. Right down to the start of the movie where they go to pray and thank the spirits of the woods that the "fantasy" of this place is predicated on the real life religious and cultural practices of the setting. In like an anthropological setting, magic and the supernatural exist based on the culture it's in, hence why witches and ghosts exist in those cultures and have real-life consequences, as they are to some degree defined by those consequences. That's why to say "Totoro and the other spirits can't exist because only the sprouts are there" doesn't make sense, as it doesn't take into account the real-life cultural premise that "the plants grow because of the spirits that are in nature." The movie under the context of nature spirits is logical, just not in a modern Western American logic
Yup. The father prays to a tree. That may seem to a western audience to be humoring children, but in Japan in the 1950's people actually did that, and some still do. Both Shinto and Buddhism emphasize interdependence and do not consider the non-human world to be dead, inert matter. If you don't understand this, you'll have trouble understanding this film, for sure.
it’s always so fascinating to me whenever someone explains some kind of cultural significance to a show that i don’t get cause i don’t understand the culture. like there are so many layers that can inform the way you watch a movie, it just boggles my mind for some reason.
I think Tortoro is a device of going through tragic or sad stuff as a child. A sparkle of keeping these kids hopeful and childlike. We as adults see there is no tree and are disappointed. Those children, the tree is there because of the sprouts. They see the hope and beauty.
The tree growing in the night is significant of a spiritual reality: "This tree is a thing that exists now and will exist in the future". A promise, so to speak. However, it takes time for the mundane reality to catch up with the spiritual. So though the tree is as good as already-existent in the spirit, right now in the mundane we can only see the first step to that. Emphasis on first step. Once the kids saw that the seeds had grown, they knew that the tree would someday exist physically as it did spiritually; whereas if the seeds failed to open, then the spiritual promise would be doomed to fail before it started. So seeing the seeds open is confirmation that the process is underway and will indeed meet the final image some day. I get the distinct vibe that whenever Totoro is onscreen, you are seeing spiritual reality. So what looks like a big tree in the physical is actually Totoro's house in the spiritual. When Totoro chooses to be hidden, so too is the spiritual reality; leaving the tree (Totoro's home tree in the beginning, i mean) as being just a tree when Mei leads her father there. I think the movie's point is that both the spiritual and physical reality, while not necessarily matching exactly, can coexist in a symbiotic relationship. The spiritual promise activating the mundane seed; the mundane routine of caretaking and farming protecting the progression of the spiritual process. I'm not well versed in Japanese religion but this seems to line up with a lot of the Japanese traditional values so far as I can observe it. No doubt my Christian viewpoint on how destiny works has given me a bias that I can't fully delineate.
Marc Shanahan Then goes on to talk 2 days straight about every pedantic detail that doesn't add up. I swear that guy's just cinema sins with less charisma.
TBH, if Big Joel left his argument at that, I would have considered it an insult to Miyazaki. I'm so glad Big Joel realized how much of a weak-sauce argument that is; his final argument is way better. Also, the difference between MauLer and CinemaSins is that MauLer is a dick, but not a liar. CS is both. CS points out the flaws and leaves it at that for the lulz; MauLer makes attempts to tie together a conclusion on how the film could have been improved, as a sort of writing study. A lot of the points Big Joel makes here would be perfectly fine by MauLer, as Big Joel does a good job accurately reflecting the movie. MauLer tends to get pissed at liar and lazy writers; probably wouldn't have much of a reaction to Big Joel; mock his speaking style, maybe. Get angry, probably not.
SamWallace Art I'd rewatch his Black Panther video then, he points out some seriously pedantic inconsistencies in most of his critiques, he even went so far as to point out a dumb editing mistake with sound design because the shoes made a noise when they weren't supposed to. Instead of focusing on what truly makes something not good or creating a concise critique that aims in making something better, he just wallows in the hate and creates these bloated diatribes to validate people who also want to wallow with him. Which, in my opinion makes him worse than Cinema Sins, because at least no one takes C.S. seriously as a source for real criticism.
bbr64 bbr64 Yeah this is my one true issue against MauLer. If he cut his videos in half and just focused on the lessons learned and less on the minutae, his videos would be way better. On the other end of the spectrum, I’m annoyed with videos such as Big Joel’s, that pick out a deep topic but only spend ~10 minutes talking about it. There is so much more about Totoro that Joel could have talked about. The theme of parallel realities was actually introduced early in the movie, subsequently spelled out by the Dad, and every Totoro appearance after that subtly reinforces that theme and builds upon it. Instead, Big Joel picked TWO scenes to talk about and leave it at that. Joel could have done research into Miyazaki’s own philosophy, and compared it to that of traditional Japanese values. Being someone who has seen the movie, and knows how deep Joel could have taken it, the lost potential does annoy me. This video is only a fragment of what Joel could have done, but he cut it short by limiting it to only his own western perspective, and by only focusing on two scenes. I think this is why I put up with MauLer; when he does make a subjective point, it’s got the whole film and context of the film’s creation to compare itself to, so that even if I disagree, I can see where he’s coming from and I can see where he’s got it wrong. In terms of video watchability, Joel’s got it down. In terms of actually talking about the movie, I almost prefer MauLer. The latter’s pettiness drags down his otherwise-good videos though, which is a shame.
I've always been somewhere in between. Totoro was real in some sense, but through the eyes of children, he took on a more imaginative form. The perspective of the adults wasn't necessarily wrong but just less driven by a sense of wonder.
A week ago: Sargon of Akkad makes a response to a Big Joel video, sparking a big ole flame war between their respective viewer bases. Today: Joel puts out a chill movie analysis like any other week. Makes me wonder if any of that really happened, or if it was just a magical hallucination... 🤔
Seeds don't sprout and grow 2 inches over night. What I would take away from that scene is that Totoro is real, but he doesn't interact with the real world to the extent that he is able. He can show two children in their dreams that he can do things like make massive trees grow, but if he actually made it happen in real life, it would cause problems. So instead he just pushes the seeds to sprout and grow a bit faster. To the two girls, it doesn't matter that a massive tree wasn't made, just that *something* tree-related was made.
Miyazaki's films explicitly care about their own logic, which is part of why I love "Kiki's Delivery Service". We see that confidence has sway over a witch's magic. Kiki starts being confident, she starts being exponentially better at her flying. She loses that confidence and loses the ability to fly and her ability to talk to my bro Jiji. As to the scene, as a gardener and biologist the fact that the sprouts grew that much over one night was an explicit proof to me that Totoro's adventures were real. Sure that it wasn't the full giant massive tree may be cause to question the magnitude of the magic's power. But that the sprouts grew as they did lends power to the magic, power that it wouldn't have if the beans didn't sprout.
I think something that is missing from this analysis is how the scene of the tree sets up the belief that there is hope. To us the viewers we can tell apart dream from reality, but when you're a kid sometimes that is not the case. We see the girls dreaming about these events, which gives them hope when they wake up. they see their mother is getting better, so they know that she is going to live another day. I think the lines of dream and reality are blurred on purpose, to make us see a connection from a different perspective.
How did Joel completely overlook the fact that My Neighbor Totoro has a built in 'don't talk to me or my son(s) again' meme with Totoro and the lil' Totoros? 0/10 terrible analysis Porko Rosso best Ghibli movie
I only watched the movie about a month ago but I've watched the that one scene like 20 times, the moment the tree sprouts up and the music starts gives warmth and fuzziness to my cold, dead heart
Children are more in-tune with the spiritual world than us "rational" adults. Spirituality is full of mystery and paradox and I think Totoro allows us to be children by making the world that way, because it's seen through the eyes of children. This is particularly evident with how Satsuki can only see Totoro when she has a need to believe and throws off the rationality to be more like Mei.
You can't be in-tune with something that doesn't exist. Spiritualism and irrationality might be great for the individual, but it'll lead to ideas which are harmful to everyone else such as race realism, homophobia, anti-vaxxing, climate change denial and religion. The way children think really shouldn't be idealized.
@@Kushufy if you want to use secular terms I guess you can call it a sense of wonder. The world is mysterious and children have a sense of wonder. Also, if you think the world can be reduced to the observable, you have too much trust in your limited senses and haven't looked hard enough at either the world or your own heart. begome gadolic.
Okay I dislike how rationality and wonder and creativity are so blocked off from each other. Like I don't believe in a spiritual world but I find myself in awe and pondering things not logical at all very often. And when I give power to my emotions, I call that spiritual. There's no reason to pit those ways of thinking against each other.
It's also worth noting that this interpretation takes Miyazaki's worldview. It's not far fetched to say he holds spiritual views based on his previous works which include a lot of pantheism. Regardless of our personal beliefs, my interpretation may be close.
It is worth noting that planted acorns sprouting overnight is itself *quite* the coincidence, as they would normally take several weeks to germinate. So, even if it's not exactly what they saw in their dream, all these acorns sprouting literally overnight *is* highly implausible, so it actually makes perfect sense to take that as a sign that what they saw wasn't just a coincidence.
I think in Totoro there's a quality that's in a lot of Ghibli movies, and also in Your Name - an interpretation of youth from the perspective of being distant from it in age. An interpretation of one's own memories. Not the experiences of youth alone, but the memory of them, the frame they now inhabit due to simply existing in a person who has held on to them for a significant portion of time. And the interpretation is this: that often in youth, things seem mystical or magical or otherworldly, due to them being completely and utterly new. And as an adult, sometimes it's fun to not sift through the memories of what was actually real and what wasn't. It's a romanticization of youth, and not just a meditation or reflection. uhh maybe
Totoro is some kind of magical forest spirit... I think it's reasonable to believe that he could use magic to show the girls the future results of thier planting. I think the giant tree was his way of showing them that even though progress in thier garden is slow, there is progress. He's showing them that if they keep hoping and tending thier tiny sprouts, the eventual results will be impressive. In a way, this mimics the cat bus scene. The girls were upset, and not seeing any progress in thier mom's healing, and after the magic cat bus trip, they have hope that, while it may be slow, things are getting better. Perhaps they didn't physically make the trip. Perhaps cat bus is a magical spirit that can let you visit a place without actually travelling. I think there's a sort of half-reality about the scenes with totoro and the cat bus, maybe because there's a bit of overlap between the real world and the spirit world in that case.
I just watched the film last night and it's really an amazing film. One of my favourite moments is when Satsuki and the dad find Mei after she's found Totoro for the first time, and Mei starts telling them about Totoro and they laugh, but Mei gets upset and shouts "I'm not lying!", after which the dad says: "Don't worry, neither of us thing you're lying". I think a typical western children's movie would just follow the line of 'the adults don't believe the kid, but later they find out the kid may actually be right after all' but this film completely goes the other way, avoiding the easy setup of drama, and shows a clear difference in culture - disbelieving the unplausible by default or believing that some supernatural things are just there and we can't always see them and that's fine.
I would like to point out a pretty clear reading of the scene. It carries basically the same meaning as your final "cool" reading. May and Satsuke have a dream in which they participate in Totoro's magical feat of growing the tree. Those seeds are magical, after all (if I remember correctly). That shared dream involves much of Totoro's magic and is influenced by his actual presence or his actual magic within the seeds. Seeing seeds sprout and grow after one night is itself a fantastical event in of itself regardless of the girls' experience the night before. That previous experience is a dream brought on by connection with Totoro's magic and the seeds they planted. Again, it's essentially the same reading. We take the sprouts to be direct evidence of a miraculous work and accept that these miracles can resolve the emotional challenges the Kusakabe family faces when their mother falls ill. I just think that the movie presents more wiggle room in dealing with how real the girls' experiences are. I mean, the creatures only appear to children for heaven's sake. That's a direct invitation to be skeptical of the fantasy the film presents.
That last statement has interesting implications - do children's experiences carry less weight than adults's in terms of determining truth? If so, what exactly does that say about children?
Jascha Bull I mean, I think that specific question has a clear answer you already know. Kids’ active imaginations and often superstitious responses to the world resulting from their lack of continuous habitual experience and grounded division between fantasy and reality is a pervasive trope in fiction. We can question whether this trope is useful/good/accurate, but what is says about children is quite clear: they are unreliable narrators and observers.
Personally, I've always thought this film was about dealing with rough times by becoming more aware of your surroundings and learning to appreciate nature. And that Totoro, being a forest spirit, was a stand in for nature. A metaphor. So the dream scene is not really a question of "Did it really happen?" It's more like the movie's way of showing us that, because of "Totoro", the girls are learning to appreciate and respect the time and care it takes for life to grow.
i have to admit i wasn’t expecting to see the word epistemology in a totoro video but you really integrated both the philosophical and whimsical aspects of your script rather perfectly. thank you so much for this video, i enjoyed it
I always interpreted the creatures as letting them see the future. The big tree is what the sprouts will grow in to one day. The catbus lets them see that their mom will be ok before anyone else knows.
"I thought it was a dream." "It wasn't a dream." is kinda mistranslated in English. In original dub they said "It was a dream but..." "It wasn't a dream!"
As someone who grew up with and calls this movie one of my favorites you highlighted parts and asked questions I’ve never thought about. Thanks for making me appreciate it even more!
Maybe this is plant nerdery, but: I always thought we had pretty good evidence of actual Totoro intervention with the tree sprouts, because they come from acorns. In real, un-magical life, acorns won't sprout rapidly and uniformly when planted. They have a symbiotic relationship with squirrels and usually won't sprout until the spring after the winter for which the squirrels cached them, and even then won't sprout all at once--some might take multiple years. But these acorns came up all at once, overnight, in warm weather. It's a Totoro miracle!
The idea of thinking up a fantasy world where not just the rules of the universe are changed, but the whole way in which we perceive and learn from the universe are changed, is something I've wanted to do for quite some time without quite knowing how or exactly what that entails. This video really gave me a mind = blown moment and I feel like I have a much better idea of how to do that now. Thanks Joel, love you buddy!
Wow! Big Joel, I’m just endlessly fascinated by your videos. They’re just so interesting! I’ve never thought about suspending the way we gain proof and information for fiction before, and it’s such a neat perspective. Thank you.
I really like this one, and the first time I've seen someone else really address the weird, cynical and off tone readings popularly applied to these movies. Good work, I would like to see more!
I found your analysis to be very intriguing as it presented a different interpretation of the movie from mine. However, I still feel that one can best appreciate this movie best when they take a step back and see everything for what it is. I appreciate your analysis as it dissects the movie and brought questions I never thought of, but at the same time your approach is one very common in the west, which approaches subjects with logic, and is bases itself on reductionism and Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction, hence why it was very difficult for you to accept the “inconsistencies” in the world. The entire point of this movie is to show the value of childlike innocence. The very reason the girls were capable of perceiving Totoro was quite simply because of their innocence and lack of preconceptions. On the other hand, adults, due to their preconceptions, have limited imaginations which makes them incapable of perceiving Totoro. The value of childlike innocence is not something that is only found in Totoro. In fact many eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Zen Bhuddism believe that childlike innocence and lack of preconceptions to be the epitome of humanity. And I think this idea is worded best by the Japanese Monk Shunryu Suzuki: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. ” -Shunryu Suzuki And I don’t mean that they can perceive Totoro because they are children and are at ages where they have fantasies inside their heads. I mean that they can literally perceive him. You see, Totoro like many of Miyazaki's films draws a lot of influences from Shintoism, the belief that natural spirits known as Kami operate the world. Totoro is a Kami which is evident by the fact that the tree where Totoro lives in is wrapped with a shimenawa. (the white rope which in Shinto culture represents a sacred space where Kami live) Furthermore, in Shintoism, Kami are believed to be the cause of natural phenomena, which was exactly what happened in Totoro. (Neko bus causing wind, Totoro causing the seeds to sprout) And I’ll say that in many eastern beliefs and philosophies, humans are not meant to understand the workings of the spiritual world. The workings of the natural world are reserved for the spirits that cause them. Which is why such inconsistencies in the world exist. Most eastern philosophy in general emphasizes that the universe is unpredictable and cannot be understood through logic alone. So while I appreciate your analysis and your question on what is real and what is not, I believe that if you watch Totoro with the same childlike wonder, you can realize that everything in the movie is real. What you ended up doing was going the route of the adult and trying to break down the film to fit your own preconception and worldview based on western concepts of non-contradiction, objectivity, and reductionism. Which was why it didn't make as much sense to you. Overall, great analysis, but I think these are some things you should consider as.
I grew up with this movie, and I always saw the Totoros as a representation of whimsical & cyclical time as it relates to the natural world. The tree growth overnight is a supernatural representation of what the tree will be, the grandness and gravity of the girl's actions, and the life it will hold, one day. To me, the whimsical, cyclical, nature of life is represented analogously in the film through their mothers illness and recovery, and their own emotional state. Because there is a lot of joy and whimsy within the sadness, the girl's mother brushing their hair when they went to the hospital, Satsuki and Kanto's cute budding romance, Mei's day at school with Satsuki, and in general the joy of discovering the countryside, even as this horrible, stressful thing is happening to their family. It connects human lives to the natural world in that way, and I do believe if there is a root connection with all of Miyazaki's works, it is the desire to connect humans to the natural world. Ps I was really sad your video about Anita Sarkeesian was deleted. Can you get it back up? It seems unfair.
The disconnect between an individual, human’s emotional reality/interpretation of reality from the actual reality, I think can only be discussed through another disconnect from a true reality. The cat-bus very realistically mimics how solutions to long term problems feel in real life, to humans. After days+ of anxiety and grief, a solution coming to the source of those will bring immediate, brief joy or euphoria. Not that anyone asked for my 2 cents.
>The cat-bus very realistically mimics how solutions to long term problems feel in real life, to humans. After days+ of anxiety and grief, a solution coming to the source of those will bring immediate, brief joy or euphoria. This is a really interesting perspective. Usually we tell ourselves not to believe problems just solve themselves like that, but you're right, this may very well be how problems get solved generally. Although, to add to the paradox, this only happens because we've taken up the full anxiety of the problem. If we just comfortably sit on our ass that Catbus won't come. Really reminds me of Zizek saying that he believes in miracles, and that solutions only come when we've grasped the full impossibility of a situation. I wonder if you've been influenced by him.
@@lavamatstudios I fundamentally disagree that taking on the full anxiety of the problem is required, humans tend to take on significantly more stress over problems than is required or healthy.
This is my favorite scene too!! I also cannot accept the morbid reading of this film, Totoro and his magic have to be real for the film to work for me. It is such a beautiful film with childish whimsy throughout sadness of bad circumstances.
me: i like my neighbor totoro. its a fun, lighthearted movie with cute animal characters- *Big Joel:* What is our burden of proof in claiming something is true?
Great video Big Joel. Your videos are always excellent, and I love your distinct personality. You cover a wide variety of topics which also keeps me engaged. I'm always excited to click on one of your videos whether it be on a familiar or unfamiliar topic.
I always thought Totoro and everything else was real. But available for the children. Totoro and his friends were real for the kids but it won’t show that magic to the adults or rather their magic won’t disrupt reality. They make the trees grow. Which disrupts reality so they make everything back to normal. But the seeds grow as a message to the kids like ‘don’t worry we were here’. The cat bus appears and it helps the children but this doesn’t disrupt reality as they manage to be invisible from the eyes of the adults. I always thought of Totoro and his friends as guardians of the forest but more so guardians of the children. A positive force that only a child could perceive. But that’s just my take. Lovely video btw.
After seeing Grave of the Fireflies a few weeks ago, I can't help but see it and Totoro as companion pieces of each other. In this context I think Totoro is great because, while Grave forces us to confront the horrors of war and humanity, Totoro forces us to believe in magic and optimism. Here, the little sister is found alive and well. Dad is around. Mom is alive. The big monster is a tangible fluffy being who is also explicitly the good guy. He allows children to be children, in a world where they could have possibly been deprived of happy childhoods. There's a lot of parallel themes in these two films which are handled completely differently, and explore childhood and growing up from completely opposite perspectives.
I actually saw this movie again recently like in the past few weeks or so, and I saw the sprouts as sort of a favor by a forest spirit that could only be seen when they want it to be seen, like Totoro's hidden hovel. Totoro wanted to excite the children and show them the magic of the forest, but Totoro also knew that the magic of the forest must be hidden, which is why the tree shouldn't actually grow that tall. Illusions are common in fae folklore, and visitation in dreams is also common. Totoro did help them grow the tree, but perhaps in a way that said, "Look at how wonderful it is to see nature grow. One day these sprouts might tower over this house. But for now, you should keep taking care of them." When you see it as more of an illusory promise, there's nothing about the scene that contradicts their behavior, and it's consistent with the fae aesthetic the film portrays. That there are two corroborating witnesses to every event makes it easily acceptable. The Catbus and Totoro avoid detection by anyone but the children, and help them in tangible, physical ways where they can, and most often when there aren't people around. Totoro's hovel is physically impenetrable unless he allows them in it. What was shown as Totoro and his companions ritualistically growing a gigantic tree was probably seen from the outside as sprouts finding their way out of the soil, where the protagonists are just astral projections or a shared hallucination, which is why their father didn't notice it.
I absolutely love these kinds of videos and the way that you think and analyze film scenes-especially those from Miyazaki. It's not how I found this channel (that was your God's Not Dead review), but definitely what made me sub!
I think I feel so lucky to have watched Miyazaki’s films as a small child. When I show these movies to my friends now, years later, they don’t understand why I, or anyone would like this, they find it strange and random, but as a kid, I could understand them, I was sucked into their world, whatever it was. I think I’m able to watch these movies again and again and enjoy them now because of the nostalgia and because I remember why I related to the movies.
Whether totoro's influence on the world is metaphorical or not, it doesnt matter, the creators are simply giving us a chance to see the world through the imagination soaked perspective of a child, thus ultimately it is their belief that makes it real.
I already liked this video from the title, but I was surprised at how much I liked watching you construct an analyzation of the deconstructionist concepts unconsciously conveyed to me when I watched the movie as a kid,
The 'evidence' of magic, like you mentioned, reminds me of Cinderella's glass slipper. Living the life she has, it was strange for her to actually make it to the ball, but also that magic helped her get there there. When the night ended, the glass slipper was the only thing that stayed (strangely) which in good fortune was the last bit of magic that saved her from her evil step-mother. Just like seeing Totoro that evening, who helped the girls 'grow' those acorn into a giant tree, at the end, when the night ended, they were just left with something small (like those sprouts) just to remind them that magic is real, if they just remember.
This is a real Western reading of the film, and I think you're kind of projecting Western concerns about consistency and the nature of reality onto a film that makes a pretty hard departure from them at the outset. You've assumed that verisimilitude for Miyazaki means the same thing it does for you, but I think that's a mistake. His realism isn't inherently factual or rational at all. He himself might be, but his films clearly are not. Things function genuinely as religion when they are part of a people's lived reality. And I think that a reading of these films that doesn't take into account the clear presence of Japan's major religions into account is mistaken. You're right in saying that there is no contradiction and the protagonists were right all along, but I'd suspect that to the film's adult Japanese audience at least, and maybe to their kids, that's obvious. Rather than presenting the audience with a contradiction, the film is merely presenting a depiction of the interplay between religious truth, childrens imagination, nature, and the suffering in human life. Here, the film doesn't, I think, even consider that things contradict. There's just all sorts of different simultaneously true stuff and that's what reality is. I'm not Japanese so I can't be sure, and I'm certainly not saying that Japanese society is devoid of rationality or anything like that, just that the tolerance for simultaneous truth and ambiguity is a bit higher. I'll go annoy some of my colleagues next week and see if I'm right.
Update: my colleague says this is roughly correct and was making funny faces at the idea there were conflicting realities there. It also kind of reminds me of my logic professor at University, a Japanese guy, who taught us about three valued logic and logics where things can be true and false at the same time, and how to model them with predicate logic and sets. I never thought at the time that his upbringing had anything to do with the content of his course and of course I don't know, but based on how readily my students here reject the idea of a singular consistent truth when presented with contradictions, I wonder if being raised in Japan or being Japanese, or living here increases people's tolerance for contradicting realities to be simultaneously true. Again, I'm not Japanese so don't take anything I'm saying as fact and go around repeating it, but I can say at least that I've got a bit more evidence for the idea that seeing a contradiction there isn't what happens in the film's intended audience.
@@koitsuga Yes, this is an excellent analysis. Without appreciation for how a western concept of "real" doesn't fit into a Buddhist worldview, you're bound to misunderstand a film like this.
I think most of this take is pretty sound and valid, although I think the one thing lacking from the analysis is an examination of the cultural symbolism at work in Totoro. This movie is very much about the power of a child's imagination, as a lot of Miyazaki work is, but it's also very specifically about Shinto concepts that get lost in translation and non-Japanese viewers who aren't familiar with Shintoism. For the longest time, I thought Totoro was like... literally some giant bear-cat creature that lived in the woods and there was some magical reasons the kids couldn't always find him, but the reality is that Totoro is supposed to be like either a regional forest god or maybe literally the spirit of the tree he lives in. There's a lot of traditions based around the idea that, instead of the materialistic view that acorns just fall from trees and sometimes they germinate and become new trees, that there are little tiny spirits or elves or whatever that go around planting them. That's where the imagery for scenes like the ones in this video, or the ones where Mei is running around after the little ones dropping acorns, etc, that's the sort of traditions they're rooted in. So it would seem to me that there's probably some reflection in Totoro not only about the imagination of a child, but how a child would view these colorful legends about forest spirits and regional gods that play in the background of their life. There is probably some license to not make concrete logical sense because, with a lot of these old traditions that don't deal with a monotheistic god, the borders between things- even dreams and reality, which is a big concept in Buddhism which Shintoism borrows from -are not always clear cut. Life in these traditions are about balance and allowing the world to flow through you, making sure to drink in miracles while you can.
I really like this one, Joel. I think you could have included a reference to the common motif in film and TV where some story happens in a dream or fantasy, the person wakes up or returns to the "real world," but there's some small remnant from the dream world that is found by the protagonist.
It's about expectation, and what it means to use fantasy to justify what happens to you in life. For a child who's got a lot of pressure sitting on their lap people develop the tactic of using fantasy as a way to come into terms with the real world. Good things and bad things happen no matter what you think, but if we turn to "magic friends" as a reason for the things happening it makes it a bit bearable. The final scene is like every other scene, a fantasy occurs when we're in trouble, and even if things don't happen magically as we'd like them to be, things still happen and life goes on in its own way.I always cry a little bit when I think of Totoro too much.
I finally got this on DVD yesterday, at a Japanese video/music/anime shop at my local Mitsuwa Marketplace. Ghibli videos are really hard to get, even here in "silicon valley". Kids often haven't learned all the limits in what you're supposed to believe in or not. When I was little I used to be able to make figures that'd float in the air. Geometrical stuff like maps, and when I was learning the alphabet I was delighted one night in bed, to have the alphabet's letters come dancing out from under my blanket. I used this stuff to entertain myself when dropping off to sleep. One night, maybe I was 8 or even 9, getting pretty old, I made a really huge one, a pattern so big and glorious that if it were real, anyone would be able to see it. I ran out of my bedroom and got my mom to come and see it. It was still hanging there in the air when I got back, of course. "Don't you see it?" I asked. My mom insisted she didn't see anything and went back to her bed. I then decided that making figures in the air was immature and childish and I should stick to grown-up things from then on.
An interesting comparison is that I really began to think of my reading of My Neighbour Totoro when watching it with my kiddo. In my mind, the narrative of the world allows for an entirely "unmagical" real-life storyline going on: children playing in the woods, real sprouts growing, Mei running away from home to look for her mother, being found, visiting the hospital and then coming home. I had an experience of getting lost from my parents in a German city and retracing all my steps back to the department store we were parked at. It was a really emotional experience as a kid and I recall half of my mind was in despair and full of emotion while the other half was concentrating so hard on finding the right path and my family. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to simply say Sasuke finding Mei/the cat-bus is when she starts thinking seriously about where her sister could have gone, and because she's able to imagine what her sister would be thinking, this empathy allows her to realise where her sister was headed and what road she would've taken. In this reading Totoro and the sprites, as well as the cat-bus are just an interpretation of real events through the imagination and dreams of the children, or their childhood memories. Interestingly my kiddo was adamant at the time that no, Totoro was real, and all that magical stuff happened and rejected my realistic take. That made me rethink my position and allow that perhaps, both layers of interpretation were at work at once, interconnected, showing that our imaginations and dreams really ARE just as important and just as real as the mundane facts of life. Later when my kid watched the film many more times with her smaller sister, the two really bonded over this and I'd like to think she is was able to experience and see both levels of the story at once, not as a contradiction, but as different aspects of the same amazing world. Great video btw, thanks! =8)-DX
(Also like to add if it wasn't clear that watching Ghibli films with children is important. It definitely allowed me to rejoice at the saplings instead of being indifferent. So a lot of the story to me is about the relationship of a parent/older sibling to their child/younger sibling and being open to share both the reality and the wonder of life within that relationship as a mutually beneficial exchange, not just as a teaching/condescending one).
This may sound odd, but I think it's a bit of an extension to some points you make here. I always felt like Totoro and Catbus had something to do with the way we explain natural phenomena to children. Like, during a thunderstorm, my mother used to say that the angels were going bowling, and even though I knew on some level that it was fantasy, it did provide some comfort for me when it came to something that, at the time, I may have been incapable of understanding. I also feel this way because Totoro has these moments of being almost frightening. However, because the children are aware of who he is and what he's capable of, they're not afraid of him. Does this make any sense? Also, please read what Nick Cave says about mythology and memory in the Sick Bag Song. It's so beautiful and really relates to this so perfectly.
hey i know this video is three years old but i just wanted to say that my neighbor totoro is my all-time favorite movie and has been since i was barely able to speak. when i say i grew up and learned from this movie, i mean it. it's a huge part of my life and this video made me see it in a whole new aspect! i always viewed it as a movie based on childhood innocence and how children view and make sense of the world around them, but the way you explained your theory was such an interesting take and i really liked it! really great video, i loved it
I kind of see it as Totoro is a spirit that guides them to accomplish the tasks of the movie on their own, so he gave them the courage to plant the trees and showed them what they can be, and he gave her the courage to find her sister, it just didn't show us the reality side of it. Perhaps the cat bus was a real bus. I could be way off but I prefer not to think everyone is dead, so I'm not going to.
I watched this movie constantly as a kid and there was no questions in my mind. I might have just been too young to understand it but I truly thought totoro grew the tree. He grew it and then it started growing. The cat bus was real and their mom is getting better.
I think you can look at the big tree being an apology for something big has occurred. The plants have been able to grow which was no garentuee and in a short time too, and the fact they meet up with Totoro being a large event. Also playing on a child's mentality that even a tiny bit of growth is such a huge thing for them.
totoro is not necessarily 'real" but he brings the light in the world and helps children and adults, overcome certian proplems in thier own way. They are figures to be proud of is what I mean. this movie is just too *POWERFUL* to say in words.
To really understand this film, you have to understand and appreciate the role of Shinto and Buddhism in Japanese society. This is basically a morality tale for children teaching them the value of faith, respect, and purity of heart.
I think Totoro appears to two children just when they sound tired or when they are sleeping,Tired to wait the bus, When May go to the hospital after ( 3 km)...
I took it for granted that there are two worlds, an ordinary one and a magical one, and that Totoro is able to bring elements of these worlds together so that they temporarily overlap.
Subbed, great video. I totally disagree, for what it's worth, but your analysis was really solid. As a kid who lost their mum at a similar age, for me this movie is about fantasy as a defence mechanism against grief. I want to believe your magical realist interpretation, but the bittersweet reading is just too true to life to reject. I think the reason your review moved me, though, is because I think you can actually have it both ways: it's not only in fiction that the question "what is real?" is valid, after all.
I really like this interpretation bc it makes me think of the way that I felt as a little kid when deciding if something was real. I was told bathroom was haunted → I investigate and hear a weird sound → the bathroom has been proven to be haunted. Obviously this logic doesn’t add up but it’s interesting to think that within the universe of My Neighbor Totoro that little ghost hunter me was right and the way a child sees the world and the supernatural is the way it truly is.
Well, how I've always seen it through the lense of child and the way children see positive changes. Little miracles through a childs eye are MAGIC. Their mother getting better, despite odds. Their trees are growing. They are miracles to them.
Someone please photoshop a pic of Big Joel with a much smaller Big Joel beside him with the caption "don't ever talk to me or my son again." Also this video was just very sweet and gentle to wake up to! I could never take that other theory seriously (that they died in the wilderness) either. It's very "all the kids in Rugrats were just Angelica's fevered hallucinations!!!1!!" You've got a really great eye for aspects of film that I never would have noticed before, and this vid was like, kinda poetic! Fantastic video! : D
The conclusion of this video is interesting to me because as a kid, that was definitely my interpretation of the movie's events. I didn't wonder what was real, I just took the girls' reactions at face value, and until now I hadn't even thought of how it could make a viewer question the reality of the movie. (So after the first couple minutes of this video, I had to do the whole internal "wait wait wait fuck is May really okay at the end????" and I'm glad you dismissed that theory quickly because I don't want to turn my enjoyment of this movie into Edgelord Sadness Time.)
The movie was about the sick mother (earth) getting better only after receiving a gift from the garden (trees). It was an eco-message before cinema got onto the subject. I didn’t read into much the magical stuff because magical realism is never the ‘main’ point. It’s used to bring up an issue in an esoteric (or fun) way, not to solve a mystery. I saw it personally as Totoro leaving to do the same thing elsewhere with other children. Plus the solution is never ‘magic’, children (and eventually adults) would need to do the job themselves (growing trees and taking care of the environment).
*Let's take a minute and make a lighthearted video*
1 min later: What is our burden of proof in claiming something is true?
'Tis the Big Joel brand.
Casually existential (TM)
I didn't even try to understand that shit
@@SurasmitaMeher-ch3lo i think it's just like "why does proof hold us back from believing something is true" i might be wrong though cus he worded that like he was plato
A few minutes later: is the scene where every problem in the movie is resolved with magic and joy secretly creepy?
Lol I always thought Totoro just took away the tree to not freak out the dad.
That dad was so chill I bet he would not mind a giant magic tree poping up over night
This is basically my ontology of the film. Adults can't see any direct evidence of Totoro, so the laws of the universe gently reassert themselves whenever he has done his work. Without really breaking anything Totoro has done. Totoro and the universe are on good terms with each other.
Edit 1: You only learn this through the final Catbus scene though. Before that there is an uneasy tension. Not on the part on the film, but on the part of the viewer. The tension is there exactly because the film seems not to mind any of it.
Edit 2: It's also interesting that the adults in the movie apparently know this fact. Their behavior could easily be taken as just entertaining the kid's imagination, but to me they seemed sold on the magic in a way that goes beyond this.
@@lavamatstudios Yeah the dust guys just created ash to the adults. The Cat Bus was appearing as wind to adults. It happens but needs to fit into the laws of our universe from the adult's perspective.
@@stromagedon I would have loved a scene of the dad just walking out with my morning coffee and just going "Oh! Cool. Ok." and going back in the house.
Same lol
While adults, like the viewer, may react to sprouts with indifference, the kids in the movie see them as something magical. They are more sensible to the beauty around them.
I agree with that reading in isolation, but like the essay says you have to find a way to connect it to the end. If the big tree is a metaphor for children being able to view simple things in the world with a sense of wonder, then what is the cat bus taking her to find her sister and visit there mom in the hospital a metaphor for?
Maybe she just didn't remember how she got the hospital, therefore catbus.
@@robynhoodie emmm, wild guess, but it is metaphor for the same thing "children being able to view simple things in the world with a sense of wonder": ride on an actual bus they used to get to the hospital becomes this crazy journey, but still somewhat grounded in reality - it is still a bus.
@@antoniogureev I do remember imagining things running on the power lines during car rides to occupy myself. I did consider that (or a police car) and the only reason i dismissed it was because they move across the rice fields rather then near the road. But again, imagination, it still fits.
Your commentary affected me... I don't know why
I've heard it called "emotional logic". An exaggeration can be more true than a literal description, sometimes.
Can confirm. Also this concept is explored in the Vietnam war story compilation "The Things They Carried," which is very sad and graphic but also illustrates how adding fantastic or exaggerated elements to a story can make the feelings the reader takes away more true to the lived experience of the storyteller
Hopping onto this comment 2 years late… but anyway, I agree! Also, this “emotional logic” I think is best described as intuition: the combination of intellectual and emotional interpretation of events, resulting in a personal discovery of the truest truth that the artwork presents, at least as it pertains to your personal understanding. It’s the way fiction, and all art for that matter (movies, music, painting, etc) should be interpreted in my opinion, and we all do it naturally anyway.
In New Zealand indigenous frameworks we teach our kids that mythology is a tangible part of our ancestral history. Doesn't matter if people think it's fiction, all that matters is that we have a connection to it.
That's what My Neighbor Totoro reminded me of.
That's beautiful, thank you for sharing this perspective.
Powerful words. Thanks for sharing!
Yes but language is important. It's not tangible as in, you could have touched these gods with your hands because they existed or something, but tangible as in at some point in history, peoples' experiences and interpretations and education and whatever else caused them to concoct some conceptual comfort and attach it to seemingly random but ultimately predictable phenomena.
Like imagine some of the first "conscious" bipeds carefully stumbling about dry land and then *thunderclap* OH SHIT no worries brethren it's just the babadook.
Nowadays we're just like OH SHIT no worries bruh it's just thunder.
Imagine far into the future we figure out how to harness that atmospheric difference in potential for energy usage those people would be like *nothing happens* OH SHOOT hey bruzzlezork have you read about the old partner's tale of thunder?
--imo--
@@lexscarlet I mean, in your world-view that would be correct and I'm not saying that rational explanations are meaningless; they have their place. I'm just saying that human beings aren't rational, they are driven by emotion, story and interaction. Mythology (our subjective history) is one way that my people tie value to ancestry.
One of my distant ancestors is Paoa, the legend of him creating our rivers is larger than life but it is real in the sense that those rivers exist and the person who made them in the story existed. My region, mountain and rivers have stories that directly tie to who I am and my origins. This world view empowers (gives mana to) our children in a way that informs their self-worth.
I can give you links to the story of Paoa if you like. If you enjoy mythology, you might find it interesting. It involves bodily fluids.
It's also important to note that both 'wake up' implicitly assuming that the night sequence 'happened' to both of them- they don't wake up thinking that it was a dream that they'd experienced individually.
The scene is similar to the fairy stores of the middle ages in Europe. They had a vision into the fairy realm, so to speak. Shinto has similar concepts.
YES
I love the idea of fantasy being conveyed by the way the events are presented, and not just the events themselves. I haven't seen this movie since I was like 6, but we would watch it all the time at my grandparents' house, so watching clips from it now makes me *feel* it more than *remember* it. Which seems to work pretty well with the message of the film. Awesome video!
Wow !
My memories are precious and I now share this movie with my own grandchildren.
Love man ∆
I always looked at it like Totoro's "work" as having the same relationship to the world he exists in as a children's book which explains something real but exaggerates to make the concept easier to understand. That is to say it's real, just not necessarily exact. The point isn't that the trees are big, it's that they exist. What they did definitely happened, we just end up seeing the "everyday" result of the extraordinary action taken - because actually doing it is extraordinary.
♥️♥️❤️❤️💙💙
i think this film is literally ment to be a children's film. not in the sense that it's pg and whatever. but in the sense that the only way you can really understand is if you were a child.
when i was young and watched this the tree scean it just was. i was a bit confused that the big tree was gone so i thought. we'll totoro couldn't just let a big tree sprout from no where. he wanted to girls to have fun but in the end reverted it to keep the balence. now that i'm older i see it as a dream. but that dream called out to totoro. so he helped them and grew the plants. and i just kinda accepted. anyways it takes a child to accept and understand what happened. and as re growl we become to logcial. this film to me is the essence of child-like wonder and imaganation like you mentioned.
I mean the fact that Mei and Sasuke had the same dream is pretty telling
...satsuki
Sasuke...hm that reminds me of Naruto....but it’s actually Satsuki
also gets more confusing when you realise the protagonist of ponyo is sosuke, a third name
I grew up with this movie. Totoro is real and I'll fight anyone who doesn't agree
Okay, you and me, under the giant tree....Totoro is on my side....you get the tiny ones...tag team rules.
Totoro is real and he is my friend.
Of course he's real! There are people thinking otherwise!? >:0
Okay! Totoro is my freind! He’s real ok? Yeah ok
I was about to wright the EXACT same thing everything u wrote exactly.
The totoro guys are real. The people aren't.
Woah.
dude
Now this, THIS is one hell of a big brain interpretation. Love it!
OH SHIIITTTT
For who?
I think another interesting thing about the movie, which supports the points made here, is that we have "Granny" as a character that can corroborate the idea of Totoro's existence, or at least the existence of spirits in general. when Satsuki and Mei talk about the little black soot balls, Granny immediately recognizes what they're describing, and is like "ah yes! soot sprites! I used to see them too when I was little!" as in, these things have a name and a history of being observed.
it's interesting because of the layered implications. on the one hand, it kind of sounds like a parent telling a child about santa clause, or the tooth fairy... certainly the kids believe they exist, but only up to a certain point. eventually they get old enough to see the world in more logical terms, and the belief in the myth fades away. which suggests that these spirits run on Tinkerbell fairy logic. you can't see them anymore when you stop believing in them. and I guess, specifically in the case of Satsuki and Mei... you see them when you need something to believe in. you see them when you need them most.
in a way, it does make its own kind of sense. santa clause and the tooth fairy are characters manufactured around a ritual, like the exchange of gifts, or receiving some kind of small prize, but soot sprites correspond to a natural occurrence. the existence of dirt accumulating in a home didn't need an explanation, but if soot sprites exist, then it has one. or, to reverse engineer it a little, if you're looking for evidence that soot sprites are around, it's there, but it makes sense that other people would overlook it. Granny even says that they appear most often in abandoned houses, which makes sense on the level of a spirit not wanting to live somewhere that people already live, but also on the level of a house getting cleaned more regularly when people live in it. the logical exists alongside the fantastical.
but then you can add to that by thinking of things from a shinto perspective. there's this belief in the idea of respecting all things because all things have a spirit. and while I don't think Satsuki and Mei's dad believes that there's a giant troll that looks like a teddy bear running around, I do think that he believes in the positive effects of considering all things with kindness. the idea that a thing can give its utility, or some general peace of mind, to you, and that you should treat it well in return, breeds a kind of positive emotion... it's like a comradery between yourself and your environment, and it makes you more empathetic to the world around you. it humbles you by emphasizing the idea that every thing has its own dignity, and your own dignity cannot be assumed superior. nature is a give and take that all things participate in, ourselves included. whether this is a strictly correct reading of how the world works or not, the result is a sense of good will, and I think that's worth cultivating, regardless of one's belief in a rigid truth.
in a way, the real, factual existence of spirits has nothing to do with it. the feeling of putting your own graciousness and kindness into the world is fulfilling when you fully commit to the sentiment of it. but if you're more committed to being cynical, you'll never understand it.
when you're watching My Neighbor Totoro, I think the level of belief that you have in Totoro speaks to which character's position you're relating to most in the movie. Satsuki and Mei believe in Totoro because they are young and willing to do so. most of the other kids in Satsuki's class are probably at their "did you know santa isn't real?!" phase, and for them, Totoro would be strictly not real. and for Mr. and Mrs. Kusakabe, and Granny... well, at the very least, the idea of Totoro produces a real emotion in Satsuki and Mei. that's as real as Totoro needs to be. it's a kind of open mindedness that comes with real maturity. not the kind that makes you stop believing in santa clause, but the kind that makes you teach your kids that he is real. because you only get so many years of believing before you don't anymore, and no one ever really grows up to regret them. in a way, I think that second stage of maturity is similar to how Satsuki was considering their mother's health in the argument between her and Mei. Satsuki's "maturity" had her considering the real possibility that their mother might die... but she would need a different kind of maturity to try and reassure Mei, rather than trying to force her to see the bleaker, more logical possibilities too. it's natural to be anxious when things seem to be going wrong, but Mei didn't need to be sad before anything truly bad had actually happened. and in a way, Satsuki's worry that their mom will die could be just as unrealistic as Mei's firm belief that their mom will get better. until the movie answers that question with factual events, there's no way to know for sure.
I think My Neighbor Totoro gives us permission to decide how real we want Totoro to be in this movie. it gives us permission to believe that he is real without having to feel ridiculous about it. because it is a movie, and the possibility of Totoro being real in the universe of this movie isn't off the table. we can believe what we actually want to believe about Totoro... not just what's proven true.
Beautiful comment thank you
you're welcome, and I'm glad my comment reached you. ^_^
Loved reading your perspective!
"the film gives us permission to decide how real totoro can be"
i loved your comment, im gonna write it down somewhere, if u dont mind :)
Comments like these makes me wish I could save them.
Will we ever get a full 2 hour video essay on Chalkzone?
I really want to see this
Will we ever get a full 2 hour video essay on The Nutshack?
This change in epistomology is propably why My Neighbour Totoro works just as well as Xanax for me. It doesn't portray fantasy as something to be hammered into contemporary ways of understanding the world (unlike Harry Potter for example, in the way Olly described in his witchcraft video, fantasy that is build on top of a strict positivist ideal of education, a "bourgeois magic school"). It's not just the aesthetics of this film that put me at peace, it's the very way it "knows" things. In that sense, it is similar to latin-american Magical Realism.
Which is why I've started telling myself stories about my life again. Every time I have to move a spider out of my apartment, I respectfully clap my hands three times and I apologise to the Spider council for evicting one of them. Sometimes, when I find random coins in my apartment, I accept that as the spiders trying to pay rent.
Artur Yeon
Magical realism is similar
Thank you for putting that together
I always found the logic of Totoro to make more sense when considering the cultural context. The way you're describing how "the sprouts are proof that Totoro exists" sounds way less like the logic of a kid's imagination, and much more the logic of a culture where nature is considered of spiritual and traditional significance, such as Japan.
Right down to the start of the movie where they go to pray and thank the spirits of the woods that the "fantasy" of this place is predicated on the real life religious and cultural practices of the setting.
In like an anthropological setting, magic and the supernatural exist based on the culture it's in, hence why witches and ghosts exist in those cultures and have real-life consequences, as they are to some degree defined by those consequences.
That's why to say "Totoro and the other spirits can't exist because only the sprouts are there" doesn't make sense, as it doesn't take into account the real-life cultural premise that "the plants grow because of the spirits that are in nature."
The movie under the context of nature spirits is logical, just not in a modern Western American logic
Aaron Borok yea, it’s a very effective explanation of folk Shinto and honestly many kinds of animistic religions around the world.
Yup. The father prays to a tree. That may seem to a western audience to be humoring children, but in Japan in the 1950's people actually did that, and some still do.
Both Shinto and Buddhism emphasize interdependence and do not consider the non-human world to be dead, inert matter. If you don't understand this, you'll have trouble understanding this film, for sure.
I agree, the movie is about the logic of spirituality
it’s always so fascinating to me whenever someone explains some kind of cultural significance to a show that i don’t get cause i don’t understand the culture. like there are so many layers that can inform the way you watch a movie, it just boggles my mind for some reason.
I think Tortoro is a device of going through tragic or sad stuff as a child. A sparkle of keeping these kids hopeful and childlike. We as adults see there is no tree and are disappointed. Those children, the tree is there because of the sprouts. They see the hope and beauty.
The tree growing in the night is significant of a spiritual reality: "This tree is a thing that exists now and will exist in the future". A promise, so to speak. However, it takes time for the mundane reality to catch up with the spiritual. So though the tree is as good as already-existent in the spirit, right now in the mundane we can only see the first step to that. Emphasis on first step. Once the kids saw that the seeds had grown, they knew that the tree would someday exist physically as it did spiritually; whereas if the seeds failed to open, then the spiritual promise would be doomed to fail before it started. So seeing the seeds open is confirmation that the process is underway and will indeed meet the final image some day.
I get the distinct vibe that whenever Totoro is onscreen, you are seeing spiritual reality. So what looks like a big tree in the physical is actually Totoro's house in the spiritual. When Totoro chooses to be hidden, so too is the spiritual reality; leaving the tree (Totoro's home tree in the beginning, i mean) as being just a tree when Mei leads her father there.
I think the movie's point is that both the spiritual and physical reality, while not necessarily matching exactly, can coexist in a symbiotic relationship. The spiritual promise activating the mundane seed; the mundane routine of caretaking and farming protecting the progression of the spiritual process.
I'm not well versed in Japanese religion but this seems to line up with a lot of the Japanese traditional values so far as I can observe it. No doubt my Christian viewpoint on how destiny works has given me a bias that I can't fully delineate.
Mei and Satsuki are just perceiving time non-linearly so it’s real
Accept that a movie is more about tone and feelings than rationality?
*Mauler has left the chat*
Marc Shanahan
Then goes on to talk 2 days straight about every pedantic detail that doesn't add up. I swear that guy's just cinema sins with less charisma.
Not seeing a parallel with Miyazaki and Totoro and the stupid, badly written movies Mauler criticizes. If that was your intention.
TBH, if Big Joel left his argument at that, I would have considered it an insult to Miyazaki. I'm so glad Big Joel realized how much of a weak-sauce argument that is; his final argument is way better.
Also, the difference between MauLer and CinemaSins is that MauLer is a dick, but not a liar. CS is both. CS points out the flaws and leaves it at that for the lulz; MauLer makes attempts to tie together a conclusion on how the film could have been improved, as a sort of writing study. A lot of the points Big Joel makes here would be perfectly fine by MauLer, as Big Joel does a good job accurately reflecting the movie. MauLer tends to get pissed at liar and lazy writers; probably wouldn't have much of a reaction to Big Joel; mock his speaking style, maybe. Get angry, probably not.
SamWallace Art
I'd rewatch his Black Panther video then, he points out some seriously pedantic inconsistencies in most of his critiques, he even went so far as to point out a dumb editing mistake with sound design because the shoes made a noise when they weren't supposed to. Instead of focusing on what truly makes something not good or creating a concise critique that aims in making something better, he just wallows in the hate and creates these bloated diatribes to validate people who also want to wallow with him. Which, in my opinion makes him worse than Cinema Sins, because at least no one takes C.S. seriously as a source for real criticism.
bbr64 bbr64 Yeah this is my one true issue against MauLer. If he cut his videos in half and just focused on the lessons learned and less on the minutae, his videos would be way better. On the other end of the spectrum, I’m annoyed with videos such as Big Joel’s, that pick out a deep topic but only spend ~10 minutes talking about it. There is so much more about Totoro that Joel could have talked about. The theme of parallel realities was actually introduced early in the movie, subsequently spelled out by the Dad, and every Totoro appearance after that subtly reinforces that theme and builds upon it. Instead, Big Joel picked TWO scenes to talk about and leave it at that. Joel could have done research into Miyazaki’s own philosophy, and compared it to that of traditional Japanese values. Being someone who has seen the movie, and knows how deep Joel could have taken it, the lost potential does annoy me. This video is only a fragment of what Joel could have done, but he cut it short by limiting it to only his own western perspective, and by only focusing on two scenes.
I think this is why I put up with MauLer; when he does make a subjective point, it’s got the whole film and context of the film’s creation to compare itself to, so that even if I disagree, I can see where he’s coming from and I can see where he’s got it wrong.
In terms of video watchability, Joel’s got it down. In terms of actually talking about the movie, I almost prefer MauLer. The latter’s pettiness drags down his otherwise-good videos though, which is a shame.
I've always been somewhere in between. Totoro was real in some sense, but through the eyes of children, he took on a more imaginative form. The perspective of the adults wasn't necessarily wrong but just less driven by a sense of wonder.
A week ago: Sargon of Akkad makes a response to a Big Joel video, sparking a big ole flame war between their respective viewer bases.
Today: Joel puts out a chill movie analysis like any other week.
Makes me wonder if any of that really happened, or if it was just a magical hallucination... 🤔
Did it really happen? Does anything really happen?
@@BushidoToken If it happened online than it's safe to say it didn't actually happen
Didn't Joel get flagged for hate speech or was that a dream?
t'was a dream
Seeds don't sprout and grow 2 inches over night. What I would take away from that scene is that Totoro is real, but he doesn't interact with the real world to the extent that he is able. He can show two children in their dreams that he can do things like make massive trees grow, but if he actually made it happen in real life, it would cause problems. So instead he just pushes the seeds to sprout and grow a bit faster. To the two girls, it doesn't matter that a massive tree wasn't made, just that *something* tree-related was made.
Miyazaki's films explicitly care about their own logic, which is part of why I love "Kiki's Delivery Service". We see that confidence has sway over a witch's magic. Kiki starts being confident, she starts being exponentially better at her flying. She loses that confidence and loses the ability to fly and her ability to talk to my bro Jiji.
As to the scene, as a gardener and biologist the fact that the sprouts grew that much over one night was an explicit proof to me that Totoro's adventures were real. Sure that it wasn't the full giant massive tree may be cause to question the magnitude of the magic's power. But that the sprouts grew as they did lends power to the magic, power that it wouldn't have if the beans didn't sprout.
I think something that is missing from this analysis is how the scene of the tree sets up the belief that there is hope. To us the viewers we can tell apart dream from reality, but when you're a kid sometimes that is not the case. We see the girls dreaming about these events, which gives them hope when they wake up. they see their mother is getting better, so they know that she is going to live another day. I think the lines of dream and reality are blurred on purpose, to make us see a connection from a different perspective.
Philosophy tube: what's democracy?
Big jole: what's real?
The real question:
What's what?
@@MuttFitness What?
How did Joel completely overlook the fact that My Neighbor Totoro has a built in 'don't talk to me or my son(s) again' meme with Totoro and the lil' Totoros? 0/10 terrible analysis Porko Rosso best Ghibli movie
Dunno if best Ghibli movie, but Porco Rosso is definetly Miyazaki's best work imo.
@@diek_yt Porco Rosso is Miyazaki's best movie, but the Nausicaa manga is his best work
I only watched the movie about a month ago but I've watched the that one scene like 20 times, the moment the tree sprouts up and the music starts gives warmth and fuzziness to my cold, dead heart
Children are more in-tune with the spiritual world than us "rational" adults. Spirituality is full of mystery and paradox and I think Totoro allows us to be children by making the world that way, because it's seen through the eyes of children.
This is particularly evident with how Satsuki can only see Totoro when she has a need to believe and throws off the rationality to be more like Mei.
You can't be in-tune with something that doesn't exist. Spiritualism and irrationality might be great for the individual, but it'll lead to ideas which are harmful to everyone else such as race realism, homophobia, anti-vaxxing, climate change denial and religion. The way children think really shouldn't be idealized.
@@Kushufy if you want to use secular terms I guess you can call it a sense of wonder. The world is mysterious and children have a sense of wonder.
Also, if you think the world can be reduced to the observable, you have too much trust in your limited senses and haven't looked hard enough at either the world or your own heart. begome gadolic.
Okay I dislike how rationality and wonder and creativity are so blocked off from each other. Like I don't believe in a spiritual world but I find myself in awe and pondering things not logical at all very often. And when I give power to my emotions, I call that spiritual. There's no reason to pit those ways of thinking against each other.
It's also worth noting that this interpretation takes Miyazaki's worldview. It's not far fetched to say he holds spiritual views based on his previous works which include a lot of pantheism. Regardless of our personal beliefs, my interpretation may be close.
It is worth noting that planted acorns sprouting overnight is itself *quite* the coincidence, as they would normally take several weeks to germinate. So, even if it's not exactly what they saw in their dream, all these acorns sprouting literally overnight *is* highly implausible, so it actually makes perfect sense to take that as a sign that what they saw wasn't just a coincidence.
the fact that the two girls have the same dream is evidence enough of the something paranormal running... (and it occurs in our reality too!)
I think in Totoro there's a quality that's in a lot of Ghibli movies, and also in Your Name - an interpretation of youth from the perspective of being distant from it in age. An interpretation of one's own memories. Not the experiences of youth alone, but the memory of them, the frame they now inhabit due to simply existing in a person who has held on to them for a significant portion of time.
And the interpretation is this: that often in youth, things seem mystical or magical or otherworldly, due to them being completely and utterly new. And as an adult, sometimes it's fun to not sift through the memories of what was actually real and what wasn't. It's a romanticization of youth, and not just a meditation or reflection.
uhh maybe
Totoro is some kind of magical forest spirit... I think it's reasonable to believe that he could use magic to show the girls the future results of thier planting. I think the giant tree was his way of showing them that even though progress in thier garden is slow, there is progress. He's showing them that if they keep hoping and tending thier tiny sprouts, the eventual results will be impressive. In a way, this mimics the cat bus scene. The girls were upset, and not seeing any progress in thier mom's healing, and after the magic cat bus trip, they have hope that, while it may be slow, things are getting better. Perhaps they didn't physically make the trip. Perhaps cat bus is a magical spirit that can let you visit a place without actually travelling. I think there's a sort of half-reality about the scenes with totoro and the cat bus, maybe because there's a bit of overlap between the real world and the spirit world in that case.
I just watched the film last night and it's really an amazing film. One of my favourite moments is when Satsuki and the dad find Mei after she's found Totoro for the first time, and Mei starts telling them about Totoro and they laugh, but Mei gets upset and shouts "I'm not lying!", after which the dad says: "Don't worry, neither of us thing you're lying". I think a typical western children's movie would just follow the line of 'the adults don't believe the kid, but later they find out the kid may actually be right after all' but this film completely goes the other way, avoiding the easy setup of drama, and shows a clear difference in culture - disbelieving the unplausible by default or believing that some supernatural things are just there and we can't always see them and that's fine.
I would like to point out a pretty clear reading of the scene. It carries basically the same meaning as your final "cool" reading. May and Satsuke have a dream in which they participate in Totoro's magical feat of growing the tree. Those seeds are magical, after all (if I remember correctly). That shared dream involves much of Totoro's magic and is influenced by his actual presence or his actual magic within the seeds. Seeing seeds sprout and grow after one night is itself a fantastical event in of itself regardless of the girls' experience the night before. That previous experience is a dream brought on by connection with Totoro's magic and the seeds they planted.
Again, it's essentially the same reading. We take the sprouts to be direct evidence of a miraculous work and accept that these miracles can resolve the emotional challenges the Kusakabe family faces when their mother falls ill. I just think that the movie presents more wiggle room in dealing with how real the girls' experiences are. I mean, the creatures only appear to children for heaven's sake. That's a direct invitation to be skeptical of the fantasy the film presents.
That last statement has interesting implications - do children's experiences carry less weight than adults's in terms of determining truth? If so, what exactly does that say about children?
Jascha Bull I mean, I think that specific question has a clear answer you already know. Kids’ active imaginations and often superstitious responses to the world resulting from their lack of continuous habitual experience and grounded division between fantasy and reality is a pervasive trope in fiction. We can question whether this trope is useful/good/accurate, but what is says about children is quite clear: they are unreliable narrators and observers.
they didn't grow big tree, did they?
Personally, I've always thought this film was about dealing with rough times by becoming more aware of your surroundings and learning to appreciate nature. And that Totoro, being a forest spirit, was a stand in for nature. A metaphor.
So the dream scene is not really a question of "Did it really happen?" It's more like the movie's way of showing us that, because of "Totoro", the girls are learning to appreciate and respect the time and care it takes for life to grow.
Oh thank god, I've been questioning whether The Chalk Zone was a real show for most of my life.
Yay, a big Joel video! And it’s about my neighbor! Dope day indeed!
i have to admit i wasn’t expecting to see the word epistemology in a totoro video but you really integrated both the philosophical and whimsical aspects of your script rather perfectly. thank you so much for this video, i enjoyed it
I always interpreted the creatures as letting them see the future. The big tree is what the sprouts will grow in to one day. The catbus lets them see that their mom will be ok before anyone else knows.
"I thought it was a dream." "It wasn't a dream." is kinda mistranslated in English. In original dub they said "It was a dream but..." "It wasn't a dream!"
Finally, somebody is talking about Chalk Zone
Damn, this was my first Miyazaki movie, and it's always been my favorite, probably for that reason. Thanks for reminding me how much I love it!
As someone who grew up with and calls this movie one of my favorites you highlighted parts and asked questions I’ve never thought about. Thanks for making me appreciate it even more!
My great grandparents had a few videos on VHS that they got from yard-sales, one was My Neighbor Totoro, the other was the Live Action Ninja Turtles.
Maybe this is plant nerdery, but: I always thought we had pretty good evidence of actual Totoro intervention with the tree sprouts, because they come from acorns. In real, un-magical life, acorns won't sprout rapidly and uniformly when planted. They have a symbiotic relationship with squirrels and usually won't sprout until the spring after the winter for which the squirrels cached them, and even then won't sprout all at once--some might take multiple years. But these acorns came up all at once, overnight, in warm weather. It's a Totoro miracle!
Totoro is real, and strong, and their friend.
The idea of thinking up a fantasy world where not just the rules of the universe are changed, but the whole way in which we perceive and learn from the universe are changed, is something I've wanted to do for quite some time without quite knowing how or exactly what that entails. This video really gave me a mind = blown moment and I feel like I have a much better idea of how to do that now. Thanks Joel, love you buddy!
4:03 I have a feeling that you were were really proud of yourself when you put that clip there
Wow! Big Joel, I’m just endlessly fascinated by your videos. They’re just so interesting! I’ve never thought about suspending the way we gain proof and information for fiction before, and it’s such a neat perspective. Thank you.
I really like this one, and the first time I've seen someone else really address the weird, cynical and off tone readings popularly applied to these movies. Good work, I would like to see more!
Never seen this movie but I love Big Joel so I'm def watching this
@彡ｆａｌｃｏｎミ I know, I definitely need to!
After that, watch Mononoke Hime and Kiki's Delivery Service. Spirited Away too, I guess.
"When Marney was There" was ... eh.
I found your analysis to be very intriguing as it presented a different interpretation of the movie from mine. However, I still feel that one can best appreciate this movie best when they take a step back and see everything for what it is. I appreciate your analysis as it dissects the movie and brought questions I never thought of, but at the same time your approach is one very common in the west, which approaches subjects with logic, and is bases itself on reductionism and Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction, hence why it was very difficult for you to accept the “inconsistencies” in the world.
The entire point of this movie is to show the value of childlike innocence. The very reason the girls were capable of perceiving Totoro was quite simply because of their innocence and lack of preconceptions. On the other hand, adults, due to their preconceptions, have limited imaginations which makes them incapable of perceiving Totoro. The value of childlike innocence is not something that is only found in Totoro. In fact many eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Zen Bhuddism believe that childlike innocence and lack of preconceptions to be the epitome of humanity. And I think this idea is worded best by the Japanese Monk Shunryu Suzuki:
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. ”
-Shunryu Suzuki
And I don’t mean that they can perceive Totoro because they are children and are at ages where they have fantasies inside their heads. I mean that they can literally perceive him. You see, Totoro like many of Miyazaki's films draws a lot of influences from Shintoism, the belief that natural spirits known as Kami operate the world. Totoro is a Kami which is evident by the fact that the tree where Totoro lives in is wrapped with a shimenawa. (the white rope which in Shinto culture represents a sacred space where Kami live) Furthermore, in Shintoism, Kami are believed to be the cause of natural phenomena, which was exactly what happened in Totoro. (Neko bus causing wind, Totoro causing the seeds to sprout) And I’ll say that in many eastern beliefs and philosophies, humans are not meant to understand the workings of the spiritual world. The workings of the natural world are reserved for the spirits that cause them. Which is why such inconsistencies in the world exist. Most eastern philosophy in general emphasizes that the universe is unpredictable and cannot be understood through logic alone.
So while I appreciate your analysis and your question on what is real and what is not, I believe that if you watch Totoro with the same childlike wonder, you can realize that everything in the movie is real. What you ended up doing was going the route of the adult and trying to break down the film to fit your own preconception and worldview based on western concepts of non-contradiction, objectivity, and reductionism. Which was why it didn't make as much sense to you.
Overall, great analysis, but I think these are some things you should consider as.
I grew up with this movie, and I always saw the Totoros as a representation of whimsical & cyclical time as it relates to the natural world. The tree growth overnight is a supernatural representation of what the tree will be, the grandness and gravity of the girl's actions, and the life it will hold, one day.
To me, the whimsical, cyclical, nature of life is represented analogously in the film through their mothers illness and recovery, and their own emotional state. Because there is a lot of joy and whimsy within the sadness, the girl's mother brushing their hair when they went to the hospital, Satsuki and Kanto's cute budding romance, Mei's day at school with Satsuki, and in general the joy of discovering the countryside, even as this horrible, stressful thing is happening to their family. It connects human lives to the natural world in that way, and I do believe if there is a root connection with all of Miyazaki's works, it is the desire to connect humans to the natural world.
Ps I was really sad your video about Anita Sarkeesian was deleted. Can you get it back up? It seems unfair.
The disconnect between an individual, human’s emotional reality/interpretation of reality from the actual reality, I think can only be discussed through another disconnect from a true reality. The cat-bus very realistically mimics how solutions to long term problems feel in real life, to humans. After days+ of anxiety and grief, a solution coming to the source of those will bring immediate, brief joy or euphoria. Not that anyone asked for my 2 cents.
>The cat-bus very realistically mimics how solutions to long term problems feel in real life, to humans. After days+ of anxiety and grief, a solution coming to the source of those will bring immediate, brief joy or euphoria.
This is a really interesting perspective. Usually we tell ourselves not to believe problems just solve themselves like that, but you're right, this may very well be how problems get solved generally. Although, to add to the paradox, this only happens because we've taken up the full anxiety of the problem. If we just comfortably sit on our ass that Catbus won't come.
Really reminds me of Zizek saying that he believes in miracles, and that solutions only come when we've grasped the full impossibility of a situation. I wonder if you've been influenced by him.
I love this interpretation
@@lavamatstudios I fundamentally disagree that taking on the full anxiety of the problem is required, humans tend to take on significantly more stress over problems than is required or healthy.
This is my favorite scene too!! I also cannot accept the morbid reading of this film, Totoro and his magic have to be real for the film to work for me. It is such a beautiful film with childish whimsy throughout sadness of bad circumstances.
me: i like my neighbor totoro. its a fun, lighthearted movie with cute animal characters-
*Big Joel:* What is our burden of proof in claiming something is true?
You hear that, Peter Coffin? *E P I S T E M O L O G Y*
Didn't you get the message? The working class doesn't understand big words.
hey PETER ITS YOUR LOIS
@@Ty-jg8pn That wasn't Peter's point. Like, at all
Feel free to make lighthearted stuff whenever you want, this was delightful and I loved it.
When we were kids little things like the sprouts felt as magical to us as the big trees do now.
This made me tear up for some reason, in a really good way. Thanks big joel
Great video Big Joel. Your videos are always excellent, and I love your distinct personality. You cover a wide variety of topics which also keeps me engaged. I'm always excited to click on one of your videos whether it be on a familiar or unfamiliar topic.
I always thought Totoro and everything else was real. But available for the children. Totoro and his friends were real for the kids but it won’t show that magic to the adults or rather their magic won’t disrupt reality. They make the trees grow. Which disrupts reality so they make everything back to normal. But the seeds grow as a message to the kids like ‘don’t worry we were here’. The cat bus appears and it helps the children but this doesn’t disrupt reality as they manage to be invisible from the eyes of the adults.
I always thought of Totoro and his friends as guardians of the forest but more so guardians of the children. A positive force that only a child could perceive.
But that’s just my take. Lovely video btw.
After seeing Grave of the Fireflies a few weeks ago, I can't help but see it and Totoro as companion pieces of each other. In this context I think Totoro is great because, while Grave forces us to confront the horrors of war and humanity, Totoro forces us to believe in magic and optimism. Here, the little sister is found alive and well. Dad is around. Mom is alive. The big monster is a tangible fluffy being who is also explicitly the good guy. He allows children to be children, in a world where they could have possibly been deprived of happy childhoods. There's a lot of parallel themes in these two films which are handled completely differently, and explore childhood and growing up from completely opposite perspectives.
I actually saw this movie again recently like in the past few weeks or so, and I saw the sprouts as sort of a favor by a forest spirit that could only be seen when they want it to be seen, like Totoro's hidden hovel. Totoro wanted to excite the children and show them the magic of the forest, but Totoro also knew that the magic of the forest must be hidden, which is why the tree shouldn't actually grow that tall. Illusions are common in fae folklore, and visitation in dreams is also common. Totoro did help them grow the tree, but perhaps in a way that said, "Look at how wonderful it is to see nature grow. One day these sprouts might tower over this house. But for now, you should keep taking care of them." When you see it as more of an illusory promise, there's nothing about the scene that contradicts their behavior, and it's consistent with the fae aesthetic the film portrays. That there are two corroborating witnesses to every event makes it easily acceptable. The Catbus and Totoro avoid detection by anyone but the children, and help them in tangible, physical ways where they can, and most often when there aren't people around. Totoro's hovel is physically impenetrable unless he allows them in it. What was shown as Totoro and his companions ritualistically growing a gigantic tree was probably seen from the outside as sprouts finding their way out of the soil, where the protagonists are just astral projections or a shared hallucination, which is why their father didn't notice it.
I absolutely love these kinds of videos and the way that you think and analyze film scenes-especially those from Miyazaki. It's not how I found this channel (that was your God's Not Dead review), but definitely what made me sub!
I think I feel so lucky to have watched Miyazaki’s films as a small child. When I show these movies to my friends now, years later, they don’t understand why I, or anyone would like this, they find it strange and random, but as a kid, I could understand them, I was sucked into their world, whatever it was. I think I’m able to watch these movies again and again and enjoy them now because of the nostalgia and because I remember why I related to the movies.
Whether totoro's influence on the world is metaphorical or not, it doesnt matter, the creators are simply giving us a chance to see the world through the imagination soaked perspective of a child, thus ultimately it is their belief that makes it real.
I already liked this video from the title, but I was surprised at how much I liked watching you construct an analyzation of the deconstructionist concepts unconsciously conveyed to me when I watched the movie as a kid,
The 'evidence' of magic, like you mentioned, reminds me of Cinderella's glass slipper.
Living the life she has, it was strange for her to actually make it to the ball, but also that magic helped her get there there. When the night ended, the glass slipper was the only thing that stayed (strangely) which in good fortune was the last bit of magic that saved her from her evil step-mother.
Just like seeing Totoro that evening, who helped the girls 'grow' those acorn into a giant tree, at the end, when the night ended, they were just left with something small (like those sprouts) just to remind them that magic is real, if they just remember.
This is a real Western reading of the film, and I think you're kind of projecting Western concerns about consistency and the nature of reality onto a film that makes a pretty hard departure from them at the outset. You've assumed that verisimilitude for Miyazaki means the same thing it does for you, but I think that's a mistake. His realism isn't inherently factual or rational at all. He himself might be, but his films clearly are not. Things function genuinely as religion when they are part of a people's lived reality. And I think that a reading of these films that doesn't take into account the clear presence of Japan's major religions into account is mistaken. You're right in saying that there is no contradiction and the protagonists were right all along, but I'd suspect that to the film's adult Japanese audience at least, and maybe to their kids, that's obvious. Rather than presenting the audience with a contradiction, the film is merely presenting a depiction of the interplay between religious truth, childrens imagination, nature, and the suffering in human life. Here, the film doesn't, I think, even consider that things contradict. There's just all sorts of different simultaneously true stuff and that's what reality is.
I'm not Japanese so I can't be sure, and I'm certainly not saying that Japanese society is devoid of rationality or anything like that, just that the tolerance for simultaneous truth and ambiguity is a bit higher. I'll go annoy some of my colleagues next week and see if I'm right.
Update: my colleague says this is roughly correct and was making funny faces at the idea there were conflicting realities there.
It also kind of reminds me of my logic professor at University, a Japanese guy, who taught us about three valued logic and logics where things can be true and false at the same time, and how to model them with predicate logic and sets. I never thought at the time that his upbringing had anything to do with the content of his course and of course I don't know, but based on how readily my students here reject the idea of a singular consistent truth when presented with contradictions, I wonder if being raised in Japan or being Japanese, or living here increases people's tolerance for contradicting realities to be simultaneously true. Again, I'm not Japanese so don't take anything I'm saying as fact and go around repeating it, but I can say at least that I've got a bit more evidence for the idea that seeing a contradiction there isn't what happens in the film's intended audience.
@@koitsuga Yes, this is an excellent analysis. Without appreciation for how a western concept of "real" doesn't fit into a Buddhist worldview, you're bound to misunderstand a film like this.
I think most of this take is pretty sound and valid, although I think the one thing lacking from the analysis is an examination of the cultural symbolism at work in Totoro. This movie is very much about the power of a child's imagination, as a lot of Miyazaki work is, but it's also very specifically about Shinto concepts that get lost in translation and non-Japanese viewers who aren't familiar with Shintoism. For the longest time, I thought Totoro was like... literally some giant bear-cat creature that lived in the woods and there was some magical reasons the kids couldn't always find him, but the reality is that Totoro is supposed to be like either a regional forest god or maybe literally the spirit of the tree he lives in. There's a lot of traditions based around the idea that, instead of the materialistic view that acorns just fall from trees and sometimes they germinate and become new trees, that there are little tiny spirits or elves or whatever that go around planting them. That's where the imagery for scenes like the ones in this video, or the ones where Mei is running around after the little ones dropping acorns, etc, that's the sort of traditions they're rooted in.
So it would seem to me that there's probably some reflection in Totoro not only about the imagination of a child, but how a child would view these colorful legends about forest spirits and regional gods that play in the background of their life. There is probably some license to not make concrete logical sense because, with a lot of these old traditions that don't deal with a monotheistic god, the borders between things- even dreams and reality, which is a big concept in Buddhism which Shintoism borrows from -are not always clear cut. Life in these traditions are about balance and allowing the world to flow through you, making sure to drink in miracles while you can.
What a beautiful interpretation of a beautiful and wholesome film.
this is the kind of content you excel at.
I don't now how i came in this channel, but i love it! A very good contente, tanks, from Brazil
I really like this one, Joel. I think you could have included a reference to the common motif in film and TV where some story happens in a dream or fantasy, the person wakes up or returns to the "real world," but there's some small remnant from the dream world that is found by the protagonist.
It's about expectation, and what it means to use fantasy to justify what happens to you in life. For a child who's got a lot of pressure sitting on their lap people develop the tactic of using fantasy as a way to come into terms with the real world. Good things and bad things happen no matter what you think, but if we turn to "magic friends" as a reason for the things happening it makes it a bit bearable. The final scene is like every other scene, a fantasy occurs when we're in trouble, and even if things don't happen magically as we'd like them to be, things still happen and life goes on in its own way.I always cry a little bit when I think of Totoro too much.
I finally got this on DVD yesterday, at a Japanese video/music/anime shop at my local Mitsuwa Marketplace. Ghibli videos are really hard to get, even here in "silicon valley".
Kids often haven't learned all the limits in what you're supposed to believe in or not. When I was little I used to be able to make figures that'd float in the air. Geometrical stuff like maps, and when I was learning the alphabet I was delighted one night in bed, to have the alphabet's letters come dancing out from under my blanket. I used this stuff to entertain myself when dropping off to sleep. One night, maybe I was 8 or even 9, getting pretty old, I made a really huge one, a pattern so big and glorious that if it were real, anyone would be able to see it. I ran out of my bedroom and got my mom to come and see it. It was still hanging there in the air when I got back, of course. "Don't you see it?" I asked. My mom insisted she didn't see anything and went back to her bed. I then decided that making figures in the air was immature and childish and I should stick to grown-up things from then on.
An interesting comparison is that I really began to think of my reading of My Neighbour Totoro when watching it with my kiddo. In my mind, the narrative of the world allows for an entirely "unmagical" real-life storyline going on: children playing in the woods, real sprouts growing, Mei running away from home to look for her mother, being found, visiting the hospital and then coming home.
I had an experience of getting lost from my parents in a German city and retracing all my steps back to the department store we were parked at. It was a really emotional experience as a kid and I recall half of my mind was in despair and full of emotion while the other half was concentrating so hard on finding the right path and my family. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to simply say Sasuke finding Mei/the cat-bus is when she starts thinking seriously about where her sister could have gone, and because she's able to imagine what her sister would be thinking, this empathy allows her to realise where her sister was headed and what road she would've taken.
In this reading Totoro and the sprites, as well as the cat-bus are just an interpretation of real events through the imagination and dreams of the children, or their childhood memories. Interestingly my kiddo was adamant at the time that no, Totoro was real, and all that magical stuff happened and rejected my realistic take. That made me rethink my position and allow that perhaps, both layers of interpretation were at work at once, interconnected, showing that our imaginations and dreams really ARE just as important and just as real as the mundane facts of life.
Later when my kid watched the film many more times with her smaller sister, the two really bonded over this and I'd like to think she is was able to experience and see both levels of the story at once, not as a contradiction, but as different aspects of the same amazing world.
Great video btw, thanks!
=8)-DX
(Also like to add if it wasn't clear that watching Ghibli films with children is important. It definitely allowed me to rejoice at the saplings instead of being indifferent. So a lot of the story to me is about the relationship of a parent/older sibling to their child/younger sibling and being open to share both the reality and the wonder of life within that relationship as a mutually beneficial exchange, not just as a teaching/condescending one).
This may sound odd, but I think it's a bit of an extension to some points you make here. I always felt like Totoro and Catbus had something to do with the way we explain natural phenomena to children. Like, during a thunderstorm, my mother used to say that the angels were going bowling, and even though I knew on some level that it was fantasy, it did provide some comfort for me when it came to something that, at the time, I may have been incapable of understanding. I also feel this way because Totoro has these moments of being almost frightening. However, because the children are aware of who he is and what he's capable of, they're not afraid of him. Does this make any sense?
Also, please read what Nick Cave says about mythology and memory in the Sick Bag Song. It's so beautiful and really relates to this so perfectly.
hey i know this video is three years old but i just wanted to say that my neighbor totoro is my all-time favorite movie and has been since i was barely able to speak. when i say i grew up and learned from this movie, i mean it. it's a huge part of my life and this video made me see it in a whole new aspect! i always viewed it as a movie based on childhood innocence and how children view and make sense of the world around them, but the way you explained your theory was such an interesting take and i really liked it! really great video, i loved it
I kind of see it as Totoro is a spirit that guides them to accomplish the tasks of the movie on their own, so he gave them the courage to plant the trees and showed them what they can be, and he gave her the courage to find her sister, it just didn't show us the reality side of it. Perhaps the cat bus was a real bus. I could be way off but I prefer not to think everyone is dead, so I'm not going to.
this is so sweet i cried
I watched this movie constantly as a kid and there was no questions in my mind. I might have just been too young to understand it but I truly thought totoro grew the tree. He grew it and then it started growing. The cat bus was real and their mom is getting better.
I always read this movie as the, magic of the mundane. Totoro is a force of nature, a cute, benevolent, god. I love this movie
I think you can look at the big tree being an apology for something big has occurred. The plants have been able to grow which was no garentuee and in a short time too, and the fact they meet up with Totoro being a large event. Also playing on a child's mentality that even a tiny bit of growth is such a huge thing for them.
totoro is not necessarily 'real" but he brings the light in the world and helps children and adults, overcome certian proplems in thier own way. They are figures to be proud of is what I mean. this movie is just too *POWERFUL* to say in words.
man i love this video so much but i almost cried when the score started playing. the music in totoro and spirited away automatically makes me sob
To really understand this film, you have to understand and appreciate the role of Shinto and Buddhism in Japanese society. This is basically a morality tale for children teaching them the value of faith, respect, and purity of heart.
I think Totoro appears to two children just when they sound tired or when they are sleeping,Tired to wait the bus, When May go to the hospital after ( 3 km)...
good analysis (and excellent matching of video to points in the dialogue)
I took it for granted that there are two worlds, an ordinary one and a magical one, and that Totoro is able to bring elements of these worlds together so that they temporarily overlap.
Subbed, great video. I totally disagree, for what it's worth, but your analysis was really solid. As a kid who lost their mum at a similar age, for me this movie is about fantasy as a defence mechanism against grief. I want to believe your magical realist interpretation, but the bittersweet reading is just too true to life to reject. I think the reason your review moved me, though, is because I think you can actually have it both ways: it's not only in fiction that the question "what is real?" is valid, after all.
I really like this interpretation bc it makes me think of the way that I felt as a little kid when deciding if something was real. I was told bathroom was haunted → I investigate and hear a weird sound → the bathroom has been proven to be haunted. Obviously this logic doesn’t add up but it’s interesting to think that within the universe of My Neighbor Totoro that little ghost hunter me was right and the way a child sees the world and the supernatural is the way it truly is.
Well, how I've always seen it through the lense of child and the way children see positive changes.
Little miracles through a childs eye are MAGIC. Their mother getting better, despite odds. Their trees are growing. They are miracles to them.
Someone please photoshop a pic of Big Joel with a much smaller Big Joel beside him with the caption "don't ever talk to me or my son again." Also this video was just very sweet and gentle to wake up to! I could never take that other theory seriously (that they died in the wilderness) either. It's very "all the kids in Rugrats were just Angelica's fevered hallucinations!!!1!!" You've got a really great eye for aspects of film that I never would have noticed before, and this vid was like, kinda poetic! Fantastic video! : D
Thank you for your work!
The conclusion of this video is interesting to me because as a kid, that was definitely my interpretation of the movie's events. I didn't wonder what was real, I just took the girls' reactions at face value, and until now I hadn't even thought of how it could make a viewer question the reality of the movie. (So after the first couple minutes of this video, I had to do the whole internal "wait wait wait fuck is May really okay at the end????" and I'm glad you dismissed that theory quickly because I don't want to turn my enjoyment of this movie into Edgelord Sadness Time.)
The movie was about the sick mother (earth) getting better only after receiving a gift from the garden (trees). It was an eco-message before cinema got onto the subject.
I didn’t read into much the magical stuff because magical realism is never the ‘main’ point. It’s used to bring up an issue in an esoteric (or fun) way, not to solve a mystery.
I saw it personally as Totoro leaving to do the same thing elsewhere with other children. Plus the solution is never ‘magic’, children (and eventually adults) would need to do the job themselves (growing trees and taking care of the environment).