My Neighbor Totoro and His Dream of Flight - DPops

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My Neighbor Totoro and His Dream of Flight
Music by Joe Hisashi
Arr. June Yoo ′25
Conducted by Eli Gilbert ′24
Featured Soloists:
Jeremy Ng (03:15)
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ABOUT THE WORK
Each year, we ask our very own DPoppers what music they might like to play with the orchestra, and the magical soundtracks of Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli are always an uncontested favorite. We thus continue this tradition with My Neighbor Totoro and His Dream of Flight, an original arrangement of the main themes from My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and The Wind Rises (2013), two films written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and scored by Joe Hisaishi.
My Neighbor Totoro has frequently been cited as one of the best animated films of all time, and its eponymous furry friend, Totoro, has become a part of the iconography of Studio Ghibli and modern Japanese culture at large. In the movie, two little girls and their father move to the countryside near a hospital where the girls’ mother is bedridden. The girls soon discover and befriend the local forest spirits, who help the girls cope with their boredom, loneliness, and fear.
The Wind Rises, then, is the perfect counterpoint to the tale of Totoro, as Miyazaki revisits a familiar tale as a fully fledged filmmaker. Whereas Totoro is a celebration of the power of imagination, The Wind Rises is a story of dreams. The only one of Miyazaki’s films removed from the magical elements, The Wind Rises tells the life story of an aeronautical engineer, Jiro Horikoshi, who devotes his life to creating the best aircraft Japan has ever seen. In pursuit of this dream, he gives up everything he has, even losing the love of his life to tuberculosis. But when the Imperial Navy takes over the industry and his art is twisted into weaponry, Jiro is forced to come to terms with the regrets of his life and the vanity of his craft. Poetically, though, he also learns to appreciate the beauty of his creation as a realization of dreams.
Miyazaki’s upbringing was troubled by illness, and his mother was absent for much of his childhood as she battled tuberculosis in the hospital. These themes manifest themselves in Miyazaki’s writing, and there is a certain unease that underpins his films, however cheerful they may appear. Hisaishi’s scores, then, mirror this sentiment through his characteristic juxtaposition of uplifting melodies and melancholy harmonies. You will hear two of these compositions today. This arrangement opens with the main theme from The Wind Rises, then breaks out into the more lively theme from My Neighbor Totoro. Thereafter, the two themes take turns playing over each other, leading to a bombastic finale in which they ultimately weave together as one.
~ June Yoo ′25