This is one of the best films of all time, sure the plot wasn’t perfect, but the cinematography was absolutely brilliant.

I can’t believe some idiot like you who dares defile the name of hobby philosophers would write such a post. You would dare make a review under the name newGEEKPHILOSOPHER without considering things about subtext or even philosophical queries brough up by the film

The story is this: Two girls move into an old house in the countryside, and it’s apparently haunted. Mind you, Japanese people have a weird definition of “haunted”, and in this movie “haunted” means inhabited by soot-sprites or forest spirits. The two girls and their father explore their new surroundings, including meeting an old lady known as Grandma, and a boy that clearly has a crush on the older girl of the two. Then the younger girl, Mei, gets transported to a place in the forest where the Totoro lives, a sort of furry troll that appears in her storybooks. Rather than mocking disbelief, her kind father and sister accept that the forest spirits are only seen when they want to be seen.

Also, the two girls have a mother who is sick in hospital, and it appears it will be soon before she can come home, but she gets another cold and this doesn’t happen.

But before this there’s a lot of imaginative sequences with the Totoro and a Catbus (a cat that’s also a bus), as well as a surreal but enjoyable sequence where the acorns the girls planted grow into a very tall tree.

The final sequence of the film is when Mei gets lost trying to walk to the hospital which is a “three hour walk away even for grown ups!” as Grandma says. The Catbus saves the day and everything is well in the world again.

This is a children’s movie, but as a young adult I found this film really charming and nice. Hayao Miyazaki delivers once again with this effort and I urge you to see it.