Charlie Clark
In an essay I want to subtitle Invitation to the Consolations of the Interior but won't
because I can't get past that -tion rhyme and because I don't write essays,
rather than attending to the generosity with which the 1988 Studio Ghibli film
My Neighbor Totoro lets its revelations proceed,
as though it wants above all to give assurances
about the lives its viewers for ninety-some minutes
~
observe,
I would probably point out too eagerly that despite the absent mother
and the various tunnels and small rooms
through which the children pass or linger
before they see the spirits that occupy their new house
and, more crucially, its surrounding grounds,
~
the film doesn't seem
especially interested in Freudian analysis. But
~
the truth is I don't know much
about Freud
beyond the way his name has become shorthand
for how people can need or do things
though even to them the reasons are withheld.
The house
Satsuki, Mei, and their father come to live in is odd,
falling apart, off alone in a sea
of grass and trees. Even its rotting is a pleasure.
In the film,
the mother is in the hospital with something because
parents sometimes have these ailments that are better left unnamed.
~
It takes me some time
to notice she's even missing because everything proceeds so easily.
The children explore the house, do chores, play. The family
even bathes together, laughing against the wind
when it rips loose roof shingles into the trees.
Later, upon first discovering Totoro—
the benign presiding spirit whose body is massive, gray-black, and soft
like a child's bean-bag notion of a bear; whose limbs and mouth
move with the dreamy fluidity animation allows, appearing
and disappearing as a scene's unfolding graces
dictate; and whose growl
resembles a garbage disposal working on a lemon rind—Mei
~
is pleased.
Though it is tedious,
~
an inventory seems in order.
There are five instances where the film's two worlds
blend, allowing the children to encounter spirits. In each case,
Satsuki and Mei make some physical entry into
or observation through an interior.
First, the soot sprites
~
the children find when they pass through the trench dug in the ground
separating their new home from the road, and then enter the home itself.
~
Second,
when Mei, alone, peers into the rusted depth of a stray bucket,
seeing through the hole in its bottom a small spirit collecting acorns; she tracks it
under their house, beneath some brambles, and eventually down a hole
between the roots of a camphor tree, where she slips and lands
on Totoro's sprawling belly.
~
Three, when standing at the bus stop, waiting
for their father to arrive so they can give him the umbrella he forgot
to take with him to his job at a local university, and watching
a frog watch them where they stand within
the enclosure the rain, night, streetlight, and umbrella make,
Satsuki
~
and a napping Mei are joined by Totoro, who accepts Satsuki's offer
of her father's umbrella, and delights in the sound the raindrops make
on its cloth before he catches the giant orange yowling
catbus that arrives suddenly and just as suddenly
passes into the night.
Four, after
~
their father drapes mosquito netting above their bedrolls
and they lie down to sleep, Satsuki and Mei see Totoro and his minions
in the yard, performing a dance that causes acorns
the children planted to grow, instantly, into giant trees.
It is an enchantment
the children can rise and join in, with Totoro eventually
inviting them to cling to his body
as he steps onto a spinning top
he then rides into the trees' rippling canopy.
And finally,
~
at the climax, with Mei lost, Satsuki crawls through the same
brambles Mei first entered.
Finding Totoro home, she asks him for help in locating Mei.
Totoro,
incensed, obliges. He carries Satsuki to the top of the trees,
where the catbus meets them and delivers
Satsuki to Mei.
Though they fail to see any of this,
~
I am grateful the adults in the film do not seem diminished. During the scene
where Totoro stands beside the children in the rain,
~
I touch my daughter's arm.
In a theater, even one full of yammering, sugar-wrung children,
it feels like a polite way for joy to leak.
My child,
~
for whom divinity is just a deep voice that steals
friends' ferrets and makes it rain,
~
does not
respond. As I do
~
with so much great art, the argument churning though Totoro
that I most gravitate toward
is the one that justifies the work itself and the pleasure of the dark room
in which we have gathered to watch its light pass. Looking
~
more broadly
at the films of Studio Ghibli—or at least the ones my daughter is old enough
to watch—it often strikes me that we are always composing after
trauma. And that, to the filmmakers, the impulse to do so remains wishful
and entirely reasonable. It's a point underscored
in the opening
~
of 1972's Panda! Go! Panda!, when Mimiko's grandmother leaves her alone
at home so she can take the train to Nagasaki, where Grandmother will attend
Grandfather's memorial service. Mimiko,
undaunted, probably all of seven,
walks through the local shops, blithely
chattering to whomever
about her plans. When she encounters the titular panda,
they play.
~
It is like finding in the pocket of a coat you haven't worn since last winter
the warm and pulsing body of a marsupial thought for more than a century extinct,
I like to imagine Hayao Miyazaki looking up from his desk
and claiming, watching these pictures, each time, proceed from your own hand.
~
Also,
to build a pleasurable world, first you must have the gentleness necessary to devise it.
~
Sometimes
we require the supernatural to illuminate the natural.
~
In Totoro,
just before the climax, before Mei runs down a narrow lane alone, holding an ear
of corn as long as her torso, and finds only a goat, wide face all want;
before she runs off again and is lost; before Satsuki calls on Totoro
who in turn calls on the catbus; before the catbus reunites Satsuki and Mei
and then delivers them to the hospital where they perch in a tree, watching
through the window as their mother and father talk, safely,
all of which
~
transpires with an inevitability that does nothing to lessen
the necessity of its relief;
~
I am distracted,
making mental notes for an essay I will not write about how casual Totoro is
regarding the mother's ailment. Then, twice,
Satsuki shouts at Mei a question about their mother containing
the word die.
Hearing it
~
is a little like falling to the ground from the low branches of a tree
in which you'd been for some time daydreaming and upon impact
feeling all the honey bees that sleep inside your lungs exit like you are a bugle
whose mild variety of music they have suddenly and furiously grown tired of
making.
Like seeing
~
later, on cardboard, in blue marker, in her crabbed, ecstatic hand, my name, my wife's, and her own
included on my daughter's list of people she knows who will die.
~
In the film's first scene,
burrowed beneath a table
in the back of an open moving truck,
Satsuki and Mei hide
when they think they see police.
There is
~
no explanation. Watching them there,
it feels
~
so natural and enlivening, seeking someplace dim and close to hide.
Here, in this house,
~
where it is dark, and night, and where our daughter in the next room sleeps,
I turn,
return, again, to Totoro; a film so companionable, so kind,
I think it improves the world.
~
I write this
not to leave it.