The ATP folks recently watched My Neighbor Totoro for a member episode. The film didn’t land with Casey for the same reason I suspect it doesn’t land with many viewers, which is that “nothing happens”. That’s not true of course. Stuff does happen in My Neighbor Totoro, but not in the structure of most mainstream western films. It doesn’t have three distinct acts where a clear and obvious villain or obstacle is introduced in the first act, stakes are dramatically raised in the second act, and things come to a resolution in the third act. The lack of this specific structure is why I suspect viewers like Casey get the sense that My Neighbor Totoro doesn’t have enough plot.
The best my non-media-studies brain can describe the structure of My Neighbor Totoro is “emotional crescendo”. As John deftly laid out in his explanation, Totoro is a film about and from the perspective of two girls, four-year-old Mei and ten-year-old Satsuki, who are both coping with the fact that their mother has been hospitalized with some undisclosed illness.
My Neighbor Totoro doesn’t dwell on the girls’ anxiety, but distracts them along with the audience using its titular character. Totoro with various other spirits throughout the film don’t provide levity as much as they do comfort. He appears every time that the children have something to be anxious about. Mei first sees Totoro when she is alone on Satsuki’s first day of school, and Satsuki first sees him when their father doesn’t come home at his usual time. These alternating beats of anxiety and comfort build throughout My Neighbor Totoro, and climaxes with its scariest moment wherein Mei disappears and is feared dead before the film rebounds to maximum comfort with Totoro victoriously coming to the rescue.
I’ve heard fans and critics alike chalk My Neighbor Totoro‘s structure to being non-western. While I’m certain there are many aspects of My Neighbor Totoro that benefit from being steeped in Japanese culture, I don’t think its structure is one of them. I’ve seen western films that also have an “emotional crescendo”. The one that comes to mind for me is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Live action R-rated horror movies don’t tend to have much in common with animated ones aimed at children, and while I certainly wouldn’t recommend one based on the appreciation of the other, The Shining and My Neighbor Totoro are oddly similar in a few ways. They both feature families with small children who are compelled to relocate as a result of some crisis to a remote location laden with spirits. The difference is that The Shining‘s emotional crescendo doesn’t offer any comfort. Instead the film relentlessly builds tension and anxiety as Jack Torrence is continually manipulated by malicious spirits until it climaxes when he resolves to chase down and attempt to murder his family.
There are plenty of reasons to feel that My Neighbor Totoro is a litmus test for being a decent human of good taste, and plenty others to feel like it’s 80-some-odd minutes of waiting for something to happen. Whatever those reasons are, the structure being somehow foreign shouldn’t be one of them.
