My Neighbor Totoro

My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Tonari no Totoro) is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki?, animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten?, and the fourth feature film directed by Miyazaki.¹³²⁰ Set in Tokorozawa? in Saitama Prefecture in post-war rural Japan, it follows a university professor’s two young daughters, Satsuki and Mei, and their encounters with friendly wood spirits after the family moves to the countryside.¹³ The film premiered on April 16, 1988, as a double feature with Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies?.¹³ Running about one hour and twenty-six minutes, it carries a G rating and was distributed under such promotional catchphrases as “This strange creature is still in Japan. Maybe.”.²⁰¹³

Plot and characters

The Kusakabe family — father Tatsuo, a professor working in the archaeology and anthropology departments of a Tokyo university, and his daughters, roughly ten- or eleven-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei — move into a run-down house combining traditional Japanese and modern Western elements, in farmland modeled on Saitama Prefecture outside Tokyo.¹¹¹⁶¹⁸ They relocate to be nearer the mountainside hospital where the girls’ mother, Yasuko, convalesces from tuberculosis at the Shichikokuyama Hospital, noted for its tuberculosis treatment program.¹¹¹⁸ The children first encounter the soot sprites (susuwatari) inhabiting the shadowy corners of the building — balls of soot that flee light and abandon a house once they judge its occupants to be good people — then the large forest spirit that Mei calls “Totoro,” a childish mispronunciation of torōru, the Japanese rendering of “troll,” who lives in a great camphor tree near the house.¹¹¹⁶¹⁸

Totoro is a grey, silent creature at least three meters tall, communicating through loud bellows understood only by other totoro and the cat bus.¹⁶¹⁸ Two smaller companions accompany the great grey Ō-Totoro: the medium grey Chū-Totoro and the small white Chibi-Totoro, which together gather acorns.¹⁶¹⁸ In the film’s most celebrated scene, Satsuki meets Totoro at a bus stop while the girls wait one rainy evening for their father, and after she shares her umbrella with him he gives her magic acorn seeds that sprout into giant trees before he departs aboard the “cat bus,” a magical vehicle that races invisibly across the countryside.¹¹ When Mei goes missing late in the film in an attempt to walk to the distant hospital and the family’s neighbor Granny fears she has drowned, Satsuki pleads with Totoro for help, and he summons the cat bus, which finds her and carries both girls to see their mother.¹¹¹⁶ The cat bus is based on the Japanese folk belief in the bake neko, a cat that gains magical shape-changing powers with age.¹⁸ Other characters include Kanta, a preteen boy of the village who is ambivalent toward Satsuki and shares Miyazaki’s own fondness for cartoons and airplanes, and Kanta’s grandmother, who sometimes cares for the girls and gives the family vegetables.¹⁶¹⁸

Themes and inspiration

The film has been read as a nostalgic evocation of rural life in late-1950s Japan, or of Miyazaki’s own childhood in the late 1940s, with fantastic elements drawn from Shinto, the traditional animistic religion in which Totoro and the other spirits are understood as kami.¹¹ The scholar Susan J. Napier described it as “perhaps the most ‘Japanese’ of Miyazaki’s films” and “a nostalgic personal fantasy”.¹¹ Some observers have noted autobiographical parallels: Miyazaki’s mother underwent a nine-year period of treatment for spinal tuberculosis when he was a boy, mirroring Yasuko Kusakabe’s illness.¹¹¹⁸ Miyazaki himself framed the project against the internationalism of much of his work, writing in The Art of My Neighbor Totoro that “it’s the most local things that can have a worldwide effect” and that, rather than being sentimental, the film “must be a joyful, entertaining film” made in the belief that things “forgotten,” “ignored,” and “considered lost” still exist.¹¹

According to scholar Raz Greenberg, Miyazaki drew on nature to explore emotional themes, and the Panda Kopanda? films inspired the design of Mei’s character and the fantasy of friendship with a big, furry creature.²³ The character Mei was modeled on Miyazaki’s niece, who later married Toy Story 3 art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi.⁹¹⁰ The story originally featured a single girl, later divided into an older and a younger sister whose names deliberately echo each other — Satsuki being the traditional name for the fifth month of the Japanese calendar, the equivalent of the English “May”.¹⁸

The film is set in Tokorozawa, and its success helped spur conservation efforts in the Sayama Hills? of Saitama Prefecture, organized as the Totoro Forest Project and led by the Totoro no Furusato Foundation.¹³ A 2008 fundraising exhibition drew works from more than 200 artists, co-sponsored by Pixar, to save one of the forests that inspired the film.¹⁰¹³ Tsutsumi’s charity efforts for the cause led to his 2009 reunion and marriage with Miyazaki’s niece, with Miyazaki in attendance.¹⁰ In 2018 Akemi Miyazaki, Hayao’s wife, published The Place Where Totoro Was Born, featuring her illustrations of the forests in Sayama Hills.¹³

Production and voices

Produced by Toru Hara, the film was made by a small team; Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki later recalled that “back when we were making My Neighbor Totoro, we only had eight animators” and that the film was completed in eight months.⁶¹³ Suzuki cited that pace as a measure of how far Ghibli’s methods had shifted by 2020, when 60 animators on Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? produced only about one minute of hand-drawn animation per month.³⁶ The original Japanese voice cast included Noriko Hidaka? as Satsuki, Chika Sakamoto? as Mei, and Hitoshi Takagi? as Totoro.¹³²⁰ Tatsuo was voiced by Shigesato Itoi, who elsewhere is known as a game designer and copywriter, and Yasuko by Sumi Shimamoto, who also voiced the cat bus.¹⁰¹⁸

The film received multiple English dubs over the years.² Streamline Pictures dubbed it around 1989 on behalf of Tokuma Shoten, directed by Gregory Snegoff; that version was released theatrically in the United States in 1993 by Troma’s 50th St. Films and on home video by Fox the following year.² Disney redubbed the film for its 2006 home-video release, directed by Rick Dempsey, with a cast including Tim Daly, Lea Salonga, and real-life sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning as Satsuki and Mei.²¹⁷ A further dub was produced in Hong Kong for broadcast on TVB Pearl.²

Reception and legacy

My Neighbor Totoro received critical acclaim and developed a worldwide cult following.¹³ It won the Animage Anime Grand Prix, the Mainichi Film Award and Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film in 1988, and a Special Award at the Blue Ribbon Awards that year.¹³ On IMDb it held a user rating of 8.1 out of 10 from about 435,000 votes as of July 2026.²⁰ The Art of My Neighbor Totoro was subsequently published by Tokuma.¹³

The film and its title character became cultural icons; the film had grossed over $41 million at the worldwide box office as of September 2019, in addition to approximately $277 million from home-video sales and $1.142 billion from licensed merchandise, for roughly $1.46 billion in total lifetime revenue.¹³ A plush Totoro appears in an extended cameo in Toy Story 3.¹⁰ A short sequel, Mei and the Kittenbus, was released in 2002 exclusively for the Ghibli Museum.¹³ A replica of the Kusakabe house was constructed for the 2005 World Expo in Japan, its interior styled to appear “straight out of the 1950s”.¹¹ Distributed in North America by GKIDS and streamed via HBO Max, the film remains part of the studio’s touring Studio Ghibli Fest programming.¹⁷³

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO | Official English TrailerGKIDS Films