Review Totoro (Part II)

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (Film Review) 

In order to get close to the hospital where his wife was undergoing treatment, Tatsuo Kusakabe (a scientist) brought her two children (Satsuki and Mei) to live in an old house in the village. During this time, the empty house is always taken care of by a grandmother who has a grandson named Kanta.

The first day of the Kusakabe family entered the house, Satsuki and May were struck by the multitude of small furry black-haired creatures that inhabited the house. Tatsuo calls the creature Makkuro Kurosuke. While Kanta's grandmother called it Milk-atari (sooty fairy). They live in empty old houses, which always cover the houses with soot and dust. According to Kanta's grandmother, the milk would soon leave when the householder always smiled.

While Satsuki's school and Tatsuo are busy with his work, May plays alone in his yard. May find the acorns along the path he passes. That's when Mei sees two little creatures then follows him. The two creatures brought Mei to a big tree. Mei went into the alley full of roots from the giant tree. It was the beginning of May's meeting with Totoro. Great gray haired creature. In fact, Mei fell asleep on her body. When May recounts his encounter with Totoro on Satsuki and Tatsuo, they do not believe it

One day, when it rained, Satsuki took the initiative to pick up Tatsuo who forgot to bring an umbrella. Together in May, Satsuki stood at the bus stop waiting for their father to miss the bus because the train he was driving was late. It was so long waiting, May sleepy and fall asleep on Satsuki's back. At that moment, Totoro came and stood beside Satsuki with a leafy umbrella. May lend his father's umbrella to Totoro. Before separating, Totoro also gave a bamboo leaf wrap that contains the grain, then went up the bus that form a twelve-foot big cat. Satsuki happily and May recounts their encounter with Totoro and the cat bus he boarded. Later, this encounter with Totoro brings Satsuki and Mei into a touching fantasy adventure.

One hot night, Satsuki and Mei awoke. Near the plot of land where they planted grains of Totoro giving, they saw Totoro with two little creatures that may have ever followed. They were dancing around the patch of land. Satsuki and Mei soon join and follow their movements. So, on the plot of the land also grows the smaller shoots that grew longer and one of them into a giant tree. With Totoro, they fly up to the top of the tree and enjoy the night view from there. When awakened, only small shoots that grow in the plot of land. The giant trees they occupied last night were gone.

When Satsuki and Mei were helping Kanta's grandmother picking corn in the garden, telegram came. How surprised were Satsuki and Mei when he learned that the telegram was sent from the hospital. The telegram contents are about delaying their mother's return. They became sad and devastated. Mei is stubborn to walk to hospital. Carrying a corn he had picked from Kanta's grandmother's garden, Mei hoped her mother would be healed. The departure of Mei made Satsuki and his neighbors busy looking for him. However, Mei was not found.

Out of desperation, Satsuki asks for Totoro's help. Did Satsuki find Mei? What's the fate of May and what happened to their mother? Everything will be missed in this movie. ^ _ ^

From the plot, My Neighbor Totoro is lighter and simpler than Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea  . In my opinion, the character of May is similar to Ponyo, always repeating words, stubborn, innocent and innocent (they are different one year, right?). The presence of Kanta's grandmother and grandchild gave color to this film too.

My Neighbor Totoro ( Tonari no Totoro ) is a two-dimensional fantasy film with Studio Ghibli's imaginative characters that are fit for the whole family to watch. The film was produced in 1988, while the story and scenario were worked on by Hayao Miyazaki, the director himself. No matter the childhood has passed from our lives, My Neighbor Totoro remains a fun spectacle for all ages. This film will bring us all to feel again the beauty of childhood. Through this movie is also the name of Hayao Miyazaki as an animated film director and Studio Ghibli increasingly known by lovers and movie lovers around the world.

Read More

These Cute Cats Become Totoro

These Cute Cats Become Totoro

Japan again excited with another unique trend! This time the owners of the cat decorate the cat's back so it resembles the character of one of Studio Ghibli's production film, Totoro.

Totoro is a character in the movie "My Neighbor Totoro" ( と な り の ト ト ロ ). The film was released in 1988. Directed by legend Hayao Miyazaki, My Neighbour Totoro tells of a small family (Satsuki, 10 years old, his sister, May, 4 years and his father who is a professor of Archeology) moved to the city of Torozawa. The reason for their move was to have their residence close to the hospital where their mother was being treated, the hospital in Hachikokuyama town.

Satsuki and Mai then find Totoro in a small forest near their new home. It was at this meeting that their mystical adventure began. Totoro  looks like a mixture of some animals ie 梟(fukuro / owl),猫(neko / cat), and狸(tanuki / raccoon dog).

In the virtual world many theories and materials about Totoro which mentions that Totoro is a mythical creature of the 'God of Death'. This theory had become a hot topic in various social media.

Forget for a moment the mystical impression of Totoro. The owner of this cat uploaded their cat photo to twitter. Wow .. how funny these cats are ya?

How? Do Akiba-kei and Akiba-chan who own a cat want to turn your cat into Totoro? 

Read More

sundries totoro

Read More

Character Animation Totoro

Characters                                 I.            Mei and Satsuki Mei is a 5 year old girl. She has a very curious mind and not afraid of being adventurous. Although Mei is a very happy girl most of the time, there are times when the absence of her mother strikes her. Fortunately, Mei has her older sister Satsuki to whom she looks up to. Mei was the first to see Totoro and when she got lost while trying to go to her mother, it was only because of Totoro and Neko Bus' help that Satsuki was able to find her. Although Satsuki is only a 11 years old girl, she has had to face greater responsibility ever since her mother was indefinitely admitted into the hospital for tuberculosis. She is a very open-minded person and possess the innocence of children as shown by her quick acceptance of Totoro and her ability to see it. Satsuki is a very outgoing and happy person and is able to make friends and adapt quickly to her surroundings. When she first arrived at her new home, Satsuki did not quite hit it off with Kanta right away. However, Satsuki soon learns Kanta is actually a very nice person and they eventually become good friends.                               II.            Mr. Kusakabe is Satsuki and Mei's Father. He loves his daughters very much and often takes part in the girls games and encourage their imaginations. He is a university professor.                             III.            Mrs. Kusakabe is Satsuki and Mei's mother. She is sick with tuberculosis and the reason why the family moved to the rural country side. She was admitted to the local hospital which offerd the best care for the illness and the family decided it would be best for her to recuperate in the countryside where the air is fresh and land healthy with the sun's rays. Having been away from her daughters for such a long time, Mrs. Kusakabe looks forward to the day when she can finally return home and give her daughters their much needed attention.                           IV.            Totoro is the guardian of the forest and can only be seen by children and can appear or disappear as he wishes. He possess special ability such as being able to make plants grow, fly in the sky, and call Neko Bus.                             V.            Neko Bus (The Cat Bus) travels at the speed of light. Being connected to nature, when Neko Bus wants to, the trees will part for him to clear his path. Neko Bus can also run on tree tops, or on phone wires and no one would even be aware of his presence except perhaps sensing a small gust of wind. The reason being is that it posses the power to be invisible.                           VI.            Chu Totoro and Chibi Totoro are Totoro's companions. They are smaller versions of Totoro and are also guardians of the forest.                         VII.            Susa-ataris are little black creatures which live in quiet and dark places. They run and hide at the first sign that there are people present, and fly away to find a new home when they can no longer have the dark and quiet that they like so much.                       VIII.            Kanta ~ Kanta is Satsuki and Mei's neighbour, and is also Satsuki's classmate. When he first met Satsuki, he made fun of Satsuki's house. However, it is revealed that Kanta is just really shy around girls and that he actually likes Satsuki a lot.                            IX.            Granny ~ Granny is Satsuki and Mei's elderly neighbour and Kanta's Grandmother. Granny has lived in the small village all her life and is familiar with all the old folk stories. She is a very kind person and often takes care of Mei while her Dad is at work and Satsuki is at school. Granny was the caretaker of the Kusakabe family's house before they moved in.

Read More

Review totoro (Part I)

Review Movie Totoro

Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.

''My Neighbor Totoro'' has become one of the most beloved of all family films without ever having been much promoted or advertised. It's a perennial best seller on video. On the Internet Movie Database, it's voted the fifth best family film of all time, right behind ''Toy Story 2'' and ahead of ''Shrek.'' The new Anime Encyclopedia calls it the best Japanese animated film ever made. Whenever I watch it, I smile, and smile, and smile.

 

This is one of the lovingly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki, often called the greatest of the Japanese animators, although his colleague at the Ghibli Studios, Isao Takahata, may be his equal. Remarkable that ''Totoro'' and Takahata's ''Grave of the Fireflies,'' now both in my Great Movies selection, were released on the same double bill in 1988. Miyazaki has not until very recently used computers to help animate his films; they are drawn a frame at a time, the classic way, with the master himself contributing tens of thousands of the frames.

Animation is big business in Japan, commanding up to a quarter of the box office some years. Miyazaki is the ''Japanese Disney,'' it's said, although that is a little unfair, since Walt Disney was more producer and visionary than animator, and Miyazaki rolls up his sleeves and draws his films himself. His ''Princess Mononoke'' (1999) outgrossed ''Titanic'' in Japan, and his newest film, ''Spirited Away'' (2002), outgrossed ''Mononoke'' when it was released in July 2001. Of his nine other major films, those best known in the U.S. are ''Kiki's Delivery Service'' (1989), ''Castle in the Sky'' (1986), ''Warriors of the Wind'' (1984) and ''The Castle of Cagliostro'' (1979).

Miyazaki's films are above all visually enchanting, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the distinctive Japanese anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as small as a dot or as big as a cavern. They also have an unforced realism in the way they notice details; early in ''Totoro,'' for example, the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream.

The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. As the story opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a vast forest. Their mother, who is sick, has been moved to a hospital in this district. Now think about that. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American animated films would be. It has a strong and loving father, in contrast to the recent Hollywood fondness for bad or absent fathers. Their mother is ill; does illness exist in American animation?

When they ask a neighbor boy how to find their new house, we see, but they don't, that he makes a face. Later he tells them it is haunted. But not haunted in the American sense, with ghosts or fearsome creatures. When Mei and Satsuki let light into the gloom, they get just a glimpse of little black fuzzy dots scurrying to safety. ''Probably just dust bunnies,'' says their father, but there is an old nanny who has been hired to look after them, and she confides that they are ''soot sprites,'' which like abandoned houses, and will pack up and leave when they hear the sound of laughter.

Consider the way the children first approach the house. It has a pillar on its porch that is almost rotted through, and they gingerly push it a little, back and forth, showing how precariously it holds up the roof. But it does hold up the roof, and we avoid the American cliche of a loud and sensational collapse, with everyone scurrying to safety. When they peek into the house and explore the attic, it's with a certain scariness--but they disperse it by throwing open windows and waving to their father from the upper floor.

And consider that the father calmly accepts their report of mysterious creatures. Do sprites and totoros exist? They certainly do in the minds of the girls. So do other wonderful creatures, such as the Cat Bus, which scurries through the forest on eight quick paws, its big eyes working as headlights.

''While it's a little hard to tell whether the adults really believe in them,'' writes the critic Robert Plamondon, ''not once does Miyazaki trot out the hoary children's literature chestnut of 'the adults think I'm a liar, so I'm going to have to save the world by myself.' This accepting attitude towards traditional Japanese spirit-creatures may well represent an interesting difference between our two cultures.''

 

''My Neighbor Totoro'' is based on experience, situation and exploration--not on conflict and threat. This becomes clear in the lovely extended sequences involving totoros--which are not mythological Japanese forest creatures, but were actually invented by Miyazaki just for this movie.

Little Mei finds the first baby totoro, which looks like a bunny, scurrying around their yard, and follows it into the forest. Her father, home alone and absorbed in his work, doesn't notice her absence. The baby leads her down a leafy green tunnel and then there's a soft landing on the stomach of a vast slumbering creature. Miyazaki doesn't exploit cliches about the dark and fearsome forest; when Setsuki and her father go looking for Mei, they find her without much trouble--sleeping on the ground, for the totoro has disappeared.

Later, the girls go to meet their father's bus. But the hour grows late and the woods grow dark. Silently, casually, the giant totoro joins them at the bus stop, standing protectively to one side like an imaginary friend. It begins to rain. The girls have umbrellas, and give one to the totoro, who is delighted by the raindrops on the umbrella, and jumps up and down to shake loose a cascade of drops from the trees. Then the bus arrives. Notice how calmly and positively the scene has been handled, with the night and the forest treated as a situation, not a threat. The movie requires no villains. I am reminded that ''Winnie the Pooh'' also originally had no evil characters--but that in its new American version evil weasels have been written into A. A. Milne's benign world.

There are two family emergencies: A visit to the hospital to visit their mother, who wants to hear all about their new house, and another occasion when Setsuki gets a call from the doctor and needs to contact her father in the city. In both scenes, the mother's illness is treated as a fact of life, not as a tragedy sure to lead to doom.

There is none of the kids-against-adults plotting of American films. The family is seen as a safe, comforting haven. The father is reasonable, insightful and tactful, accepts stories of strange creatures, trusts his girls, listens to explanations with an open mind. It lacks those dreary scenes where a parent misinterprets a well-meaning action and punishes it unfairly.

I'm afraid that in praising the virtues of ''My Neighbor Totoro'' I have made it sound merely good for you, but it would never have won its worldwide audience just because of its warm heart. It is also rich with human comedy in the way it observes the two remarkably convincing, lifelike little girls (I speak of their personalities, not their appearance). It is awe-inspiring in the scenes involving the totoro, and enchanting in the scenes with the Cat Bus. It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.

Read More

Legacy of Totoro

Legacy

My Neighbor Totoro

set its writer-director Hayao Miyazaki on the road to success. The film's central character, Totoro, is as famous among Japanese children as Winnie-the-Pooh is among British ones. The Independent recognized Totoro as one of the greatest cartoon characters, describing the creature, "At once innocent and awe-inspiring, King Totoro captures the innocence and magic of childhood more than any of Miyazaki's other magical creations." The Financial Times recognized the character's appeal, "[Totoro] is more genuinely loved than Mickey Mouse could hope to be in his wildest – not nearly so beautifully illustrated – fantasies."Totoro and characters from the movie play a significant role in the Ghibli Museum, including a large catbus and the Straw Hat Cafe.

The environmental journal Ambio described the influence of My Neighbor Totoro, "[It] has served as a powerful force to focus the positive feelings that the Japanese people have for satoyama and traditional village life." The film's central character Totoro was used as a mascot by the Japanese "Totoro Hometown Fund Campaign" to preserve areas of satoyama in the Saitama Prefecture.The fund, started in 1990 after the film's release, held an auction in August 2008 at Pixar Animation Studios to sell over 210 original paintings, illustrations, and sculptures inspired by My Neighbor Totoro.

Totoro has made cameo appearances in multiple Studio Ghibli films, including Pom Poko, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Whisper of the Heart, even appearing on Studio Ghibli's logo. Additionally, various other anime series and films have featured cameos, including one episode of the Gainax TV series His and Her Circumstances. Miyazaki also uses Totoro as a part of his Studio Ghibli company logo.

A main-belt asteroid, discovered on December 31, 1994, was named 10160 Totoro after the film's central character.

In 2013 a velvet worm species Eoperipatus totoro, recently discovered in Vietnam, was named after Totoro: "Following the request of Pavel V. Kvartalnov, Eduard A. Galoyan and Igor V. Palko, the species is named after the main character of the cartoon movie "My Neighbour Totoro" by Hayao Miyazaki (1988, Studio Ghibli), who uses a many-legged animal as a vehicle, which according to the collectors resembles a velvet worm."

Read More

Wallpaper tumblr totoro

Read More