Hayao Miyazaki, who is primarily known as a director of numerous anime films by Studio Ghibli, recently spoke that “my neighbor Totoro” came from a feeling of guilt. We summarize.
Guilt to Japan
After his early work “Future Boy Conan” (1978) and “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979), Miyazaki’s career with “Nausicaä from the Valley of Winds” (1984) and “The Castle in Heaven” (1986) clearly won.
Both films not only became successful worldwide, but also share another commonality: their stories are located in foreign or fictional worlds. This is exactly what Miyazaki burdened with strong feelings of guilt – which ultimately led to the emergence of “my neighbor Totoro”:
»Up to this point I had only developed stories that were located in foreign or invented countries without clear nationality. Little by little, however, I felt like my own home country of Japan, in which I was born and grew up to have born a guilt. «
Finally, this resulted in “my neighbor Totoro”, which was strongly shaped by places in Japan, which were of particular importance for Hayao Miyazaki-such as Seiseki-Sakuragaoka, the location of his former employer Nippon Animation, or the Kanda River on which he spent his childhood.
In addition, the plot is located in Tokorozawa, a medium-sized city in Saitama Prefecture, in which Miyazaki lived in the 1970s.
It was precisely these personal influences that “my neighbor Totoro” enjoys such an extraordinary popularity worldwide both at the time of his theatrical release and many years later.
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© 1988 Hayao Miyazaki, Studio GHIBLI / Tokuma Shoten, Nibariki, Studio GHIBLI
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