Juan You - My Neighbor Totoro (Personal Blog #5)

We brought up weeks ago that the previous RSTD class had gone to see Spirited Away for their movie field trip. So I decided that one of my posts should be a Miyazaki film, since I've been a fan of his since My Neighbor Totoro.
Totoro is my favorite of his films. However, after I attended a Miyazaki's panel at a convention last year, it gave me a completely different outlook on My Neighbor Totoro, a more morbid one.
The story is about two girls, Mei and Satsuki, who move to the countryside of Tokyo with their father, who is an archaeology professor, because their mother is suffering from tuberculosis and is situated at a nearby hospital.
Ironically, the new house that the family moves in was previously occupied by a wealthy man whose wife suffered from tuberculosis and died, which is what the hospital Satsuki and Mei's mother stay at is famous for. Creepy.
In this new life of theirs, the younger sister, Mei, quickly discovers a secret lair of a forest spirit, Totoro, via following little underling critters of the spirit. She and Satsuki later meet this Totoro spirit several times, and he even helps them out later on.
Totoro is a representative Shinto spirit of the forest and looks like a Japanese Tanuki creature. According to legend, only children can see these creatures because of their innocence and purity.
The film, however, is becomes more morbid. In Buddhism, a Ojizou-sama statue is usually erected for a child that has died. This is the type of statue that Mei and Satsuki stop at to seek shelter from the rain, and it is somewhat ironic and horrific. At the same time, however, the fact that Mei, who gets lost towards the end of the film, is sitting near many of these statues while she waits for help to arrive, can also be construed as her being protected by the spirits of these dead children. In either case, there is a sense of unease when it comes to the idea of Death.
This brings me to my final point. After attneding this panel at an Anime Convention, I was told that the nature spirit, Totoro, is actually a Shinigami, or a Death God in Japanese folklore. Similar to a Grim Reaper. This idea is backed up by the idea of the 'soot gremlins', which in Japan are known to be a symbol of upcoming death.

However, the main part of the movie is its ties with the Sayama incident of May 1963. During this case, a younger sister was kidnapped for ransom, raped and murdered. Her older sister who found her body was so traumatized by the experience that all she could tell the authorities was that she “met a large Tanuki” and “saw a cat monster." She later committed suicide.
This movie, though a children's movie, will never be the same to me now that I've heard this side of the tale. Even the catbus is, in this sense, a morbidity. It serves as a carriage from the living world into the world of the dead. If we look at it in this way, when Mei goes missing, she is murdered, and her older sister joins her on the catbus into the world of the dead.
The end of the movie is even more evidence of this deathly spirit looming in the background of this film. While their father meets their mother at the hospital, a few flowers lay on the windowsill. The children are never seen by the adults, but the mother claims that she can sense the children. This may serve to be a hint that she, too, is near death.