Cognition Dissemination: The Late Summer of Ghibli, Part II — Neighboring Witches

I posted about the start of my Studio Ghibli Watchathon a couple of weeks ago. There is never a bad time to watch a bunch of Ghibli films in succession, as they’re some of the finest movies around inside and outside the anime universe. The release of The Boy and the Heron/How Do You Live? in Japan (and now the west through early screenings) and distributor GKids providing limited screenings for all the studio’s movies that made this feel like a particularly great time to venture through their library.

Even if The Boy and the Heron may not be the final film from venerable and longtime director Hayao Miyazaki, this is still a sterling time for a Watchathon. The man has claimed that he’ll retire since the late 1990s, sure, but he is 82 years old now. No one besides fate knows when his final work will truly arrive.

I considered skipping My Neighbor Totoro this time around. Only 15 months have passed since I first watched the movie in dubbed form, and I figured that I remembered enough of it that there was no need to watch it again. But it’s part of this post for a reason: I ultimately didn’t skip it, and I couldn’t be happier that I didn’t. A great movie is perfectly rewatchable many times, and it helps that Totoro is only 88 minutes long. But I enjoyed it even more this time around.

A big part of that is perhaps due to watching the film in Japanese with subtitles this time. I enjoyed the Fanning sisters’ performances as Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe, and it was a good casting choice to have real-life sisters voicing animated counterparts. The English voicework is good overall. But it’s not surprising that the movie works better in Japanese thanks to its setting. It’s a slice-of-life movie released at a time when the concept was still uncertain, especially in high-budget movie form, that takes place in Japan’s rural countryside. The movie may not have performed well at the box office during its initial release despite being placed with the more marketable and heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies (which, sorry, I simply could not stomach rewatching as part of this Watchathon), but there’s a reason why it found a good audience in Japan on TV and home video.

Miyazaki movies excel at character development, and My Neighbor Totoro is no exception. The Kusakabe sisters are cheery and energetic types, but both suffer from realistic plights for younger and older audiences watching. The two are extremely concerned about their mother, who’s been hospitalized for months despite ostensibly suffering from a cold. Both unsurprisingly suspect that she’s afflicted with something far worse than a seasonal sickness. This drives the story, as the family feels incomplete when the two and their father, Tatsuko Kusakabe, move and into a run-down rural house and settle into their lives in a vast environment outside the urban city. Miyazaki put his personal experiences into this movie, and it shows.

It’s perfectly understandable why the Kusakabe sisters are perfectly willing to go on a whimsical adventure not far from their new home upon meeting Totoro in a not-so-uneventful countryside. This is a running theme, but it’s another example of a timeless experience from Ghibli despite the movie being a whopping 35 years old as of 2023.

Kiki’s Delivery Service, meanwhile, is relatable (a running theme here, if you haven’t noticed) for an alternate set of reasons. It is, on the surface, the story of the titular Kiki, a young witch longing to stretch her wings in a new town draped with a classic late 19th century European aesthetic. She even finds a good job by offering a unique sort of delivery skills through utilizing her special powers, with a great boss who gave her a place to live. It’s during her deliveries when the heart of the movie blossoms, which makes it clear that Kiki suffers from depression and fear of acceptance. The more she dawns on her lack of confidence in some of her abilities and how those around her view her, the tighter their grip becomes. It saps her will to even perform her job and most of her powers.

It’s been many years since I first watched Kiki’s Delivery Service, on the DVD issued by Disney in 2006 (the spine for which I’m glancing at as I type this). But I’ll never forget how intensely relatable these moments felt, when depression grips you so hard that you can’t do anything. All the while, the people around you think there’s something uniquely wrong with you. The genius shines through how subtle it keeps all these themes. The movie didn’t need to spell out precisely what went wrong internally with Kiki; anyone who’s experienced similar feelings or remains perceptive could tell what was happening. I am not a young girl. I never was. Let alone one with the powers of a witch. But it was far too easy to watch this film and say “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

That aside, and that’s a big aside, it’s another superlative Ghibli film from Miyazaki with strong visuals and a great soundtrack from Joe Hisaishi. It’s also reminiscent of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind through how its stellar direction and writing wouldn’t make anyone who watched it think that it’s based on a novelization by Eiko Kadono that received eight (!!) follow-up stories. This is despite the movie’s ending leaving a few elements open to interpretation, particularly one that involves Kiki’s cat Jiji (Happy Caturday, by the way). That’s good, too, considering only the first novel has received an official English translation, which arrived more than 18 years after the original 1985 release in Japan.

It’s one thing to remember how good Ghibli’s movies were and are after thinking about the experience of watching them in the past. It’s another to actually watch and rewatch a series of them to either discover for fully remember that, goddamn, these are some of the best animated movies around. They’re so good, in fact, that the chronicling of my Ghibli Watchathon won’t be stopping here. Maybe I’ll come up with another new name by then, because I sure as hell can’t settle on one.