In this column, we at the Screengrab discuss movies fit for children. If you are vaguely aware of the state of children's movies, you know that most of them are animated affairs involving rapid-fire references to pop culture that, strangely enough, few under the age of 31 could possibly understand. Only rarely do filmmakers decide to make movies that appeal to anything deeper than a child's love of a sugar rush. Despite the odds, some brave souls still manage to create great kid movies, and this column will seek to weed wheat from chaff. This being the first edition, we'll start with some low-hanging fruit: my 3-year-old son's all-time favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro.
My Neighbor Totoro is the flagship movie for the Japanese Studio Ghibli, which is known for the animated works of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Totoro is a Miyazaki movie throughout, built on a deep reverence for nature, characters who are well-observed and nuanced, and a ton of empathy for the viewpoint of each character, no matter how child-like (as opposed to childish) that viewpoint may be.
The plot revolves around two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, who move with their father, a university professor, to a rural house to be closer to their mother, who is sick in a nearby hospital. One day, while Satsuki (the older sister) is at school, Mei sees a little bunny-eared critter that can make itself invisible nosing around their house. Being too young to know how unusual such a creature is, Mei follows it into the woods and lands on the belly of a giant, fuzzy version of the same creature, Totoro. In translation, Totoro is identified as a various points of the story as a troll or a forest spirit. He helps plants grow, summons a catbus (yep, part cat/part bus) that, incidentally, creates the wind, and takes the kids for a ride on a spinning top. One of Miyazaki's nice touches is that Totoro is clearly inhuman, often shown with the dull staring eyes and blank face of an animal, but he still has an obvious affection for the girls.
(The clip above is from the scene where Satsuki first meets Totoro in the undubbed Japanese version. I should tell you that the international distributor is Disney, and the English dub is excellent, so don't think I'm advising you to show a subtitled movie to your pre-schooler. I'm dense, but not that dense.)
It's one of two Miyazaki movies that's almost completely devoid of conflict, which makes it ideal for the pre-K set. The tension of the story comes when Mei wanders off through the Japanese countryside, desperate to get to her mother in the hospital. My son finds this part thrilling. It plays to pre-K fears -- the lost child, the coming dark -- without getting too violent or confusing. It's good for adults, too, who may at this point be lulled into a zen stupor. Not in a bad way, I mean, but in the way of someone staring contemplatively at the wind rippling along the water, head somewhere between fond memories and meditative no-thought. The dreaminess of Totoro is a positive, but when Mei wanders off, she breaks the calm in a naturalistic way that propels the story to its conclusion. Or semi-conclusion. There's a few loose ends that are resolved in stills over the end credits (which has an incredibly annoying song, I believe written by Miyazaki himself, that my kids adore), but even without their resolution in the narrative itself, it feels like a good place to end the story. Good enough, at least. It's not like life is full of clear endings, and the trueness to life is perhaps the most wonderful and magical selling point in this story of little girls who meet an anthropomorphic forest spirit.
The other Miyazaki movie that my son loves is Kiki's Delivery Service, which is similarly low on conflict. Most of Miyazaki's movies have moments of violence, which although only the first few have unambiguously evil characters (the first two, actually, if you don't count his Lupin III movie, and I generally don't). Miyazaki's humanism comes bounding to the fore in Totoro, with its insistence that evil and good are mostly beside the point, and it holds sway even through his more conflicted movies. This is one reason why he is not simply a great animator, but a great filmmaker.
His more recent movies have been too violent for my kids as of yet. We have let him watch some parts of Spirited Away, but much of that movie is geared for kids who are a bit more mature, I think. Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle are not even on the table because little kids don't want to see people hacked up and bombs falling. I'm pretty sure that was the message of a Mr. Roger's Neighorhood we watched the other day, at least. I understand that Miyazaki's 2008 movie Ponyo On the Cliff By The Sea has been compared to Totoro by those who've seen it, but it is not due for an international release until next year. Until then, we'll stick with Totoro.
Links: The Screengrab Salutes The Top Twenty Animated Feature Films.