My Neighbor Totoro: Film Analysis

In the film My Neighbor Totoro, Satsuki and her family go through a great deal of changes in their lives. These recent changes cause them oodles of stress. Every person in the family gets through the stressful changes in different ways. Satsuki’s dad gets through them by trying to spend more time at home instead of always being away at work. Mei, Satsuki’s sister, deals with her stressful feelings by trying to spend all of her time with Satsuki. Satsuki attempts to get through the stress by trying to simply ignore it. She tries to distract herself from the entire situation that her family is enduring by consuming herself with other aspects of her life. This causes her multitudes of issues throughout the film, and it eventually causes her more stress than she originally was dealt with. The Totoros come into the movie in order to give Satsuki’s life an alternative, stress-free environment. They also provide a

distraction to her stressful life, while also relieving some of the oncoming stresses.
One of the changes in Satsuki’s life that causes her a lot of stress is her mother being in the hospital. Her mother is receiving a long-term treatment for an unknown sickness. This unfortunate situation forces Satsuki and her family to make a couple of difficult adjustments to their lives. Her dad decides that the family needs to move to a new neighborhood in order to be closer to the hospital that their mother resides in. Satsuki is forced to get accustomed to a new school, new town, and new surroundings. This puts stress on her simply because it is a lot of new things to get used to. Although this situation is not ideal, the entire family gets accustomed to the new circumstances in the end.
There are heaps of ways that Satsuki could cope or deal with the overwhelmingly stressful situations on her life. Satsuki decides to deal with the stress by ignoring it and by keeping herself preoccupied. She tries a lot of different methods to ignore her feelings and they all seem to work temporarily. One of the methods she tries to preoccupy herself with is by helping her dad out. She knows that her dad has a great deal of matters on his mind since her mother is not there to help him with the family, so she willingly decides to cook lunch for the family. She knows this is something simple that she can do that simultaneously helps him out. Unfortunately for Satsuki, helping her dad cook food only helped her ignore the feelings of stress for a trivial amount of time.
Another way she tries to preoccupy herself from her stressful situation is by paying extra attention to her sister, Mei. Satsuki and Mei seem to be inseparable in the beginning of the film. They start off by running around the house playing and having what seems to be a fantastic time. Mei loves her big sister’s attention and Satsuki seems to be loving Mei’s as well. This wonderful relationship between the sisters lasts for the majority of the movie, but being with Mei all the time starts to cause Satsuki stress as well. Mei, loving hanging out with her sister, decides to make Granny take her to Satsuki’s school one day. This is not an ideal situation for Satsuki because it is hard for her to concentrate on the school work when Mei is at the school being disruptive. This situation threatens to overwhelm Satsuki with more stressful thoughts that she has trouble ignoring. She does not want to be disruptive to the entire class, but she keeps her stress at bay. Satsuki knows that if she keeps Mei at the school, she will not have to call and bother her dad at work. In the end, having her sister at the school was, even though not ideal, helped Satsuki ignore some of her stresses.
Satsuki successfully preoccupied herself from the stresses of her life for most of the film.

Not until she received a phone call from her mother’s hospital did her way of dealing with the stress fail. The hospital needed to get a hold of Satsuki and her family to tell them that her mother was too sick to visit their new house during the upcoming weekend. Satsuki, overwhelmed with the news, ran to call her dad at the university about the hospital’s call. After she got a hold of her dad, she went to tell the ill-fated news to her sister. Upon hearing the news, Mei became extremely distraught and decided to run away from Satsuki. Since her dad was still away at work, it was partially Satsuki’s responsibility to find Mei. This situation adds more stress to the already stressed out Satsuki. Ignoring all of her stress at this point of the film does not work for Satsuki. She ends up thinking about her mom being sick, and how her dad is gone while her sister is missing. Satsuki is now desperately in need of a successful way of getting through the stresses of her

life.
The Totoros, cat bus, and the soot spirits are in the film to help with this. In the beginning of the movie the girls see these soot spirits around the house when they first arrive in the new neighborhood. Granny told the girls to play around and laugh a lot. If they did this, then the soot spirits would go away to a different empty house. As a result, Satsuki and Mei ignored the soot spirits and played more and laughed louder than before. All of the extra laughing and playing helped Satsuki ignore the stress of moving to a new neighborhood and that of her mother being in the hospital.
The Totoros also helped Satsuki out with ignoring the stressful situations in her life. They helped her by bringing her many stress-free, blissful moments. One of these moments was when Satsuki and Mei were waiting for their dad to get back from the university alone at the bus stop. The largest Totoro stood by them in the rain until right before their dad’s bus came. The Totoro was sad because he did not have an umbrella and was getting wet. Satsuki gave it her father’s umbrella that she brought, and in return he gave her some seeds. The Totoro started to play with the rain that was falling from the trees by jumping and making a ton of drops fall at once. This made the girls start to laugh and enjoy themselves again. This moment was relevant because it distracted Satsuki from the growing stress of her dad being on the wrong bus. This also forced Satsuki to forget about her mother being in the hospital and the other changes in her life temporarily, since she was paying attention to the big Totoro playing.
After the girls planted the seeds, the Totoros woke them up by doing a dance around the seeds. Satsuki and Mei joined the Totoros in the dance, and the seed started to grow at a rapid pace. After the seeds were fully grown into trees, the Totoros flew the girls to the top of them to sit and enjoy the peaceful night. This caused the girls to become overjoyed. Satsuki was again temporarily distracted from all the stressful situations in her life.
When Mei ran away after she heard the news from the hospital, the big Totoro also helped out Satsuki. Granny, Satsuki and some town’s peoples were searching for Mei, but were having no luck in finding her. Satsuki, desperate for help, decided to run to the Totoros and ask them to help her look for her sister. The large Totoro helped by called in his cat bus, which took Satsuki straight to her absent sister. Satsuki thanked the cat bus because it helped her relieve the stress of losing her sister. Soon after that, the cat bus took the girls to the hospital where their mother was situated at. This also helped the girls relieve the stresses that were caused by the call from the hospital because they saw their mother laughing.
At the end of the film, Satsuki’s life becomes essentially stress-free. Her mother is able to leave the hospital healthy. This eliminates the major source of stress in Satsuki’s life. Since her mother is home, her dad does not have to do all the parental work anymore. This allows Satsuki to be able to choose to not help her dad cook and watch Mei anymore, which removes more stress from her life. Now she has more time to just play with Mei and play in general.
Satsuki tried multiple ways to distract herself from her recent, stressful changes in her life. The majority of ways she tried only helped her forget her stressful life temporarily. The Totoros helped her get through all of her stress-causing situations. They also helped her become more laidback and in the long run the situations disappeared from Satsuki’s life all together. Satsuki realizes that she cannot hide from the stress of life. She can only work through it with a little help from her peers.