My Neighbor Totoro What s Real Big Joel

Hey everybody, so I've been making some longer, more intense videos lately, so I thought it would be a good time to take a minute and talk about something I really like, my favorite scene from My Neighbor Totoro. And let's just jump right into it. The scene occurs right toward the middle of the movie, after our protagonists, Mei and Satsuki, plant some acorns that Totoro gave them in hopes that they'll be able to grow some trees. They go to bed, but wake up when they spot Totoro outside, so they run to meet him and grow a massive tree together. After this, they fly through the air on Totoro's belly, seeing the sights and, as Satsuki puts it, becoming the wind. Cut to the girls waking up, we don't know how they got to bed. They look outside and seem disappointed for a second that there is no massive tree there, but their mood quickly changes when they see that the seeds they planted have now sprouted. All that stuff wasn't just a dream after all. Okay, so this scene is important because in a really elegant way, it primes us as viewers to have a strange relationship with the protagonists of the film. A relationship defined by one question. What is our burden of proof in claiming something is true about this world? See, going into My Neighbor Totoro, the audience shares one major thing in common with Mei and Satsuki, our willingness to accept that in this movie, Totoro exists. However, we come to that willingness from entirely different perspectives. As people watching this film, we are predisposed toward just accepting whatever reality it offers us. Were the film to end on this scene where the gang grows a big tree together, we wouldn't doubt for a second that these events were actually occurring in the movie, because we would have been provided all the proof we could ever need. Mei and Satsuki, on the other hand, are not living under this contract of fiction. They don't make the various assumptions that an audience has to make, and for that reason, they are the sorts of people who would want to have more proof, want some evidence that the experiences they've had have some actual relationship to their reality. And in this scene, we're introduced to an object that actively plays on this difference Looking at these sprouts, the audience can naturally come to a set of sort of disappointing conclusions. Where the Totoro last night seemed to do this amazing supernatural thing, today, we see that none of that apparently happened. Either Totoro doesn't exist, and the fact that these trees are growing now is just a Or maybe Totoro kind of exists, but whatever he does is not always the same as what it looks like he's doing. Either way, this night sequence does not give us the whole truth, right? But for Mei and Satsuki, the sprouts have the exact opposite effect. They allow the girls to go from a state of skepticism, noting that what they expected To having their reality confirmed. Totoro grew this big tree, and now something related to growing trees is happening here, and the protagonists reject the distinctions between these two events, and instead recognize a pattern, a causal relationship, a different form of evidence. This scene doesn't raise any stakes within the world of My Neighbor Totoro. There is no real problem it presents to the characters of the film, rather, it creates a conflict outside of the narrative, a sense that the events of the film cannot work for both its protagonists and its audience, that there is some fundamental disconnect here in how we approach this world, and how we begin to say things about it. And in the final moments of this movie, I think we're sort of instructed to remember and reflect on this tree scene. Mei runs away, and Satsuki desperately tries to find her, but Satsuki's incapable of doing so until these woodland creatures appear, help her find Mei in the woods, and give them a little trip to see their sick mom who's apparently getting better now. I don't think I'm the only one who finds this scene pretty uncomfortable. For one thing, it's like, notably Pat. The main problems in this film, that Satsuki is upset that she's forced into a maternal role with Mei, that Mei is upset and perhaps incapable of dealing with the possibility of her mother's loss, that their mother is ill in the first place and might not get better. This all gets resolved in about 2 minutes, because a literal cat bus comes from the sky and resolves their conflicts and lets them see the good news. It's eerie in its own way. But also, this feeling is made all the more powerful, because we have very clear proof that these magic creatures don't always do what we see them doing. I mean, they didn't grow big tree, did they? How can we see that and not doubt that this ending is really occurring within the reality of the film? It only makes sense to watch this scene with some reservation. And this is really where My Neighbor Totoro gets interesting to me. Because no, I don't think this cat bus scene is some hallucination. I don't think Satsuki never found Mei. That watching their mother was just fantasy, that they died in the wilderness or something awful like that. I mean, we see them coming home, surrounded by friends and family. What, is this heaven? That's just morbid and insipid, and feels more like a fun game theory than an actual good faith read of this movie. So now, I guess we're in a pretty weird spot, right? A situation where our evidence suggests two contradictory things. We feel like we know that these creatures did a magical thing for the protagonists. The protagonists think that too. But according to the model we've used to learn things about this world, there's good reason to think they did no such thing. And what do we do with that tension? How are we, as an audience, supposed to resolve this conflict? Well, there's two ways we can do it. First, we could just accept the contradiction. These little sprouts are not evidence that Totoro exists or does magical things. But later on, magic stuff does happen, and we just have to be okay with that. To look at this movie and ask questions like, what is real? Or how does this world work? Or is there really magic going on? That stuff is kinda missing the point. The world of My Neighbor Totoro is chaotic and strange, and that reflects the chaotic and strange functioning of a child's imagination. And by presenting us with this contradictory logic, the film asks us to not care so much. To put our brains aside and accept that the movie is more about tone and feelings than it is about rationality. And while that is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of this film, it just doesn't do it for me. I mean, one of the cornerstones of Hayao Miyazaki's work is an emphasis on verisimilitude. The feeling that his work is always attentive to the real world, believable and well-grounded. We can see this in the animation and scripting of My Neighbor Totoro, how vivid everything feels. And partially for that reason, it seems like a bit of a cop-out to say, this film doesn't care about the logic of its own universe, doesn't want us to concern ourselves with the questions it presents, and does not call for a rational understanding. So instead, I prefer to interpret the film like this. We were wrong, and Mei and Satsuki were right this whole time. Looking at these little sprouts, it might seem like there is a telling difference between this and the magic that was supposed to have occurred. A difference that might mean that no magic exists here at all. But in fact, that was an incorrect meaning to draw from this situation. This big tree grew last night, it was helped along by Totoro and the girls. And the real evidence of this fact, not just some tepid imagination evidence, is that we can see sprouts popping up from the ground. This is actually enough to prove that what happened last night wasn't a dream. The protagonists knew this when they first saw it, and we can't fully agree until the end of the movie. Honestly, I think this interpretation is just so cool. Like, fantasy films often ask us to accept, or at least appreciate, things that are not true about our world. When Dorothy goes to Oz, when Harry picks up that wand, when Rudy enters the Chalk Zone, we have to entertain the fact that things here are fantastical, unreal. But at the end of the day, the way we learn facts about these universes is pretty much the same as it is in day-to-day life. We observe things, we take in the evidence, we make reasonable conclusions about how things work. And that's fine, you know, I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all. But it doesn't demand from us what Totoro demands. That shift in epistemology, that substantial change in the way we come into knowledge. It's not the sprouts and how happy it makes Mei and Satsuki that makes me love this scene so much, nor is it the big magic tree. Rather, I love this scene as it exists in the film because it makes us perceive these objects as connected in a way that we would naturally want to resist. It forces us to think of the world of My Neighbor Totoro as a magical place. Not because of all the magic stuff that's in it, but because of the strange and unfamiliar way we learn that stuff is magical here. So I hope you liked that video. Kind of a return to form, just talking about a thing I like. Isn't that- wasn't that nice? If you liked it, feel free to like, comment, and subscribe, and give me money on Patreon, and follow me on Twitter if you're feeling so inclined. Uh, so now it's time for my Patreon question of the video. Kawora asks, What is your favorite meme? Uh, I like the meme where it's like a big dog, and then a smaller picture of the big dog, and it's like, Don't ever talk to me or my son again. Uh, even thinking about that meme is just putting a smile on my face. It's- it's pretty great. Don't- don't- don't talk to me or my son again. Um, okay. Thank you so much. Bye.