My Neighbor Totoro

My Neighbor Totoro is Studio Ghibli's purest expression of childhood wonder — a film with almost no conventional narrative tension that achieves something more remarkable: the complete recreation of how the world feels when you are four years old and everything is strange and magical and safe. The Kusakabe sisters Satsuki and Mei move to the countryside while their mother recovers from illness, discovering the gentle forest spirits who inhabit the ancient camphor tree behind their house. Miyazaki's Totoro is the definitive image of benevolent natural mystery: enormous, quiet, and indifferent in the way that only something ancient and fundamentally non-threatening can be. The catbus is an act of pure imaginative generosity. The film's emotional effect — a kind of serene joy that leaves adults who watch it with their children in a state of unusual emotional openness — is close to unique in world cinema.