Mizuki and Miyazaki

I finally watched My Neighbor Totoro yesterday.

Perhaps the first point I should make there is that I am always culturally behind, for various reasons. If you think of any movie and guess that it's something I would want to see - no matter how right you are - there is probably only a 30% chance that I have seen it. I do spend a lot of time thinking about the ones that I see.

(Given my rate of successful viewing, it is rather impressive that this is the fourth Miyazaki movie that I have seen. The others are Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Ponyo.)

I did see similarities between Totoro and Miyazaki's other works, but what it reminded me of the most was Shigeru Mizuki's manga NonNonBa.

For those unfamiliar, NonNonBa is kind of a memoir. It is not meant to be non-fiction, exactly, but the key part is how much of what happens is infused with spirits. There are various kinds of yokai everywhere, some are more like ghosts but some are more like nature spirits, and they are all a part of normal life.

In My Neighbor Totoro, a father moves his two young girls to the country to be closer to where their mother is recuperating from an extended illness. They befriend a woodland spirit, possibly a guardian of the woods.

It is a smaller story than the other Miyazaki films I have seen. There are no floods with prehistoric creatures rising from the sea, no one enters other dimensions and has to rescue bewitched parents, and there are no enchanted princes or wizards. Two of the encounters with Totoro end with the girls waking up, where it could have been a dream. It is truly just everyday life, infused with wonder and magic that helps make the fear easier.

It is scary having your mother sick. It is lonely not seeing her. Part of what impressed me was the honesty in the depiction of the girls. They are generally cheerful and get along well, but that the four year old might sometimes cry, and neither be able to stop or explain it, and that the older one might act even older most of the time and still at least once lose it under stress and yell at the younger one to grow up - yeah, it's like that.

One thing I loved is how the father just rolled with it. There was no endless conflict of telling the girls that it was just their imagination. That did not seem to be so much a matter of his indulgence, but an attitude that you can't rule those things out. So when you stop under a shrine to get out of the rain, you ask the resident of the shrine for permission, and you can stand in front of a tree and thank the guardian for his protection, even if you are not seeing him and may not see him - that's just good manners.

That's a lot of what reminded me of Mizuki. Maybe not everyone believed in the yokai, and maybe no one but Shigeru believed in them as much as NonNonBa herself, but they were still accepted as at least kind of real.

I don't know how much of that was true culturally for them. Mizuki was 19 years older than Miyazaki. Both were influenced by wartime events, though Mizuki's experiences were worse, losing an arm after being caught in an explosion.

Mainly I am reminded how childhood both is and is not idyllic. You can shriek with laughter just running, or spotting fish in a creek. You also cannot fix it if your parents are sick, or worried about money, or don't understand you.

A lot of if can be helped if you still see some magic.