5 things you probably don't know about Totoro

Thirty-five-plus years on, My Neighbor Totoro remains the film most customers at totoro-shop mention first when they explain why they got into Ghibli at all. It's the entry point for many, the comfort watch for others, and apparently indestructible as a piece of cinema. Yet even fans who've seen it dozens of times tend to be surprised by a few things about how it came to exist.

Here are five details worth knowing - some historical, some strange, all of them genuinely illuminating about Miyazaki and about Studio Ghibli's early years.

It opened alongside one of the bleakest war films ever made

In April 1988, Japanese cinemas showed My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies as a double feature. The pairing was Toho's idea, and it remains one of the stranger programming decisions in animation history. Grave of the Fireflies - directed by Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki - is a film about two children starving to death in the final months of the Second World War. It is not a light watch.

The contrast was deliberate. Ghibli wanted to show range. Both films were also made under real financial pressure - neither was expected to be a massive commercial success - and bundling them cut distribution costs. As it happened, Totoro underperformed at the box office initially. It found its audience gradually, through home video, then television broadcast, then something approaching a cultural lock-in that has never really released.

Totoro comes from a very specific spiritual tradition

Shinto - Japan's oldest and most widely practiced set of religious beliefs - holds that spirits called kami inhabit natural objects: trees, rivers, stones, mountains. These aren't ghosts or demons in any Western sense. They're more like presences - the animating force within something old and rooted.

What this means for the film's logic

Miyazaki has said in interviews that Totoro is not truly a creature of any single tradition but borrows heavily from this Shinto framework. The camphor tree that the girls discover - the one with the hollow that leads into Totoro's world - is specifically the kind of ancient tree that would be considered a sacred site in Japanese folk belief. Often these trees have a shimenawa (a rope of twisted straw) wrapped around them to mark them as spiritually significant. Miyazaki doesn't make this explicit in the film, but it's the substructure that makes the film's rules feel coherent and earned rather than arbitrary.

The house was real - and it was in Saitama

Miyazaki spent time living in and walking around the Tokorozawa area of Saitama Prefecture during the 1980s, when rapid suburban development was swallowing up the farmland and forested hills that had defined the landscape for generations. He was documenting what was being lost. The farmhouse that appears in Totoro - with its tatami rooms, its overgrown garden, its sense of benign age - was based on a real structure he encountered during this period.

The Satsuki and Mei house replica in Ghibli Park's Dondoko Forest was built from the same plans used for the film, cross-referenced with historical farmhouse architecture from the region. If you've visited, you'll know that walking through it produces an uncanny recognition - the kind where you can't quite tell if you're remembering the film or remembering a real place.

The production was genuinely precarious

Studio Ghibli was four years old in 1988. Castle in the Sky (1986) had performed reasonably, but the studio was not financially secure. Miyazaki oversaw Totoro while simultaneously supervising Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies, and the production schedules overlapped in ways that stretched resources to their limits.

Background art - typically repainted fresh for each film - was occasionally reused across scenes to control costs. If you're the kind of viewer who pauses on establishing shots, you may spot it. The financial pressure also explains why Totoro runs just 86 minutes: a deliberate decision to cap costs while maintaining the film's internal rhythm.

The voice of Totoro was a child, chosen for exactly that reason

Chika Sakamoto was not a professional voice actor when she was cast to voice Totoro. She was a child whose father knew Miyazaki. The director's reasoning was direct: he didn't want Totoro to sound performed. Professional voice actors bring technique - breath control, projection, character shaping. Miyazaki wanted something less constructed. A child's instinctive vocalisation, not an adult's approximation of one.

The result is a voice that's oddly difficult to place - neither clearly human nor clearly animal, neither threatening nor entirely soft. It does something no adult voice could have managed in quite the same way.

Why this film endures

None of this is incidental to why Totoro lasts. The spiritual grounding, the real geography, the financial constraints that forced economy of storytelling, the casting decision - they all point toward a film made with an unusual degree of intentionality about what it was trying to do. It wasn't built to be a franchise. It was built to be a specific experience, and it remains exactly that.

If you're looking to bring a piece of that into daily life, our Totoro plush collection includes officially licensed figures across a range of sizes, and our broader Ghibli gifts range covers everything from figurines to stationery for fans at any level of the collection journey.