MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO
(1988, Blu-ray released May 21, 2013 – MSRP $39.99)
THE FILM:
- “Disney presents a Studio Ghibli film about the magic of friendship and sisterhood from Academy Award®-winning director Hayao Miyazaki (Best Animated Feature, 2001, Spirited Away). Celebrate the 25th anniversary of My Neighbor Totoro – available for the first time on Disney Blu-ray, with a new HD digital transfer and perfect picture and sound!
Follow the adventures of Satsuki and her four-year-old sister Mei as they discover their new neighbor is a mysterious forest spirit named Totoro who can only be seen by the eyes of a child. As Totoro introduces the girls to his extraordinary friends, they embark on the journey of a lifetime. Featuring the voice talents of Tim Daly, Lea Salonga and real-life sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning, My Neighbor Totoro is an amazing animated adventure the whole family will fall in love with.
“
WHO SHOULD BUY:
There is no better film than My Neighbor Totoro. There, I said it. Crucify me. I watched it for the first time on a VHS dub from a laserdisc back in ’91 and have yet to see anything that’s equalled or bested it since. I unabashedly love this film and therefore feel comfortable telling you that you shouldn’t consider this section of the post so much a review as a laundry list of reasons you need to watch and own My Neighbor Totoro in any form.
So, if this is a laundry list, let’s just attack it list-style. What, did you think this was formal journalism or something?
Reasons to see My Neighbor Totoro:
- A detailed, nuanced representation of middle-class family life in the Japanese countryside, circa the early ’40s.
- The most incredibly honest portrayal of children you’ll ever see in film – animated or otherwise
- Iconic and influential creatures that’ll win you over with original character, as opposed to gimmicky, in-your-face attitudes
- A narrative nearly untouched by plot but driven by imagination, theme and character.
- Subtle, realistic animation
- Breathtaking background paintings
- Incredible, touching score that never forgets to be playful in the right places
- Believable original Japanese vocal performances
- Impressive US dub from Disney
- Most critically, the ideal cohesion of all the arts at play in the craft of making an animated film – the perfect recipe!
THE BLU-RAY DISC:
This is the best I’ve ever seen My Neighbor Totoro look. Seriously. This is the best. Better than any home video presentation and even better than the so-called “new” 35mm print I had the opportunity to screen last year. The image isn’t scrubbed clean and boosted like Disney’s classic animated films have been, so don’t expect the false sense of clean perfection you get from those releases. What you get here is a far more honest, film-like transfer that honours the original elements, with a touch of grain in the mix for good measure.
Again, keeping things honest, Disney provides audio via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 only, in both original Japanese and English dub flavours (there’s also a French language dub in DTS but I presume if you read this site you’re primarily concerned with original audio and English language versions.) While we might crave modern, immersive soundtracks, I’m happy to watch Totoro the way it was created – in stereo – and it’s never sounded better than on this disc. Clean, clear and dynamic, with a brilliant lossless reproduction of Joe Hisaishi‘s classic score.
Special features echo the previously released 2010 DVD and are relatively decent. We get the full film presented as storyboards – a brilliant inclusion for animation and Miyazaki-san nerds like me – and a bunch of fairly brief featurettes and interviews. Outside of the ‘Locations’ documentary segment (more on that in a moment) the featurettes that contain interviews with writer/director/genius Miyazaki, his producer Toshio Suzuki and composer Hisaishi clock in at under 20-minutes. Not bad, all around, I guess. But the creation and legacy of Totoro warrants a feature length doc, if you ask me.
The “Locations” doc runs nearly a half hour in length and is all around excellent. The sad thing about it is that it’s culled from a longer doc called The Scenery of Ghibli, available as a standalone Blu-ray in Japan. It would have been fantastic to either have the relative segments included on each Ghibli Blu-ray release or, even better, as a full and complete bonus here or packaged in with another film. Sigh. I guess I’ll just have to settle for how mostly-awesome this release is without the full doc. Honestly, I’m just over the moon that we’ve got the film in HD now. Everything else is gravy.
Super-highly recommended!
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Original Japanese Storyboards
- Creating My Neighbor Totoro
- Creating the Characters
- The Totoro Experience
- Producer’s Perspective: Creating Ghibli
- Scoring Miyazaki
- The Locations of Totoro
- Behind the Microphone
- Original Japanese Trailers
