My Neighbor Totoro: Film Analysis

In the film My Neighbor Totoro, Satsuki and her family go through a great deal of changes in their lives. These recent changes cause them oodles of stress. Every person in the family gets through the stressful changes in different ways. Satsuki’s dad gets through them by trying to spend more time at home instead of always being away at work. Mei, Satsuki’s sister, deals with her stressful feelings by trying to spend all of her time with Satsuki. Satsuki attempts to get through the stress by trying to simply ignore it. She tries to distract herself from the entire situation that her family is enduring by consuming herself with other aspects of her life. This causes her multitudes of issues throughout the film, and it eventually causes her more stress than she originally was dealt with. The Totoros come into the movie in order to give Satsuki’s life an alternative, stress-free environment. They also provide a

Not until she received a phone call from her mother’s hospital did her way of dealing with the stress fail. The hospital needed to get a hold of Satsuki and her family to tell them that her mother was too sick to visit their new house during the upcoming weekend. Satsuki, overwhelmed with the news, ran to call her dad at the university about the hospital’s call. After she got a hold of her dad, she went to tell the ill-fated news to her sister. Upon hearing the news, Mei became extremely distraught and decided to run away from Satsuki. Since her dad was still away at work, it was partially Satsuki’s responsibility to find Mei. This situation adds more stress to the already stressed out Satsuki. Ignoring all of her stress at this point of the film does not work for Satsuki. She ends up thinking about her mom being sick, and how her dad is gone while her sister is missing. Satsuki is now desperately in need of a successful way of getting through the stresses of her