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April 09, 2015

“Trees and people used to be good friends” | My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

17 minutes

Japanese animation turns 100 years old in 2017. The art form

initially flourished in 1917, as animators including Oten Shimokawa and

Seitarou Kitayama produced short comedic films that ran for only a few

minutes each. While the vast majority of those early animated shorts are

now lost – due variously to time, humidity, earthquakes and the

American fire-bombing of Tokyo – Japan’s animation (or ‘anime’, to use

the borrowed Japanese term) industry has continued to thrive ever since.

Numerous directors have been and gone over the decades, and the

industry has expanded and contracted. If we were to highlight a single

filmmaker as the best artist anime has produced over that time, it’s a

fairly safe bet that the majority of fans, critics and observers will

cite Hayao Miyazaki. Furthermore if we were to highlight the very best

film Miyazaki had directed, I suspect the majority would cite his 1988

fantasy My Neighbor Totoro.

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