Shy'Comics

Current children’s cinema is composed predominately of flashy adventure-comedies (to name some recent hits: The Lego Batman Movie, Finding Dory, The Secret Life of Pets, Zootopia). Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, minus any potentially offensive content. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. Perhaps this is why the genre is generally called “Family,’ rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasant enough to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily made specifically for young hearts and brains.

My Neighbor Totoro is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure—in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.

Kroki a écrit : ↑12 août 2017, 21:22 Super super essai sur Mon voisin Totoro.

And children love it. They love it. My sisters and I watched it ad nauseam parentis growing up, and every child to whom we’ve passed it on has done the same. We didn’t know it was characterized by “narrative intransitivity,” one of Peter Wollen’s diagnostic criteria for avant-garde counter-cinema. We just knew it was wonderful.