9:37pm September 21, 2014

My Neighbor Totoro online streaming :D

This is one of my favorite movies and hands down the cutest movie I have ever seen, like complete cute overload, especially the faces made by the little kid, OMG.

Anyway:

My Neighbor Totoro (subtitled)

My Neighbor Totoro (dubbed)

So you can watch subtitled or dubbed, whatever you prefer.  I tend to prefer subtitles, but dubbed comes in handy when I can’t be watching the screen all the time, so I’ve seen both.

Just WOW.

It’s rare that a film really amazes me, but this one does.  The kids are just such quintessential kids.  And I love the father’s relationship with them, and the fact that the father gets to have a relationship with the two young girls.  And even though everything is completely adorable, they’re not without problems, their mother is in the hospital with tuberculosis and there’s always a threat she might die.  And they befriend these amazing monsters called Totoros.  And there’s a bus shaped like a cat, or a cat shaped like a bus (from a Japanese legend that cats can, past a certain age, shapeshift, and holy crap does that one become a cat-bus if there ever was one).  And there’s all sorts of slow parts where you just get to look at the background, which is one of my favorite things in a movie or a book, where it’s slow and you don’t have to “rush along the plot” really fast all the time.

There’s one ten-second scene that strikes me as racist.  (Where a girl jumps around going wah-wah-wah and patting her mouth rhythmically, you know the way kids do to imitate “Indians” they’ve seen on TV.  Was watching it with a staff person today and she was like “Well THAT’S racist…”)   But other than that, there was nothing bad enough to jar me out of the story.  Thought I should warn people though.  It happens so fast a lot of people could even miss it.  But it’s still there, and it made me uncomfortable.  But for a movie to only make me uncomfortable that way once for a few split seconds in the whole movie, honestly that’s rare enough as it is.  I hate to set my standards that low, but… yeah.

Anyway.  Wonderful movie overall.  Love all the characters.  Every single one of them.  Which for me makes or breaks a movie or book.  It all rides on the characters, for me.  And I also love a lot of scene-setting stuff, like watching frogs in ponds that don’t ‘add to the plot’ but that add to the scenery in a big way.  And Miyazaki is really good at that kind of thing.

(I tried to show my mom a book that I really liked and she couldn’t get through it, she said the pacing was too slow and nothing was happening.  I realized that for her, she really likes plot.  And for me, I really like characters and setting.  So the characters and setting can be sitting around establishing themselves for ages without the plot moving along, and I’m perfectly content.  Hell, I’d read a book with no plot if the characterization and scene-setting was strong enough.  That may even be the book I write for NaNoWriMo – not necessarily no plot, but plot will not be a priority at all, and neither will conflict, although conflict might occur anyway.  So might plot.  But only if they arise naturally.)

Anyway… if you want to see it, or re-watch it, or whatever, those are two places you can go to get subtitled or dubbed versions online.

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