At first, Mei is the only one who sees Totoro, but Satsuki soon meets him as well, and the girls have several fantastic encounters with Totoro, interwoven between subplots involving their family and (human) neighbors.īut the girls' seemingly idyllic rural existence is soon shattered when a health crisis forces their mother to cancel a much-anticipated visit home. While pursuing it, she comes upon the den of a much larger forest spirit that she eventually calls "Totoro". Along with the usual tribulations of moving-a spooky old house, new neighbors, fitting in at a new school-Mei encounters an odd little creature (Hitoshi Takagi) in the backyard. My Neighbor Totoro (Japanese: Tonari no Totoro, 1988) is Studio Ghibli's second feature film and the fourth animated feature directed by Hayao Miyazaki (the first being The Castle of Cagliostro).Ī little cycle truck putters down a rural road in post-war Japan, carrying four-year-old Mei ( Chika Sakamoto), her older sister Satsuki ( Noriko Hidaka), and their father Tatsuo Kusakabe ( Shigesato Itoi) to a new home in the country to be closer to the rural hospital where the girls' mother Yasuko ( Sumi Shimamoto) is recovering from an unspecified (but potentially deadly) disease.