My Neighbor Totoro: Soundtrack

33⅓ Japan #6

by Kunio Hara, Noriko Manabe (Series Editor)

My Neighbor Totoro is a long-standing international icon of Japanese pop culture that grew out of the partnership between the legendary animator Miyazaki Hayao and the world-renowned composer Joe Hisaishi. A crucial step in the two artists' collaboration was the creation of the album, My Neighbor Totoro: Image Song Collection, with lyrics penned by Miyazaki and Nakagawa Rieko, a famed children's book author, and music composed by Hisaishi. The album, released in 1987 prior to the opening of the film, served not only as a promotional product, but also provided Miyazaki with concrete ideas about the characters and the themes of the film. This book investigates the extent to which Hisaishi's music shaped Miyazaki's vision by examining the relationship between the images created by Miyazaki and the music composed by Hisaishi, with special emphasis on their approaches to nostalgia, one of the central themes of the film.

Genres: Music

184 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2020

Reviews

[Adam]

I would like to give the book 3.5 stars, but I also can't bump it to 4.

I enjoyed the bulk of this book, including the level of detail the author put into describing the actual music of the soundtrack. Fans of actual music theory and composition will find much to love in the author's critical analysis of the pieces.

I also appreciated the investigation of the cultural and anthropological motifs and motivations employed by Miyazaki in creating the world of the movie and how Hisaishi manifested them in the music. The level of research made me happy and kept my interest.

My main quibble with the book is that it doesn't follow the chronology of the movie. I understand that the author wanted to break down many of the "image songs" that appear in different formats surrounding the movie, and that information definitely intrigues me. However, I would have preferred for at least some portion of the book to track with the actual events of the movie before digging into all of the supplementary songs, snippets, and apocryphal ephemera that complements the core soundtrack.

[Alex Sarll]

Because obviously going to Ghibli Park in my Totoro top wasn't quite enough Totoro for the day – and it turns out the book ends with a visit to the same site, when only Mei and Satsuki's house was there of the current riches, but you did have more chance of seeing wild boar. 33 1/3: books have always varied in how much musical knowledge they presume, but I think this is the first one I've read that has passages of formal musical notation; still, I'm fine with cues and leitmotifs, and mickey-mousing was explained along the way. Matters are also complicated by the fact that, despite allegedly following the series' format by examining a single record, this one is really taking on three overlapping but disparate texts: the Image Song Record (a whole category of which I'd been unaware, briefly and illuminatinglly explained); the soundtrack album itself; and, of course, the soundtrack as it exists in the film. Where, for all that I love it, there are lots of clever little details I'd never noticed before reading this. But at the same time, and for all that he prods at the complications of Joe Hisaishi's self-description of the "minimal and ethnic" strain in his music, or the complexities of Miyazaki's relationship with nostalgia, Kunio Hara is careful never to let any of the work get in the way of the film's peerless evocation of childhood wonder.

[Michael Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid entry in the 33 1/3 series, analyzing the development of Joe Hisaishi's soundtrack for the amazing Miyazaki Hayao anime "My Neighbor Totoro". The author shows how the music contains many meanings, not only serving the narrative purposes of the film, but also reflecting Hisaishi's eclectic musical palette and Miyazaki's ambivalence about Japan, having grown up during the post-WWII era of Japanese self-recriminations. Kunio Hara makes a good case for the soundtrack evoking a revisionist nostalgia for a more benign vision of Japan in which people and nature live in harmony.

What I found particularly interesting was how Japanese anime soundtracks - such as for "Totoro" - are sometimes composed before there is even a film, being released initially as an "image album" or "song album". This release builds audience anticipation for the film, when it eventually comes out. The actual film soundtrack then adapts the earlier musical material, but might be iterated yet again with a subsequent soundtrack album release, featuring yet more arrangements.

One reference he doesn't mention is the strong similarity between one of the film's signature cues, "The Village in May", and the Cliff Richard song "Summer Holiday". This might have made for an interesting discussion.