u/denim_skirt

Cant put a bomb on the table in the first act without having it go off by the end, right? This is a famous trope in drama called Vince's Gun.

The things. You say.

Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro are Studio Ghibli films that came out on the same day: the original Barbenheimer, April 16, 1988. Grave of the Fireflies is, famously, one of the saddest, heaviest movies ever made, whereas My Neighbor Totoro is its opposite: one of the most delightful, charming, joyful movies you'll ever see.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to do my best to ruin that for you. Big spoilers for both movies.

Grave of the Fireflies is the story of two kids who are orphaned in world war 2: an older brother (Seita) doing his best to take care of his toddler sister (Setsuko) in a time of extreme scarcity. It ends with both of them dead: Seita dies in the opening flash-forward, and Setsuko dies of malnourishment at the end. Both starve. That's it, that's the fuckin movie.

My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is the story of a happy father and his two sweet daughters - super sweet, like nobody in the movie can resist talking about how fuckin rad his daughters are every chance they get - moving to a new house while their wife/mother recovers in a hospital from an unnamed illness. Nobody dies. The setting is absolutely gorgeous. There is plenty to eat - we see everybody chow down over and over. And in fact, Totoro ends with the girls giving their mother a magical (?) ear of corn which will help her recover.

My theory is that My Neighbor Totoro is Seita's dream/fantasy/wish/vision as he's dying in Grave of the Fireflies. In his vision, he's grown up. He's a father named Tatsuo with two beautiful daughters (one with almost the same name as his sister "irl," in Grave of the Fireflies), a loving wife, and no apparent mental damage, no trauma. Hes a great dad. His daughters are great kids. Over the course of the film, one goes missing but is found, and while his wife IS convalescing, we are led to believe that she will recover. The stakes are low. They're there, but we don't really worry about them. Everybody's going to be fine. Great, even. This is Seita's dying dream.

There's a theme about the women and girls in his life. Seita's mother has died from injuries sustained in a bombing, and the younger sister he tried so hard to protect died too; in his vision, though, hes surrounded by great women who sometimes have problems, but nothing worth worrying much about. In his vision he has a loving wife - a mother, to his children - as well as two girls, one very similar to his toddler sister Mei and the other kind of a version of Mei if she had gotten to grow up.

Seita's sister is named Setsuko; in this dream, his daughter is named Satsuki. Very similar names. Heartbrealing in the implication that Setsuki could have grown to become the spunky, thoughtful, sweet Satsuko if she hadn't starved.

As Tatsuo, he is surrounded by healthy, loving female figures, including the woman they call Granny who takes care of his daughters. Maidens and crone are doing great; mother will recover.

(I've been writing this for half an hour and my phone is about to die so I'm going to speed run a couple more points and then stop)

Seita (in Grave of the Fireflies) tries desperately to get support from his aunt and from his literal neighbors, but none of them has enough, they can't help him. In his Totoro fantasy, though, the titular neighbor (Totoro) actively protects his girls. He fantasizes about an enormously powerful Neighbor who keeps the girls in his life safe, literally finding Mei when she goes missing toward the end. Seita's neighbors should have protected him and his sisters. In his fantasy, they do. Even aside from Totoro, when Mei goes missing, literally everyone in their communjty does everything they can to find her.

Totoro also makes plants and trees grow. At one point he gives the girls a package of acorns, then that night (in what is sort of a dream and sort of not, an idea we'll return to), they have a goofy, fun ritual in which they dance around and make an enormous tree grow, then grab onto Totoro and fly around then play music atop the giant tree and have, basically, one of the sweetest adventures two little kids could have. Which is heartbreaking when you compare it to his actual sister's death by starvation in a cave.

Contrast Totoro's flora powers with the setting of Grave of the Fireflies. Seika spends the movie in a bombed out, ugly city. There are some fields where weedy crops grow, and Seika finds a patch of land where grasses are growing near the cave where they set up their beds and meager possessions, but mostly they spend their days in the bombed out city, scavenging. So in his dying moments, then, he is fantasizing about the lush forests, rolling hills of farms, rivers and hidden pathways through the foliage and a tree, wider than a house, which holds a secret tunnel down to the grassy bedroom of an enormous, benevolent nature spirit. It's heartbreaking to think that as he dies in a filthy subway station in a ruined city, he's fantasizing about a tree as large as a mountain erupting from the earth in a single night, aided by the magic of the innocence of the kind of girl his sister could have been if she hadn't died.

Its also interesting the way that the girls' interactions with Totoro kind of happen when they're asleep, but kind of also don't. It's a grey area, which resonates with the half-dreaming, half-dying state in which Seita imagines it. Mei's first interaction with Totoro ends with her falling asleep, implying that she may have dreamed it. In her next interaction with Totoro, at the cat bus station, she is also asleep, although Satsuko is awake and present this time. Then there's the dream where they make the giant tree grow: when they wake the next morning, theres no giant tree, but the acorns they've planted have finally started to sprout. I think these incidents in which waking and sleep, the magical and the conrete mingle and blur, parallel Seita's experience imagining these things as he's dying. He's feverishly experiencing them, but also not.

You get what I'm saying. There's lots more, but the last thing i'll point out is this. In Grave of the Fireflies, fireflies themselves become a complicated symbol: they are beautiful and symbolize joy and beauty, but they're also melancholy, caught and kept in an empty candy tin whose steadily diminishing contents had paralleled the steadily diminishing resources (and hope) available to Seita and Setsuko. AFTER Seita dies, we see these fireflies released from the candy tin, representing a kind of ultimate release from suffering. But AS he is dying, and fantasizing about a better life...

As I've said a lot, one of the delights of My Neighbor Totoro is the lushness of the vegetation, the leaves and acorns and branches and dirt and nature spirits and water and sky and clouds and sun and rain. We see butterflies and moths, centipedes and soot gremlins, fish, a goat - but not once in My Neighbor Totoro do we see a firefly. It's a glaring and honestly heartbreaking omission.