Where to watch My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Trivia & production notes

• Hayao Miyazaki based the character Mei on his own niece.
• Art director Kazuo Oga's work on My Neighbor Totoro launched his career with Studio Ghibli, which led the studio to assign him future projects that became a trademark style for the studio.
• Miyazaki initially conceived the story with only one young girl but realized she wouldn't be meeting her father at a bus stop, so he added a second sister during development.
• The film's opening sequence was not storyboarded but instead composed through a permutation process using time sheets.
• The animators spent an entire month creating the tadpole scene, using four colors and blurred water effects to achieve the desired look.
• Joe Hisaishi composed the soundtrack while drawing inspiration from contemporary composers Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Cage.
• A main-belt asteroid discovered on December 31, 1994 was named 10160 Totoro in honor of the film's character.
• In 2013, a newly discovered species of velvet worm from Vietnam was named Eoperipatus totoro because the creature resembles the many-legged animal that Totoro uses as a vehicle.
• The Totoro character became the official mascot and logo for Studio Ghibli following the film's success.
• The film served as inspiration for the Totoro Hometown Fund Campaign, which began in 1990 to preserve satoyama landscapes in Saitama Prefecture.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article My Neighbor Totoro, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.