As seen in Tour 1, Totoro is an animal-like being, he has a feline nose and whiskers, an owl-shaped body, and grey fur that resembles that of a tanuki, a Japanese raccoon dog. All of these beings live in Japan’s natural and country landscapes so Totoro would be a fitting spirit and wild animal either way. But beyond his looks, Totoro’s role in My Neighbor Totoro is far more complex. Is he just an unusual forest being, or is he something else?
Visually, Totoro is a mixture of a variety of real-life animals but he is not completely one of them (Yoneyama, 2021). His cat-like nose and whiskers remind us of domestic pets with whom he shares a friendly and endearing personality. His rounded form and shape-shifting ability remind us of the tanuki, a mythological creature renowned for its ability to change shape. His wide and observant eyes and subdued personality remind us of the owl and enhance his wise and mysterious personality. At the same time, his hopping gait is reminiscent of a rabbit and adds to his playfulness and evasive personality. His grey fur, while color-neutral, allows him to camouflage himself in Japan’s foggy forests in much the same way tanuki and owls camouflage themselves to live successfully. By taking aspects from several different animals, Totoro places himself between reality and myth, and he is both a recognizable and mysterious figure.
Aside from his physical body, Totoro has anthropomorphic qualities, a characteristic typical in cultural representations of animals (Gossin, 2015). Many cultures imbue religious meaning to those animals found to be intelligent, curious, or strongly emotive, foxes, bears, and elephants have all been holy figures in the past. While never explicitly described as a god or spirit, Totoro becomes a guardian spirit within the context of the woods. He represents the balance between man and nature, a being that doesn't demand worship but evokes awe and regard for the natural world.
But what if Totoro were transplanted to another ecology—Yunnan’s rainforests? The temperate forests of Japan have very different fauna from those in the forests of Yunnan—Asian elephants, gibbons, and leopards among them. The attributes that allow Totoro to blend in with Japan’s forests, his grey color and stealth, would not be so effective in the dense and colorful biodiversity of Yunnan’s forests. Large mammals like elephants dominate the ecosystem here and have a significant role to play in the maintenance of ecological balance. Thick-skinned and wrinkled to deal with the hot and humid tropics, they shape the environment through seed dispersal and the formation of clearings that work to the advantage of other species. Contrasting with the small and elusive Totoro, elephants are a more immediate and tangible form of conservation.
If Totoro were to exist in Yunnan, he would not only have to adapt to living in a new habitat but would have to establish his place in a conservation story shaped by different environmental challenges. Perhaps he would not be the silent and elusive guardian that he is in the Japanese context but a more proactive agent in the realities of habitat destruction and human-wildlife conflict. This conflict between the fantasized role played by Totoro and real environmental processes in Yunnan raises an even larger question: is Totoro a real environmental icon or simply a cultural construction? While he serves as a benign reminder about the magic in the natural world in My Neighbor Totoro, real environmental protection involves real action beyond symbolic wonder. It leads us to the next subject, what actually stands for Totoro in environmentalism?