It was the moment where Mei stands alone, the Corn husk still in her hands, that she plucked herself from the plant and is so proud about, and she wants to give it to her mother, and she understands she cannot give it to her. It's this moment in which she just bursts into the bitterest of sobs where I broke too.
I watched My Neighbour Totoro after a recommendation from a good friend. Right from the start it is clear the animation is very different from any other film I ever saw. Nature is at the center of this films aesthetics. It's bustling with life, bursting with livelihood, occupying every corner of the frame. The beauty of it catches you in a primal way, you breath deeper out of instinct.
When you have read a lot of plays, and I have, you start asking yourself different questions. And as a story unfolds sometimes the more important question is: what's missing? As the family enters their new house, it becomes apparent, it's the mother who is missing. The wonders of the house and the garden, with it's small creatures and mysteries is setting a ton which is vital for understanding the Film. It's about coping. Children are as likely as adults to look for comfort in the tiniest of phenomena. In the face of trauma, the feeling of powerlessness in front of bigger forces leads us to search for the smallest of signs. Why did this happen, why does anything happen?
Children are more flexible than adults, and also more fearless in face of the unknown. Since they lack the experience to make them fear the 'danger behind the bushes'. So when Mei discovers a small creature she follows it through a tunnel in the bushes into the forest, where she falls through the roots of a tree to discover the Totoro. We never know what is Totoro, it is the name Mei gives him, shortly before she falls asleep on his belly. As her father and sister find her, she is fast asleep on the forest floor. Nature has provided her with protection. Totoro has provided her with the comport of sleep. She tells her family about Totoro and they look for him, but they cannot find him. The father, instead of dismissing it, excepts the idea of the forest god, he understands that it brings happiness and comfort for Mei, and as so it will bring him and Satsuki comfort too.
It is Satsuki, the older sister who discovers the world for us. She runs all the time in the rooms of the house, outside, her little sister trying to keep up. She also has taken all the traditional roles of a Mother. She cooks for the family and as her father buries himself in his work she is the one to notice that Mei is missing. She holds her own for most of the movie, fighting to keep a normal life for her family and for herself. She breaks into sobs in a heart quenching moment near the water pump, when she can't keep her strength in the light of fear that she will never see her mother again.
There is an ambivalence in the portraying of Totoro and the Cat-bus which is confusing for adults but probably not for children. As children are often in a state of finding an object or a person attractive and horrid at the same time. Which means they feel drawn to it but also repulsed. As with Totoro and the Cat-bus which have this ambivalence drawn into them, the somehow too big mouth, and seemingly weird mimic. It is also a part of the Unheimlich or the uncanny, familiar yet foreign, which is an important part of dreaming or perceiving an unknown part of reality. It is also in the context of the film a symbol for the main theme, the fear and coping with a loss. As the Father drowns himself in his work, the girls have created a world of creatures to help them come to terms with their dying mother.
The Mother is present in the film much more often than the two brief appearances in the hospital. First through her absence in the first scenes, than as a memory, but represented by Nature, by the weather and by Totoro. When Mei meets Totoro she hugs him, busking in his warmth as she would her mother. When Satsuki meets Totoro he is just there for her in the rain, so she wouldn't stand alone, as her mother would have been. As he goes away, she lets a part of her mother go away with him.
And so we come back to the Corn husk. Mei doesn't drop it until the end of the film. As it represents for her the hope she will get to see her mother again. That's why she cannot contain her disappointment as Satsuki tells her they would not see her any time soon. Her breakdown could have been dismissed as a tantrum was it not the most human rant against everything that is wrong in the world, as if it's not enough to try and live through the hardship of life as you are being robbed without reason of your innermost hopes.
It is non the less a nuance but the second meeting with the mother is already as she moved to another world. Where she still lives and can even see her daughters, and receive their gift, the Corn husk. Totoro is there with them, he accompanies them to this farewell and he enables them to say goodbye in a way the father cannot. This scene mirrors the other scene with the mother in a way which shows what the girls are missing. The touch, the brushing of the hair, the warmth of a mother.