Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro

Kunio Hara

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501345135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

1 Miyazaki, Hisaishi, and Their Collaboration

When My Neighbor Totoro was released in movie theaters in Japan on April 16, 1988, Miyazaki was a 47-year-old veteran of the Japanese animation industry.¹ It was the fourth feature-length animation that he directed, and his third film with Hisaishi,² with whom he has collaborated since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) through his most recent full-length film, The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu, 2013). A brief discussion of their respective careers up to My Neighbor Totoro, as well as the nature and process of their collaboration, provides a background for understanding the music for the film.

Miyazaki Hayao: A Biographical Sketch

Miyazaki became interested in animation after watching The Tale of the White Serpent (Hakujaden, 1958), Tōei Animation’s first feature-length color animation, when he was eighteen and cramming for the college entrance exam (Miyazaki 1996, 44). In 1959, Miyazaki entered the political economy department at Gakushūin University. He had wanted to join a student manga club (circle) but was unable to find one and, instead, joined a club that studied children’s literature. This experience provided him with the opportunity to familiarize himself with a new breed of Japanese children’s literature, including the works of Nakagawa Rieko. After graduating from college in 1963, he joined Tōei Animation, where he spent the next seven years working as an animator. There, he met Takahata Isao, with whom he would collaborate over the next few decades. In 1971, Miyazaki quit Tōei Animation and joined another animation studio, A Production, with Takahata. He collaborated with Takahata on the TV anime series Lupin III (Rupan sansei, 1971–72) and two medium-length theatrical anime, Panda! Go, Panda! (Panda kopanda, 1972) and its sequel, Panda! Go, Panda!: The Rainy-Day Circus (Panda kopanda amefuri sākasu, 1973). Miyazaki and Takahata made another move in 1973 to Zuiyō Eizō (which later reorganized itself as Nippon Animation), where Miyazaki participated in several notable TV series based on well-known children’s literature, including Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no shōjo Haiji, 1974), A Dog of Flanders (Furandāsu no inu, 1975), 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (Haha o tazunete sanzenri, 1976), Rascal the Raccoon (Araiguma Rasukaru, 1978), and Anne of Green Gables (Akage no An, 1979). It is significant to note that many of these series center on the lives of children, especially young girls, in realistic Western settings.

After Miyazaki had fulfilled many supportive functions as an animator in the 1960s and 1970s, he began to take on leadership roles starting in the late 1970s. Miyazaki made his directorial debut with the TV series, Future Boy Conan (Miraishōnen Konan, 1978), a postapocalyptic sci-fi fantasy based on American author Alexander Key’s The Incredible Tide (1970). This was quickly followed by The Castle of Cagliostro (Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979), a comedy-action drama film featuring characters from the popular Lupin III manga by Monkey Punch. This was the first feature-length animation that Miyazaki directed. In 1982, Miyazaki started the serial publication of his own postapocalyptic sci-fi fantasy manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in the magazine Animage published by Tokuma Shoten, initiating a long association with the publisher. The following year, Miyazaki started working on the animated film version of Nausicaä as its director with the animation studio Topcraft. The success of the film, which was released in 1984, encouraged Miyazaki and Takahata (who had managed the film as its producer) to found their own animation company, Studio Ghibli, in 1985 with an investment from Tokuma Shoten. Studio Ghibli released its very first film—Castle in the Sky, a steampunk³ adventure film inspired, in part, by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—in August 1986. The list of films directed by Miyazaki suggests his preference for fantasy and adventure films intended for teenagers and young adults. Totoro, which follows the ordinary (and at times extraordinary) daily activities of a pair of young sisters, marked a radical departure from the reputation that Miyazaki had forged up to this point. His earlier works, especially at Nippon Animation with Takahata, demonstrate his familiarity with narratives centering on young children (Greenberg 2018, 117). Yet, the setting of Totoro—the Japanese countryside rather than a foreign locale—also signaled an important shift in priorities (Napier 2018, 104). In fact, this was the first of Miyazaki’s many films set in Japan, which include Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime, 1997), Spirited Away (2001), Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo, 2008), and The Wind Rises (2013).

In spite of this apparent anomaly, My Neighbor Totoro represented for Miyazaki a culmination of ideas he had nurtured over several decades. Twice before the late 1980s, Miyazaki had attempted to launch similar projects. In 1975, during the transitionary period between his work on Heidi and 3,000 Leagues, Miyazaki produced two sketches, called “image boards” (imēji bōdo), depicting scenes of a small girl interacting with a mysterious monster at the bus stop on a rainy evening. These and other sketches are reproduced in The Place Where Totoro Was Born (Totoro no umareta tokoro) (Miyazaki 2018, 2–3). The first sketch shows a girl, holding an umbrella at a bus stop at night, spotting a dark yeti-like creature approaching her, with only its eyes visible, covering its head with a huge green leaf. The second image shows this monster on a cat -shaped bus handing a little sack to the girl. These were initially prepared for a planned children’s picture book, but the project never came to fruition. After completing The Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki revisited the idea and produced additional sketches, but this attempt, too, did not materialize. As the work for Castle in the Sky approached its end, Miyazaki began to ponder taking on the project in earnest. However, the executives of Studio Ghibli’s parent company, Tokuma Shoten, expressed concerns about the commercial viability of the film. The situation changed once Suzuki Toshio, the assistant editor of Animage, negotiated a deal—unprecedented in the industry—for Studio Ghibli to produce simultaneously My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) on behalf of two publishing houses, Tokuma Shoten and Shinchōsha, respectively, as a double bill (McCarthy 1999, 116–7; Suzuki 2013, 39–45).

Joe Hisaishi: A Biographical Sketch

Born as Fujisawa Mamoru on December 6, 1950, in Nagano Prefecture in the mountains of central Japan, Hisaishi studied composition at Kunitachi College of Music, the oldest private music school in Tokyo, founded in 1926. While there, Hisaishi became captivated by the then cutting-edge, avant-garde movement of minimalism after listening to Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air (1968) (Hisaishi 1992, 177). After graduating from Kunitachi, he pursued a career as a composer-performer of minimalist music while taking on odd jobs, teaching piano to children, making orchestral arrangements for concerts, and providing music for the TV anime series, First Humans Giatrus (Hajime ningen gyātoruzu, 1974–1975).⁴ Around this time, he adopted the professional name Joe Hisaishi, a clever play on the name of American producer Quincy Jones.⁵ After composing, recording, and producing the album Mkwaju (1981), consisting of six minimalist style pieces for percussions and electronic instruments, Hisaishi retired from the world of “modern music” (gendai ongaku) and turned a new leaf in his life as a popular music artist. In 1982, he released the album Information with his newly formed synth-pop group, Wonder City Orchestra, through the label Japan Record, which was affiliated with Tokuma Japan Communications.

In the summer of 1983, Hisaishi had a fateful meeting with Miyazaki to discuss the “image album” (imēji arubamu) for the film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Takahata 1991, 318–26; Hisaishi 1992, 36–56). An image album is a collection of music based on characters, events, locales, and themes from the film to be sold in advance of the film (Bellano 2010, 5; Koizumi 2010, 62). Anime production companies had begun to pay attention to soundtrack albums as possible sources of revenue following the release of The Symphonic Suite: Space Battleship Yamato (Kōkyōkumikyoku Uchū Senkan Yamato) in 1977 (Yamasaki 2014, 194).⁶ By the time Miyazaki met with Hisaishi, the media mix strategy of creating an album consisting of music based on popular manga series had become a firmly established practice.⁷ Takahata, who acted as the music director of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, anticipated that such an album for the feature-length animated film could enable him to check the quality and fit of the music by the chosen composer. At the same time, the album could function as an advanced promotional material for future audience members of the film (Suzuki 2011, 74).

Tokuma Japan Communications, the record company owned by Tokuma Shoten, recommended Hisaishi to Takahata and Miyazaki; Tokuma Shoten also published the Animage magazine that ran Miyazaki’s manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Miyazaki showed Hisaishi the image boards he had created for the Nausicaä project and verbally described the characters, objects, events, and situations he had in mind for the film. Hisaishi quickly produced a collection of instrumental music based on Miyazaki’s ideas. The album was sold under Tokuma Japan Communications’ Animage Records label later that year. When it was time to decide the composer for the soundtrack of the film, both Miyazaki and Takahata pushed for Hisaishi against other composers recommended by Tokuma Shoten’s executives. Thanks to Miyazaki and Takahata’s insistence, Hisaishi secured the job, providing music for the soundtrack largely based on the music he had composed for the image album.⁸

In his recollections, Takahata (1991, 325) expresses his amazement at how well Hisaishi’s music evoked the fantastic world depicted in Miyazaki’s film. Considering that Miyazaki had repeatedly listened to Hisaishi’s compositions on the image album while he was creating the film, Takahata suspects that the director had fashioned his film in such a way as to work well with Hisaishi’s musical ideas. The function of Hisaishi’s image album was thus more than promotional: not only did it allow Hisaishi to try out musical ideas during the production phase of the film, but it also provided a rich source of inspiration for Miyazaki’s imagination (Bellano 2012). The collaboration between the two artists continued in Miyazaki’s next project, Castle in the Sky, for which Hisaishi provided both the image album and the music for the film soundtrack. In addition to the image albums, the record company also released newly composed music for the soundtracks of both films as “soundtrack albums” during their initial runs.

The Process of Collaboration

Once he had decided to work on My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki quickly expressed his desire to have Hisaishi compose the music for the film. Hisaishi, in turn, gladly accepted Miyazaki’s request, but he p roposed creating a collection of “image songs” instead of the customary image album of instrumental music (Watanabe [1987] 2018, 1). Miyazaki, who felt the need for songs that would appeal to young children, approached Nakagawa whom he had admired since his college days. Recalling their previous collaboration on the theme song for Castle in the Sky, “Carrying You” (Kimi o nosete), Hisaishi requested that Miyazaki write additional poems for the album (Hisaishi 1992, 63–64). On April 16, 1987, Miyazaki arranged an interview (taidan) with Nakagawa to explain his ideas about the film and formally request her participation in the project. The transcript of the interview was published in the June issue of Animage magazine, which represents a shrewd promotional strategy from the magazine editor. Miyazaki was successful in obtaining Nakagawa’s interest, initiating a remarkable collaboration among these three creative artists that would last for the next several months. Throughout the process, Suzuki Toshio, who was then the as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Miyazaki, Hisaishi, and Their Collaboration
• 2 Two Songs from the Image Album
• 3 Totoro in Music and Sound
• 4 The Wind and the Forest
• 5 Satsuki and Mei
• 6 Forgotten Sounds
• Conclusion: Forgetting and Remembering
• Notes
• References
• Filmography
• Discography
• Track Lists
• Index
• Copyright