You'd be hardpressed to find a person who has seen Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 animated fantasy film My Neighbor Totoro and didn't absolutely love it. Even if dedicated Studio Ghibli fans were left out of the equation, audiences both young and old have fallen in love with the likes of Satsuki, Mei, and Catbus, but no character has captured hearts and imaginations quite like the big, furry, forest keeper Totoro.
In this video essay, the team over at ScreenPrism explores the architecture of Totoro's character to explain how the woodland creature works on a narrative level, why it has become such a huge cultural icon, as well as how we could all benefit from having a neighbor like Totoro around to lift our spirits.
Miyazaki's films resonate with people for many reasons, but his celebration of innocence and childhood has to be one of the biggest. Kids love films like Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo because they appeal to the wonder that is already active within them, and adults love them because they remind them of the wonder they might've lost sight of in the chaos of growing up. And My Neighbor Totoro is no different.
The film contains many similar themes and motifs that we've seen in other films by Miyazaki, including flying (representing freedom), strong female characters, and humans connecting to nature through mystical powers, but here are a few concepts that My Neighbor Totoro specifically introduces to its audience.
Laugh at your fears
Children have many things to be scared of, like monsters, storms, and being alone. When we first meet Satsuki and Mei, they are dealing with all of these things, primarily the fear that their mother won't pull through the illness that has already taken her away from them. When Totoro comes along when the girls are alone at a bus stop on a dark and rainy night, his presence is like that of an enormous stuffy given to a child to soothe them. His demeanor, his big furry body, and his magical connection to nature give the girls respite from the tragedy that has befallen them.
'My Neighbor Totoro' (1988)
Don't act like adults
The transition from childhood to adulthood is often marked with moments of great sacrifice from the things we held dear as kids. We cry less, we worry more, we don't live with the wonder that seemed to shape a lot of our joy and curiosity—we make a contractual agreement with our future selves that if we become more practical and restrained, we will gain the rewards that adulthood has to offer. However, these great sacrifices are made in small deposits in our earliest years, as we can see in how Satsuki and Mei misinterpret bravery as not showing emotion "like an adult." Totoro is there to remind them that expressing emotions is not only healthy but is a sign of courage in a world that often suppresses that which it fears.
Have faith in natural magic
Miyazaki isn't shy about revealing the awesome beauty and power of nature in his films. In My Neighbor Totoro, we see the forest as a place where not only magical spirits abide but where real life magic turns tiny acorns into mighty oak trees. That drastic evolution from seed to snag parallels that of our own human life from birth to death. Totoro shows Satsuki and Mei while growth and change may not always be pleasant, it does make one stronger, like a single sapling slowly giving life to a sprawling forest. And even when it is pleasant, growth and change take time, a lesson we learn in the mirroring of the girls' garden and their mother. Mei watches the garden waiting for the first sign of life much like she waits for her mother to make a recovery from her illness. The film asks us to respect the natural timing of things, to not despair when progress isn't visible, and to have faith in that which we cannot see.
Miyazaki created Totoro to not only be a protector for those who are unable to face their fears but also a guide to show them where to look for sources of bravery. I'm sure we'd all be lucky to have that big, furry, forest keeper as our neighbor.
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
'My Neighbor Totoro' (1988)
