Comparison · 3 shared techniques

My Neighbor Totoro vs Ponyo

My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Ponyo (2008) share 3 techniques. Here is how each film uses them.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988) poster

My Neighbor Totoro

Hayao Miyazaki · 1988

Ponyo (2008) poster

Ponyo

Hayao Miyazaki · 2008

Shared

Same technique, two films

Hand-Drawn Texture

Keeping the handmade look of traditional animation, including slightly uneven pencil lines and visible brushwork in the backgrounds. The small imperfections make the image feel warm and human.

My Neighbor Totoro

The animators draw the rain, the grass and Totoro's fur in such specific detail that you can almost touch them. You can sense how heavy, damp and warm or cold the countryside is.

Ponyo

The studio closed its computer graphics department so the film could be drawn by hand. Miyazaki had ships drawn frame by frame, and the sea is full of wobbling, uneven lines. The ocean looks like it is breathing.

Ecological Animism

Treating nature as alive and aware, with its own will, hierarchy and sacred status. Animals and spirits respond to people, which argues that the natural world has value of its own.

My Neighbor Totoro

The camphor tree is a living shelter, and the forest is as much a subject of the film as the people are. Miyazaki shows nature as conscious and patient, and as closely tied to how well the humans are doing.

Ponyo

When Ponyo uses her father's magic to become human, nature loses its balance and the sea rises onto the land. The wave spirits obey Fujimoto and the sea answers to a goddess, Gran Mamare. Nature has a will here, and people have to live with its answers.

Supernatural Realism

Dropping magical or miraculous events into an otherwise realistic world and playing them completely straight. The film never explains them or winks at you about them.

My Neighbor Totoro

Totoro and the soot sprites are simply part of the world. Nobody explains them and nobody doubts them. The film shows them as plainly and confidently as it shows the farmhouse or the camphor tree.

Ponyo

A fish with a human face, a flooded town and a sea goddess all appear in a plain fishing village. Nobody stops to explain the magic or jokes about it. Because the film plays it all straight, you accept it the way Sosuke does.

Different

Where they split