this is not a journal title

I finally watched My Neighbor Totoro (Wikipedia, IMDB). Can you believe it took me this long? (It was made in 1988.) It is clearly an earlier work by Miyazaki - it doesn't contain any grand sweeping message, it isn't a coming-of-age for a girl story, it's just a simple cute childhood tale. Miyazaki borrows the imagery of the Cheshire Cat from the Disney's 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland, and when watching Totoro you can easily pick out earlier incarnations of things like the dust bunnies in Spirited Away, and the tree sprits in Princess Mononoke. In the film we begin to see the development of Miyazaki's fascination with the balance between humans and the spirits of nature, but it is not fully developed.

The film is worth seeing to get a sense of where Miyazaki has come from (and how far he has come), but do not expect it to be of the same caliber as his more recent (mass released in the US) films.