Character · My Neighbor Totoro
Totoro
Not his name. A four-year-old mispronounced a word once, and the whole world took her at it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Giant grey forest spirit who waits at a bus stop
- Type
- Character
- Series
- My Neighbor Totoro
- Letters
- 6 · Easy
Totoro is a forest spirit the size of a small building who lives inside a camphor tree, sleeps most of the time, and is visible mainly to children. He does not speak beyond a roar, does not explain himself, and does not rescue anyone from anything a rescue would fix. What he does is turn up, mostly when a child needs the world to be larger than the news from the hospital.
The name comes from Mei. Asked what he is, she says Totoro, which is her attempt at tororu, the Japanese rendering of troll, out of a picture book her sister reads to her. Satsuki accepts it without correcting her. Everything since printed on a lunchbox descends from a four-year-old getting one word slightly wrong.
The 1988 film sold modestly on release, then sold merchandise steadily for decades, and the character ended up as Studio Ghibli's logo. Miyazaki set it in the countryside of the 1950s, before the ridgeline behind the house had been built over, and the affection in the film is aimed at that landscape at least as much as at the creature standing in it.
Spelling TOTORO
TOTORO is six letters made of three simple pairs: TO, TO, RO. Three O's and no other vowel, so one confirmed O tends to hand you all three. The Japanese トトロ has no long vowels, so nothing is being dropped in translation. The only real trap is writing TOTARO, since the middle pair repeats the first pair exactly.