Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro: 33 1/3 Japan
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Overview
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.
Miyazaki Hayao’s beloved animated film, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), expresses nostalgia for both an innocent past and a distant home, sentiments greatly enhanced by Joe Hisaishi’s music.
The first book to examine the role that music and sound play in Miyazaki Hayao’s My Neighbor Totoro, a popular Japanese animation (anime)
Describes the various steps involved in the creation of the soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro through an extensive collaboration between the composer, Joe Hisaishi, and the director of the film, Miyazaki Hayao
Synthesizes information from Japanese-language sources, the vast majority of which has not been translated into English
List of Examples
Acknowledgments
Preface
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
Many fans of Japanese anime love their musical soundtracks, but few scholars have studied their appeal. Kunio Hara explains in clear, soulful language how Joe Hisaishi and Miyazaki Hayao collaborated to create the sonic environment for the beloved My Neighbor Totoro, balancing a scholars’ sophisticated musical analysis and a fan’s emotional engagement.
Kunio Hara is one of the few music and Japanese film scholars with a truly multidisciplinary and multilingual competence. To discover the minutest details of Totoro’s music through a panoply of references previously unavailable to English-speaking readers, while also enjoying endearing recollections on the special sense of nostalgia exuded by the film, is all the more satisfying.
- Title: Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro
- Author: Kunio Hara
- Series: 33 1/3 Japan
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 184
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501345135, 9781501345128, 1501345125, 1501345133
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501345135
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:04:22Z
Kunio Hara is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina, USA. His research focuses on Puccini's operas, exoticism and orientalism in music, music in postwar Japan, and nostalgia.