Urban Legend | My Neighbor Totoro 🌳

When you watched 'My Neighbor Totoro' as a kid, you probably rarely associated it with horror stories, right? However, for many years, an interesting 'Satsuki and Mei Death Theory' has been circulating online😨 In the latter part of the story, Mei goes missing, and a child's shoe is found in the pond, leading some to speculate that Mei actually drowned. Satsuki, in order to find her sister, asked Totoro for help, and consequently entered another world. This then led to interpretations like 'Totoro is the Grim Reaper' and 'The Catbus travels between the realms of the living and the dead'. Some details in the movie were also brought into the discussion: the sisters lacking shadows in some scenes in the latter half, Mei sitting next to the six Jizo statues, and the fact that the two didn't directly meet their mother upon arriving at the hospital at the end. Another more well-known theory connects 'My Neighbor Totoro' with the 1963 'Sayama Incident' (a real case where a girl was kidnapped and murdered). The incident also occurred in Saitama Prefecture and happened in May. 'Satsuki' and 'May' both represent May, and Satsuki's age of 12 + Mei's age of 4 = 16, which coincidentally matches the age of the incident's victim. Are these coincidences just coincidences, or can they be interpreted differently? That's left for you to imagine🤔 However, Studio Ghibli officially clarified the rumors in 2007, stating that the settings of 'Totoro being the Grim Reaper' and 'Mei having died' do not exist. As for the absence of shadows in some scenes, the official explanation was that they were omitted because the animation judged them unnecessary.