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.

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9781501345111

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Reviews

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. * E. Taylor Atkins, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Assistant Chair of History, Northern Illinois University, USA * 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. * Marco Bellano, Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor in History of Animation, University of Padova, Italy *

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. * E. Taylor Atkins, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Assistant Chair of History, Northern Illinois University, USA *

Author Information

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.

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