I think the issue is that in this movie, the pastoral love letter takes up most of the first half of the movie and there is little else going on. Totoro doesn't even feature much until after the half way mark. If you are used to Miyazaki getting straight to the point (like Spirited Away Or Howl's Moving Castle), this feels like an age.
Most people I know find this movie to drag on for ages in the first half. As soon as Totoro and the others start appearing regularly though, they melt into the floor.
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I think that's actually what makes some of Hayao's films unique. Some of them are a rather Slice Of Life storytelling with plenty of spiritual mysticism with one big event as the climax. You don't need an evil villian or something too dark. And Hayao always builds up or establishes the mysticism well at the start of his movies.
It doesn't need large climax, it just needs to show life going on. Children having imaginations and waiting for a sick mother to come home.
And so the film is a love letter to childhood. You don't need any more conflict than that.
- I've always been taught that stories are about conflict
You had bad teachers then.
^ Almost all stories have some conflict, even if it's a case of deciding what to have for lunch today or what to say to a friend.
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Mixed feelings, lifted from the forums
My Neighbor Totoro is Hayao Miyazaki's love letter to the Japanese countryside, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
On the one hand, the idealized portrayal of village life is pretty nice, to say the least. On the other hand, it so clearly is an idealized portrayal that I had trouble believing in it. It didn't feel real, it felt like what somebody else wished were real. It felt like Grandpa saying "kids these days, why back when I was a boy, those were the good times..." Granted, Miyazaki does a lot of this anyway, but it never came across like that to me as strongly as it did here. I didn't see "the Japanese countryside, " I saw "the Japanese countryside as filtered through Miyazaki's mind." Ironically, the fantastical elements, the spirits and such, were probably the most believable thing about the movie.
I also found Satsuki a less compelling protagonist than, say, Chihiro, for all the latter's whininess. The way she and Mei and their father took to said countryside like a fish to water just felt a little too neat, like a little struggling would've been more believable. I've always been taught that stories are about conflict, and it feels strange to see a story with so little conflict in its first two thirds. Reminds me of complaints about Twilight and Left Behind.
I dunno, maybe all of this is just because I can't imagine myself, personally, fitting in in the country. I'm not particularly fond of the big city, but I have no real love for farm life, either. I can't see society's transition from 90% farmers 10% other to 10% farmers 90% other as being a bad thing, no matter how pretty and nice-smelling grasslands and woodlands are. Maybe it's my own lack of empathy. Maybe I've just gotten too damn cynical and skeptical in my old age (21), expecting utopian settings to turn out to be lotus eater machines or part of a Truman Show Plot. And the animation is gorgeous, even if the scene with the sprouts just made me think "huh?" when it was over. Maybe I just need to wait for a niece or nephew to watch it with. Whatever the case, though, Totoro still left me feeling like I'd intruded onto something intensely personal.