1957: MIRACLES ON MAPLE HILL by Virginia Sorensen, with illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush
“Mother, say the scoot-thing again,” Marly said.
“[This] aims to be a happy and heartwarming film, a film that lets the audience go home with pleasant, glad feelings. Lovers will feel each other to be more precious, parents will fondly recall their childhoods, and children will start exploring the thickets behind shrines and climbing trees to try and find a totoro. This is the kind of film I want to make…we need a new approach. This new sort of film needs to be a lively and fresh piece of entertainment, not full reminiscence and nostalgia.
What we have forgotten
What we don’t notice
What we are convinced we have lostBelieving that we still have those things, I am proposing to make My Neighbor Totoro.”
As you possibly guessed before you read those last three words, and as you definitely guessed after reading those last three words, the above quote is from Hayao Miyazaki’s original 1986 project plan for My Neighbor Totoro, the animated film that would find itself showered with awards and acclaim, create one of the most iconic and beloved characters in the history of Japanese animation, and set Miyazaki on a path to being recognized worldwide as a brilliant writer, director, and animator1. Roger Ebert summarized his love for the film like this:
“[My Neighbor Totoro] is based on experience, situation and exploration—not on conflict and threat…it would never have won its worldwide audience just because of its warm heart. It is also rich with human comedy in the way it observes the two remarkably convincing, lifelike little girls ... It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.”
Roger Ebert is right (as he often is), Totoro rules. My daughter is four and we’ve watched it twice2 and she didn’t care for The Lion King, but she loves Totoro. Beyond the gorgeous animation and the delightful character design of the Totoros, this movie really sticks out to someone like me who was raised on Disney’s second golden age, mainly because, as Ebert said, Totoro isn’t exactly a plot-heavy film. Two sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe, move out to the Japanese countryside with their dad, while their mom convalesces in the hospital from some unknown illness. Their neighbors are nice to them, and they play with each other, and there are some magic soot sprites in their house, but also there are Totoros, big peaceful nonverbal furry creatures that live in the camphor trees. The mom plans to come home for a visit, and then she can’t, and the girls are sad, but Totoro helps them deliver an ear of corn to the hospital as a present, and they realize they all love each other and can wait to see their mom again. That’s not a lot of story, but it’s not meant to be. You’re meant to watch the sisters take care of each other, and be delighted like Mei is when she discovers the first Totoro, and admire the beautiful hand-drawn hills and forests and rivers in your theater at a time when a rapidly developing Japan was sprouting steel and concrete left and right (and America was preaching a gospel of greed and excess). Like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or pretty much any Miyazaki film, Totoro revolves around the things that keep us grounded in a world that feels increasingly absurd and uncaring: family and selflessness and our connections to the natural world, or, in other words, what we have forgotten, what we don't notice, and what we are convinced we have lost. In 2022, Japan finally opened a Disneyland-style theme park based on Miyazaki’s films, but the park itself is deliberately minimally designed: it doesn’t have any rides, but plenty of play areas for young children and attractions structured to get families to spend time together outside.
I’ve only watched a handful of Miyazaki’s films so far, but animation dork that I am, and children’s media dork that I am, and “guy who likes watching and reading things that make him feel good about the world” dork that I am, I’m thrilled to work my way through the rest of them, and to share Kiki’s Delivery Service or Ponyo with my daughters some day soon.
1957 medalist Miracles On Maple Hill has more than a few interesting similarities to Totoro. Not that this is the Totoro of children’s books; Totoro is a wonderful gem you can share with your entire family and Miracles is something closer to “pleasant enough”. But both stories focus on a family moving out to the countryside to aid in a parent’s recovery. In Miracles, Marly’s family is moving from the bustle of Pittsburgh out to rural Pennsylvania; Marly’s father has returned home from the second World War as a freed POW, he clearly has post-traumatic stress in an era when nobody knew what post-traumatic stress was, and the family desperately needs a change of scenery. So the family moves back to the mother’s old neighborhood in maple syrup country to try and slow their lives down and help in the father’s recovery. Marly, in particular, prays for some miracles to start happening.
Amazingly, they do, pretty quickly. Mr. Chris, the maple syrup farmer next door, promises Marly one new miracle every week. And, as they are in Totoro, the miracles are very quiet and simple; one of the first ones that Marly notices is that her dad starts singing to them in the evenings again, as he begins to settle in to his new home. There aren’t miracles on a biblical scale - nobody heals a leper or raises the dead - but they’re miracles of a family getting back together and living with each other. Those were also the miracles you see in Totoro, which is pretty remarkable considering that Totoro is set in a world where children can see giant spirit creatures drawn from Shinto cosmology.
Nature is at the center of Miracles, though; Marly’s father is convalescing because he’s away from the big city, because he’s out chopping his own wood and living at a slower pace. The climax of the novel is when the syrup farmer neighbor gets hospitalized and Marly’s family has to step in to harvest the syrup themselves, and they grow closer through their exhausting work out in the winter woods. Marly, who can’t even stand the thought of killing a family of mice in the new house, even wonders to herself early in the novel whether human civilization is, you know, a blight upon the earth:
“Tears were running in a real stream and dropping off her chin already, like a sudden rain. ‘It’s people that spoil everything nice in the whole world!’ she cried. ‘Think how happy those mice were in this house until we had to come! That’s just the way my history teacher said people were - there were all those nice buffaloes and everything. And bears. And deer and antelope and everything. And beaver. And then all those horrible old people came…”
But people are good, Miracles is very clear about that. The family pinch-hitting on the syrup harvest - that’s certainly a combination of words - speaks to, as another neighbor points out, “stories I’ve heard about the old days. Folks used to help each other more than they do now. If a man’s barn burned in my neighborhood, why, everybody turned to and in a week he had another barn - full of hay.” When Marly’s brother, Joe, invites the local unhoused drifter - apparently, every Newbery medalist has to have a “local unhoused drifter” character - to stay with the family on Christmas, Marly’s father - a man everyone knew as distant and depressed and suffering - unexpectedly praises the act of selflessness:
“‘Honestly!’ Mother said in a helpless way. ‘Dale, he must have bedbugs and everything, living the way he does’.
Daddy stood there looking at her. His eyes looked hot in his face, which seemed to be going pale. The air had a big important feeling all around him, the way it has around an actor with all the lights turned on him alone, with everybody waiting to hear him speak. ‘Lee, we had bugs in that prison camp,’ Daddy said. ‘I had them on me when I came out. But we got rid of them before we got home again. Some of the people in camp helped each other all the time. Some others never thought about anything or anybody but themselves. I’d never known before how different people can be. And now Joe-’ He turned and looked at Joe with the proudest look Marly ever saw in her life. ‘Well, I know now that Joe would have been one of the good ones. I just know that now.’”
This idea of returning to a simpler, more selfless time, a time before the world got paved over, is all throughout Miracles. At the climatic syrup harvest, another neighbor marvels at the complexity of collecting the sap and preparing the syrup - and you will learn more about syrup harvesting while reading Miracles than you ever thought possible - and at her own ignorance of something that had been in her town for generations:
“Suddenly Miss Annie seemed excited. She looked at Joe and then at Marly, and her eyes began to sparkle over her cup [of syrup]. ‘Children ought to learn about that,’ she said. ‘Why, every child ought to come out here and have a taste-’ She stopped again. But Marly could see the thought finished on her face. ‘Every child in that school ought to see a place like this. It’s part of their American heritage, that’s what it is, and they don’t even know about it.’”
In Miyazaki’s 1986 proposal for Totoro, he also wrote this:
“Unlike a short time ago, when asked ‘What can Japan proudly show to the world?’ grown-ups and children would answer, ‘The beauty in nature and four seasons.’ No one says this anymore. Though we live in Japan and are without a doubt Japanese, we continue to create animation films that avoid depicting Japan. Has our nation become such a miserable place, devoid of dreams? In this age of internationalization, we know that the essentially national is what can become most international. Why, then, don’t we make fun, wonderful films actually set in Japan?”
At the end of World War II, and in 1980s Japan, and I’m going to go ahead and say in 2020s America, the world can still feel like a miserable place, devoid of dreams. Our ties to our families can be universal. Our marveling at nature can be universal. Our willingness, pushing against our own instinct, to help others at our own expense can be universal. To remember that, we need to draw from our stories on what we have forgotten, what we don’t notice, and what we are convinced we have lost.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1947 medalist, Miss Hickory by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey.
John Lasseter, first of Pixar and then of Disney and now of Skydance, was a friend of Miyazaki and was instrumental in getting Disney involved in distributing films like the Oscar-winning Spirited Away to an American audience. Disney was also behind the 2004 dub and re-release of Totoro with Dakota and Elle Fanning in the starring roles. I have not yet had a chance to look up if John Lasseter has a reputation for anything else in the film industry.
Look, she's four, so we watch the dub, but please know that I am VERY STRONGLY a subs guy in my personal anime viewing.