In My Neighbor Totoro, a Family Bows to a Tree — Miyazaki's Films Believe Everything Has a Soul

When the Kusakabe family first moves into their new house out in the countryside, they do something a little strange: they walk out to the enormous tree in the yard and bow to it, together, out loud: "Thank you for watching over Mei and making us feel so welcome here. Please continue to look after us." The film never really stops to explain what that tree actually is — it just has an entire family talking to a tree like it can hear every word.

That's not a random scene Miyazaki tossed in. This Wisecrack episode argues that tree, Totoro himself, the strange spirits wandering through Spirited Away, and the furious forest god in Princess Mononoke all trace back to one specific worldview: Japanese Shinto, and its belief that spirit can live inside almost anything.

What Makes a Tree Somebody's Home

Quick decode: Shinto's core idea isn't a single god — it's a word, kami. The word is both singular and plural at once: it can mean one specific spirit, or the divine quality running through absolutely everything. That tree in the yard is a yorishiro — an object the forest god, Totoro, has chosen to live inside. Once a spirit picks an object like that, it stops being ordinary scenery and becomes something owed real respect. That's exactly why the Kusakabes bow to a tree: they're not performing for the camera, they're following an actual Shinto custom — thanking the spirit of the land for taking them in.

The soot sprites drifting around the attic follow a similar logic. They cluster around a gohei — a paper charm meant to bless the whole house. When the local grandmother finds the attic crawling with little black shapes, she doesn't panic; to her, they're not monsters, they're neighbors: "Don't worry, dear. They're nothing to be afraid of. If they decide you're nice people, they won't harm you, and after a little while they'll just go away."

When the Forest and the Humans Actually Go to War

Not every spirit in Miyazaki's films is that gentle. In Princess Mononoke, the young warrior Ashitaka traces a string of curses back to Irontown, an industrial settlement whose leader, Lady Eboshi, has been clear-cutting the forest to keep the town's iron supply going — which has dragged her into a long, brutal war with the mountain god, one Ashitaka is desperate to stop. The film doesn't look away from what that costs: the forest burns, the gods grow furious, and the curses are real and spreading.

But it never lets you pick a clean side, either. Irontown gives desperate women — and even outcasts of the time, people with leprosy — real work and real dignity for the first time in their lives. Lady Eboshi isn't a cartoon villain either. "She's not even afraid of the gods, that woman," one townsperson says, and there's something like admiration in it. At the same time, the forest really is disappearing, the mountain god really is enraged, and the curse is genuinely spreading. The film refuses to hand you an easy answer.

People Who Only See What Something's Worth

Ponyo lays this same clash out even more bluntly. Ponyo's father, Fujimoto, was once human himself before choosing to leave humanity behind and devote his life to the ocean. He opposes his daughter's wish to become human, and he doesn't hold back why: "Human? What do you know about humans, Brunnhilde? They spoil the sea. They treat your home like their empty, black souls. I was once, long ago, a human myself. I had to leave that all behind to serve the earth." To Fujimoto, all humans see when they look at the ocean is how much they can take from it.

Quick decode: the episode points to an idea that religion shapes how a culture treats the natural world. Traditions that describe humans as having "dominion" over the earth leave nature with only instrumental value — worth something only because it's useful. Shinto runs the other direction: if everything might carry a spirit, the land itself deserves to be treated as an end in itself, not just a means to one — what philosophers call intrinsic value. That clash, the episode argues, is the real root of conflict running through most of Miyazaki's films, Irontown's war with the forest included.

Looking at a Tree and Only Seeing Lumber

Quick decode: the episode brings in the philosopher Martin Heidegger (nicknamed here "philosophy's Ron Swanson") and his argument that once you look at the world only in terms of what's useful, you lose the ability to see what things actually are. A tree becomes nothing but "wood." A beach becomes nothing but "material for iron sand." A giant, walking, thinking mountain god becomes nothing but "an obstacle in the way." That's a fair description of Irontown's residents — not villains so much as people whose whole way of seeing has quietly reduced an entire forest down to raw material.

Nature Isn't Automatically Kind, and Machines Aren't Automatically Evil

The toxic jungle in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is beautiful and will kill you in five minutes without a mask — and it's crawling with insects large enough to kill on their own. Spirited Away's bathhouse boss Yubaba and the wandering spirit No-Face are nowhere close to as gentle as Totoro. Miyazaki never lets nature or spirits get romanticized into something automatically safe.

Technology gets the same fair treatment in reverse. In The Wind Rises, the engineer Jiro spends his whole life chasing one dream, and his idol Caproni puts it plainly: "Airplanes are not tools for war. They're not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality." The catch is that the planes Jiro actually builds end up flying into war anyway. Miyazaki himself never seems to fully resolve that tension — can loving what you make really stay separate from what it's eventually used for? The episode doesn't think the film ever gives a clean answer, and honestly, neither does Miyazaki.

So What's Miyazaki's Actual Answer?

Shinto has one more piece worth knowing: the dead need to be properly honored so their spirits can rest, and the sacrifices made by local gods and wildlife — even sacrifices that benefit people — have to be acknowledged and respected. Ignore that, and an angered spirit can turn into a curse. That idea of respect and balance is close to Miyazaki's real answer, running underneath all of it.

Castle in the Sky's ending draws that answer out visually. When the floating city of Laputa is finally destroyed, exactly one thing survives intact: the enormous tree growing around its power crystal, rising into the sky with the crystal glowing inside its roots. Neither nature nor technology has to defeat the other — they go up together.

Behind-the-Scenes Trivia

• Nausicaä's opening credits really do carry the World Wildlife Fund's official stamp of approval — not a fan theory, the episode rewinds the footage specifically to prove it.
• Kami is grammatically both singular and plural — the same word works for one spirit or for the divine quality running through everything at once.
• Japan ranks among the least religious countries in the world by self-identification, yet more than 80% of the population still takes part in Shinto rituals. The host jokes that Japan has more vending machines than shrines.
• Even the host can't fully describe the catbus that helps find Mei at the end of My Neighbor Totoro: "Seriously, I don't know what to call that!"
• This episode was recorded in 2018, back when Miyazaki was reportedly about to open a nature sanctuary and The Wind Rises was being called his "last film." Both were just how things looked at that moment — nothing that happened afterward gets folded in here.