This is why Totoro and Gauche feel like cousins to me they both communicate the same message, but told very differently, just as Miyazaki and Takahata are very different. But I am also reminded of that Miyazaki's wonderful scene where Totoro and the girls ride with the winds on a giant spinning top. That shot was later quoted at the end of My Neighbors the Yamadas, and it also points back to the opening sequence from The Story of Perrine (World Masterpiece Theater, 1978).

There is that image of the two mice holding the dandelions, floating in the breeze. There's the early performance by the orchestra in a torrential storm that evokes Walt Disney's The Band Concert there's the sight of a small room becoming the forest there's the image of the young mouse, curled inside the cello, as nature becomes an audience for the music. My favorite moments in Gauche the Cellist are those scenes where Beethoven's music overtakes the imagination, and world is carried away. The expressionism of Horus, of Heidi and Marco and Anne is the expressionism of Van Gogh, of Rauoult, then fused with the humanity of Jean Renoir and Yasujiro Ozu. He pulled animation into the realm of the inner mind, and created a new expression in art. Takahata made his mark as the psychological filmmaker. This is a world I wish to inhabit, a peaceful dream that also inhabits the waking life, where the imagination is the world. It probably helps to be a music lover, and I can't think of any film that honors the transcendent power of great music quite like this. To me, Gauche the Cellist shares that same sense of peaceful mysticism, that playful imagination, of My Neighbor Totoro. In this world, I would almost expect the animals to stand on their hind legs, speak fluently, and share their love of music. Its world shares a quiet mysticism, where the crickets play music to the trees and the stars, and the sounds of Beethoven echo in all living things.

I have a special fondness for Isao Takahata's 1982 film Gauche the Cellist, for its, ahem, 'pastoral' depiction of small town rural life. Ben Ettinger's newest essay at AniPages discusses the many anime adaptations of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa. It's a bit of good timing that I showed the trailer for Night on the Galactic Railroad recently.

Yellow submarine cartoon torrent