The journey of 'My Neighbour Totoro' from Japan to the West End

The six-time Olivier Award-winning My Neighbour Totoro, based on the enchanting Studio Ghibli film, returns to London for a third time this month. London Theatre Magazine looks at the show’s extraordinary journey.

Pop quiz time – who do you think starred in the fastest selling show in the history of the Barbican Theatre’s box office? Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet? Cate Blanchett in The Seagull? Or a big, fluffy Japanese monster called Totoro?

It was Totoro, of course, the eponymous star of the cult anime movie My Neighbour Totoro. The show won six Olivier awards in 2023, including Best Entertainment or Comedy Play and Best Director. And if you’re surprised, you’re probably unfamiliar with the works of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki, that broke through in the West with the Oscar-winning Spirited Away in 2001.

By then, Ghibli films like Princess Mononoke and, of course, Totoro had small groups of fervent admirers around the world. In Japan, some call Totoro the Japanese Mickey Mouse.

But whether you’ve heard of him or not, it’s easy to think the film is impossible to recreate on stage. Set in 1950s Japan, it follows two young girls who move to the countryside with their father while their mother is in a nearby hospital.

They stay in a strange house that’s filled with spirits. The youngest, Mei, wanders into the forest where she meets the enormous Totoro. When her sister Satsuki comes looking for her, they end up getting a ride home in a giant bus-shaped cat. And things are only getting started… With dancing spirits, trees that grow to full size in minutes, the giant Totoro, a haunted house, a cat the size of a bus and, as the legendary US film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “a film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No scary monsters. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap,” it’s clearly not a play.

And yet around 2019, two people on two continents – British Playwright Tom Morton-Smith, who wrote Oppenheimer for the RSC in 2015, and Joe Hisaishi, the composer of Totoro’s original score and long-time Ghibli collaborator – both came up with the idea separately at the same time. This is a very Ghibli thing to happen.

“After Oppenheimer, I was having a chat with the RSC, and they said – have you got a family show?” Moreton-Smith explains in a Zoom call. “My brain, for some reason, went to Totoro. I fell in love with Ghibli after Spirited Away, tracked down all I could, and Totoro stayed with me. It's so deceptively simple.”

Simple? A giant monster that a child can bounce on, trees that grow at unfeasible speeds, and a cat that’s the size of a bus? “I set an atomic bomb off in the other one,” he shrugs. “That sort of thing doesn't really bother me. That's not my department. I love an impossible stage direction.”

Realising the impossible started with director Phelim McDermott, behind 1998’s Shockheaded Peter and various Philip Glass works at the ENO and the Metropolitan Opera. “It was such a ridiculous idea that I expected it not to happen,” McDermott admits.

But he put together a production team that he knew could do it – designer Tom Pye, who has worked with everyone from Disney to the Bolshoi; puppeteer Basil Twist, who has created stage puppets for Hansel and Gretel, The Addams Family, and Jim Henson of Muppets fame; as well as costume designer Kimie Nakano, creator of spectacular ballet outfits in almost every European capital city.

We met them in Japan, in a full-size replica of the curious house at the heart of My Neighbour Totoro, just as they’re preparing to restage the show for London’s West End. They were there to meet Goro Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki’s son, in Ghibli Park – an aggressively uncommercial theme park entirely unlike Disneyland.

Ghibli Park has no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient soundtrack, no giant statues of animated characters. Most of the park is open to everyone for free, except for sections called things like Hill of Youth, Dondoko Forest, the Valley of Witches, and Mononoke Village, which mainly house full-size recreations of houses, castles, shops, and streets from famous films.

Tickets are limited to a specific number per day. The Ghibli PR team will not reveal what that number is, but when the New York Times wanted to write a huge feature on their Park, the team said it might make more people want to visit. This struck them as a problem.

Pye, Twist, and Nakano had wandered the park all day, but were enraptured by the Totoro house above all. They had decided very early on to make the house into one of the many puppets on stage. In fact, almost everything on stage is alive with movement and black clad stagehands – each with a comic personality – make the house dance its way into new configurations when the next scene needs a different room.

“The moving house was Kimie’s idea,” Pye explains. “It could have just filled the stage like a weight until Kimie told us about wind spirits, and we decided they could be on stage, controlling the house and the puppets.”

Pye explains he is the play’s animator, in a way. “I knew I couldn’t compete with the film in beauty and detail,” he nods. “Theatre doesn’t need to do that – what theatre does well is evoking something and getting the audience to fill in the gaps. A suggestion of a forest, a hint of hospital.”

The puppets, however, had to be real. “Each one comes with different needs,” Twist explains. “With the Catbus, one has to fly. With Totoro, sometimes he is enormous and sometimes he’s a manageable size. So we needed all these versions and you can’t have them all hanging round in the wings.”

The secret — look away now if you don’t like spoilers — arrived at after days experimenting in a vast space in Houston, was inflatable puppets. “An inflatable is easy to store and you can blow it up just before you need it,” Twist beams. “That way we can have a great big Totoro and Mei can bounce on his stomach and all the audience will secretly wish they could join her there.”

Around that, the staging leans into the love of the natural world that Totoro underlines — set and props are carved from wood or natural materials and musicians play from rope and bamboo treehouses. Within all this, the cast plays out one of those tiny epic family dramas at the heart of all great children’s stories.

Dai Tabuchi plays Tatsuo, Mei and Satsuki’s father. He’s been based in the UK for years, appearing in Spectre, Industry, The Crown, and 47 Ronin. Out here in Ghibli Park, he’s also the cultural attaché to the production team, helping translate where needed. When they ask Goro Miyazaki questions, Tabuchi deftly handles the back and forth. But even Tabuchi looks surprised when Goro explains that if a Japanese theatre company had asked to stage Totoro, Ghibli would have refused.

“Stage is a different kind of magic,” Goro explains. “When it comes to film, that’s one way of expressing things, but the stage has its own way. If the stage show just translated the film as is, then it’s not interesting to us. Because this stage show gave the story new life, we appreciated it. The result brought me happiness. And besides,” he bows his head to his guests with a little smile playing about his lips, “it was the Royal Shakespeare Company. Who can say no to them?”

And now the show is heading to the West End. Back in London, Dai Tabuchi is delighted and amazed. “We were not expecting anything like this level of success,” he admits. “We were just a bunch of east Asian actors rehearsing in Stratford when we heard the news that the Barbican box office records had broken – but at that point we were still trying to work out how to move the Catbus without it looking like an octopus,” he laughs.

The cast are feeling the pressure, he admits. “It’s an unlimited, open-ended run,” he explains. “There’s a lot of pressure for our first year to grab people’s hearts. It’s something I can’t quite get my head round. Although we are opening in the same theatre, on the same date, as the RSC opened Les Misérables 40 years ago.” He pauses. “I don’t know if that’s tempting fate, but both shows are about community and love and that has to be a good sign. Either way, it means a lot to all of us that our first run was accepted. It shows how strong London theatre really is right now.”

Book My Neighbour Totoro tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credits: My Neighbour Totoro on stage (main photo and photo one); Dai Tabuchi, Victoria Chen, and Ami Okumura Jones (photo two); Dai Tabuchi, Basil Twist, Kimie Nakano, Tom Morton-Smith, and Mr Goro Miyazaki in Japan (photo three by Takahiro Toita); Dai Tabuchi (photo four).

This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of London Theatre Magazine.