My Neighbor Totoro : 5 of 5

I'm still catching up with my last round of Miyazaki DVD purchases (though there are still more I haven't bought yet!), so I had the pleasure of watching My Neighbor Totoro again! This is one of the first anime films I remember watching, and I even bought it on VHS (wow, I can barely remember those big black boxes). Of course, I wanted to get it on DVD, but it was only available in a full-screen edition for so long, so it was wonderful news that Disney finally released it in wide-screen as part of their agreement with Studio Ghibli. It was fantastic watching it again and reliving the magic of childhood that the story portrays so well! The plot is so simple, yet watching these girls play together and live their simple country life is so wonderful (it reminded me a little of Tokushima from my last trip to Japan). I think it's cool that my level of Japanese is about the same as Mei (a 4-year old), so I think I had her dialogue down. I really appreciated the Cat Bus ride this time - it's such a bizarre concept, yet thinking about actually experiencing it is pretty exciting! It's really interesting to see such a perfect movie animated completely old-school (in the late 80s) with no CGI - the level of detail is incredible. The bonus features are pretty dismal (and there's no way I would watch the new dub - I couldn't deal with how Dakota Fanning says "Totoro"), but I'm just thankful to be able to watch this movie again on DVD!