Nintendo…why Wont You Let Me Walk Within Three Feet Of This Man

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

What if Sakumo had a twin brother? (Might be named Raiden :3)

And what if that brother was just a little bit overprotective of his much nicer twin.

He might not take too kindly to people talking shit about his brother after that failed mission. Might even get a bit stabby about it.

And while Sakumo appreciates the sentiment, killing anyone who so much as looks at him funny doesn't solve the problem.

Raiden begs to differ.

So I asked nonbinary reddit this a while back:

And they really went all out, here are some of my favorite responses:

And of course, the most confusing of all to cis people:

Link to the original if you wanna see more responses! 

Fan art of a fan fic

Kamui Blues by @butter--peanut

Oh no:(((😔😔😔😔 Gai was going to HUG HIM it looks like….Kakashi’s fucked UP and he knows it his face in the last frame he just looks tired I can’t I can’t my poor baby BOY😭😔😞 I just have to remember later we see Gai grab his leg and touch his hair and Kakashi doesn’t react like the growth…but rn…oof☹️😣

yeah ok. tbh this is actually just me talking abt my own experiences with my older cousins LMAO

edit: cont

i think i drew this as fast as i could lmao

~accurate representation of team 7 lmAo

his butt says naruto

Someone's talking malicious shit about Sakumo and attempting to put him out of business. Good thing Sakumo's gym buddy is the world's greatest medic corporate lawyer.

This puts Shizune and Kakashi in each other's orbit.

It is very cute.

Tsunade and Sakumo are too busy crying over how cute it is to realise their two kids are plotting to take over the corporate world.

(Idea for medics being lawyers in business AU comes from Doodlebotbop on AO3.)