My Neighbor Totoro

Satsuki and four-year-old Mei move with their father to an old house near a hospital where their mother is recovering. There is no plot to speak of. The girls explore the house, find soot-sprites in the dark, and Mei stumbles onto a giant furry forest spirit asleep under a tree. Totoro does very little. He waits for a bus, he makes seeds grow, he turns up when a child is scared. The whole film is built on small true things: the boredom of a new place, the way a younger sister copies an older one, the fear that a parent might not come home. Miyazaki trusts those small things to carry it, and they do.