The ‘Totoro Meme’ and the politics of transfandom pleasure

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the 'Totoro meme' as a site of affective, transfandom pleasure. In the Totoro meme, Japanese and non-Japanese fans alike appropriate the now-iconic image of Satsuki, Mei and an umbrella-toting Totoro at a bus stop from Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 film, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro), to their own fannish ends, creating fan art that inserts favourite characters from other media into the scene in ways that often have a doubled semiotic resonance. I argue that this meme is characteristic not of the global appropriation of a broad 'Japanese anime style', per se, but a specific, affectively appealing 'Ghibli style', one that is fully part of non-Japanese fans' own popular cultural repertoires. In its cross-border merging of globally circulating Studio Ghibli aesthetics with other fan-favourite media, I contend that the Totoro meme and its associated fanworks are in fact wholly congruent with, and representative of, what Matt Hills has termed 'trans-fandom' (2015), contemporary practices of 'navigating across and combining and fusing fandoms' (Hills 2015: 159). I conclude with a consideration of the implications of what might be termed 'corporate transfandom' in the context of transfannish citations of Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) (Miyazaki, 1984) in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015). KEYWORDSMy Neighbor Totoro, intertextuality, transfandom, transcultural fandom, memes, fan art, fanproducer relationsThe setting is a rainy night-time bus stop somewhere deep in the Japanese countryside. Three figures stand in the shadow of a rusty sign, one carried on the back of another and one silent and massive next to the other two. In Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) (Miyazaki, 1988), these three are young Mei, her older sister Satsuki and Totoro himself, looming over the pair with a leaf on his head to (ineffectively) protect him from the rain. Originally featured on Japanese promotional materials for the film, within online fan circles this scene has attained singular resonance through memetic fan art that substitutes characters from other, unrelated media for those of Satsuki and Totoro (Mei is optional). This 'Totoro meme' is believed to have begun with a 2007 work by Oceanic artist sachsen, depicting a rifle-toting Satsuki standing next to a horrifically bloodied, gaping-mawed Totoro (CSloth 2014). It is difficult to say with any certainty what specifically it was about this image that caused it to resonate with people around the world and from many walks of fandom (although the jarring juxtaposition of the film's pastel nostalgia and its own grotesqueness certainly lingers), but its iconicity is

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