This blockbuster family show from the Royal Shakespeare Company is full of dazzling visual magic but short on plot, just like the Studio Ghibli animation classic it’s based on. Two young Tokyo sisters, relocated by their dad to rural Japan in 1955 while their mother is sick, enter a fantasy realm dominated by Totoro, a giant, furry animal spirit with a benign, molar-baring roar and a tongue the size of a pink duvet. They get sad, they cheer up, that’s it.
The blimp-like Totoro, his rabbity minions and the enormous 12-legged cat bus that transports people across the sky in its abdomen are powerfully realised through giant puppetry and inflatables in Phelim McDermott’s production. But like the delicate, half-whimsical, half-creepy visuals of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 film, this adaptation is easier to admire than to love. Never mind: the Barbican apparently took a bigger advance for this than for Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2015 Hamlet.
