TOTORO JW - - video Dailymotion

Evening Standard

4/27/2025

TOTORO JW -

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00:00Hello! Welcome to the Gillian Lynn, home of my neighbour Totoro, and come with us on a little backstage tour!

00:15Welcome to our dressing room, come on in! And here we have all our lovely costumes.

00:30You can probably guess which half is Vic's, because it is all very pink.

00:35Yes.

00:36Those are Maid's costumes, and these are my costumes, these are Satsuki's costumes.

00:41Our amazing designer Kimie Nakono drew a lot on themes of nature and plants for her costume design,

00:49and she wanted the girls, apparently, to look like spring flowers.

00:53Yes, yes!

00:54So we've got colours of daffodils, of roses, we've got all these lovely pinks.

00:59So this is my costume, I play Mae.

01:02She's a four-year-old, and you can see that it's designed to look really, really boxy,

01:08so he's meant to hide the silhouette of a grown woman.

01:12So when I put it on, I really look like four, and the styling is incredible as well.

01:16Yeah, they're so clever how they kind of change the shape of our bodies.

01:20Yeah, it looks very European, quite Western, compared to what we assume of what Japanese costumes would look like,

01:26and that's because they're from Tokyo, and they've moved to the countryside,

01:30so this is meant to reflect that, you know, their exposure to the rest of the world.

01:35And when you come to the show, you see how everyone else from the forest and the village dress very differently as well.

01:42So this is Satsuki!

01:43So this is my Act One outfit, this is what I start the show in.

01:47Yeah, so it's 1955, so you get those influences.

01:52It's post-war, it's got a lot of American influence.

01:55Like Vic said, we have a mixture of Western style and Japanese style, both in the costumes and on stage.

02:03So, you know, the house itself, the famous Totoro house, has European and Japanese influences in it,

02:09and that's really beautifully reflected in the costumes.

02:11One of the many challenges of bringing this amazing film to the stage was how to bring all the creatures and spirits to life,

02:19and the answer of how we do that is through lots of puppets, including the Soot Sprites,

02:25who they're amongst the first puppets we meet,

02:28and they bring us into the world of My Never Totoro,

02:31designed by our amazing head of puppetry, Basil Twist,

02:35and made in collaboration with a significant object.

02:39And over here, we have Jasheed, one of our amazing puppet technicians.

02:43Yeah!

02:44And over here is Irina E., who is our Assistant Puppetry Director.

02:51Tell us a little bit about the variety of puppets, the different movement qualities they have, things like that.

02:59Right, so the really cool thing about the puppets in our show is that the materials have been chosen really specifically for how they move.

03:08So there's a quality to the Soot Sprites, for example.

03:11They're made of ostrich feathers, and there's a sort of unruly quality to them.

03:17It's almost like you can't control them, and they've got a life of their own, and they're moved by the air.

03:24Air is a big theme in all of our puppets.

03:28But obviously, we still are able to control them through our wonderful puppeteers, and this show is really great.

03:37Every single performer in our show is a puppeteer.

03:40Thank you so much for coming to visit us!

03:42See you at the Jilly Lynn!

TOTORO JW -

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