Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window

Totto-chan is curious, talks constantly and cannot sit still. She is expelled from her primary school. Her mother takes her to a small school called Tomoe, where the headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi, listens to her for four hours on the first day without interrupting. The classrooms are old railway carriages. There is no fixed order of lessons; the children do whatever they want first. Then the war grows. Shinnosuke Yakuwa directs. It was made at Shin-Ei Animation. The source is Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's memoir. The author is among the best known television presenters in Japan and the book describes her own childhood; published in 1981, it became one of the best selling books in Japanese history. The Tomoe school and Sosaku Kobayashi were real. Kobayashi had studied music education in Europe and the school burned in the bombing of Tokyo in 1945. The first half is a childhood narrative; in the second the war enters daily life and the film hardens without warning. Food restrictions, children imitating soldiers and friends who are lost are shown directly. The animation style changes by section; the imagined passages are drawn in a watercolour texture. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese animation and films about the war seen through a child. Who it is not for: the first half is slow, the emotional pitch rises sharply at the end, and some scenes are heavy for small children.