However, Satsuki ends up finding Mei and they travel on the Catbus to the hospital together, but Kanta is nowhere to be seen. It’s a short exchange but it explains quite a bit, as Kanta previously told Satsuki she should go home as he would go to the hospital to look for her missing sister Mei. Kanta: “Hehe … I got a flat tyre so I couldn’t make it to the hospital.” However, the storyboard for this scene reveals what they’re saying to each other at this moment: At this moment, you can see the character’s mouths move but you can’t hear what they’re saying. That’s because she says it right at the very end, when the final scenes of the movie are shown as the “My Neighbour Totoro” ending song plays over the top of their dialogue. “What’s that? I never heard her say “Kan-chan”, you might be saying to yourself, even if you’ve watched the original non-dubbed version of the film. However, as the story progresses, Sattsuki and Kanta go from poking their tongues out at each other to showing a heartwarming level of care for one another, expressed at the very end when she refers to him affectionately as “Kan-chan” instead of the less-friendly “Kanta”. He stops by Satsuki’s new house to pass something on from his mother to his grandmother, who’s helping Satsuki and her family get settled in, and after initially being stumped for words, he quickly races outside and yells at her, “ You live in a haunted house!” The first meeting between these two characters is a memorable moment in the story, but not because Kanta makes a good impression on his crush. What does Kanta say to Satsuki at the very end of the movie? So let’s take a look at some of the secrets behind the film, starting with the relationship between Satsuki - Mei’s older sister and female lead - and Kanta, the boy who develops a crush on her. Some of Miyazaki’s direction didn’t make it into the movie, and after reading through the book, we’re now seeing some of the scenes in a different light. The book, by Ghibli director and co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, contains a number of storyboard notes written in his hand during production, which add some juicy details to the narrative and an extra layer of depth to the well-known story. This week we discovered another set of My Neighbour Totoro secrets, after a recent broadcast of the movie on Japanese television prompted us to take a look at the original storyboards for the film, found in the 2010 book My Neighbor Totoro (Studio Ghibli Storyboard Collection, Volume 3). It’s been over three decades since Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro debuted in Japan in 1988, and we’re still uncovering little-known secrets behind the beloved animated feature film. Totoro’s missing dialogue, Kanta’s final revelation, and… Totoro has a crush on Satsuki?!

My neighbor totoro characters