DANIEL CAPPELLO: How did you become interested in writing about Hayao Miyazaki?

MARGARET TALBOT: My kids watched several of his movies, especially “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), on video a lot, and I started to realize that I could abide repeat viewings of them more than almost any other children's movies, with the possible exception of “The Wizard of Oz.” Naturally, I started wondering about the filmmaker who was doing me such a favor. Last summer, when I went to Japan on a United States-Japan Foundation Media Fellowship and began reporting on him, I found out that he hates the idea that children watch his films repeatedly. He's very worried about kids consuming too much media, and thinks that they should watch a movie like "Totoro" no more than once a year.

[Read on, online only, at The New Yorker]