Throughout Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro, we were presented with images of rice fields, the two girls watching a leaf floating down a stream, a torii in the forest, a country house surrounded by overgrown grass and butterflies, the humming of the cicadas, and, most importantly, a mysterious old camphor tree. All of these images, especially the archetypal tree, resonate the divine not just because they remind us of our youth, but because they embody and reflect something spiritual.

Running along the ideological lines of Shintoism, this ancient belief maintains that a material can never exist without some relation to the spiritual. It holds the view that kami or divinity inhabits everything in nature. The sun, moon, rocks, streams, old tress, caves, flowers, animals, and even people of special character or standing are perceived to be the offspring of deities. As a consequence, the distinction between the animate and the inanimate world is considerably blurred as all of nature is transformed into a sentient being.

While this framework of thinking is conveniently valid, the question of whether spirituality warrants equality between man and nature remains to be a puzzle. It is clear to us that man regards nature as divine. But what does this say about the relationship between nature and man besides the relationship between nature and the divine?  If all of nature is divine, is nature equal to man?

This is where I argue that the film's depiction of spirituality is simultaneously predicated upon the theoretical underpinnings of ecologism – a perspective advancing the claim that man and nature holds equal priority and status. Although both the terms environmentalism and ecologism are usually interchanged, it bears clarifying that there is thin line that separates these two broad churches.

Environmentalism, arguably thought to be one of Miyazaki's recurring animation themes, is an approach that responds to ecological crisis but not necessarily question the fundamental assumption about the natural world. It seeks to protect the environment, not to re-examine our conceptions of it. Ecologism, in contrast, is an ideology that adopts an ecocentric or biocentric perspective of according priority to nature. As such, it is underpinned by two salient assumptions: first, that the human species is not in any way superior to, or more important than, any other species second, that if we serve and cherish the natural world, it will, in turn, continue to sustain human life.

The characters in Miyazaki's Totoro held the view that man and nature constitute an interconnected whole, neither of which is subordinate to the other. They perceive nature spirits as co-equal sentient beings who have the capacity to be friendly and helpful in difficult times. This is evident in the numerous times Totoro appeared to both the girls and came to their aid. They regard tress, mountains, and other life-giving forces of nature as spiritual and hence, inviolable like humans. They also treat them nature as if it thrives in a manner similar to humans.

In all of these occasions, the characters assumed an ecologistic worldview that while man sees nature as divine, nature is not in any way subjugated by man instead, nature assumes a co-equal footing vis-a-vis man. This recurring pattern of behavior, therefore, affirms that Miyazaki's sense of spirituality unquestionably borders on fundamental assumptions on the relationship between man and nature, not just between nature and the divine – a fresh analysis that provides us a deeper and a more holistic examination of  of Miyazaki's Totoro.