My Neighbor Totoro

Adding on to the bloated discussion of the question of Assurance/De-assurance of My Neighbor Totoro, I would like to mention the importance of context regarding the film. We talked about the varying scenes of the fantastic and the realistic in various points of the movie- such as the juxtaposition between the marvelous forest and powers of the Totoros and the realistic countryside of postwar Japan.
This is the first point I would like to discuss- that the fantastic has powers to both assure and de-assure. Not only that, but the realistic also has powers to both assure and de-assure. In My Neighbor Totoro, the usage of magic and fantastic is mostly to offer a respite for the little girls in order to assuage their fears about their sick mother. There are few times when the fantastic actually unsettles. However, one does wonder why the Cat-Bus has so many legs and such yellow and even leering eyes.
In contrast, the reality in the film very much offers, in my opinion, conflicting sensations of comforting and unsettling. When we see the final arrival of the dad in the movie, we share the same sense of relief shared by the girls. This transition from the fantastic to the realistic offers a perfect way to assure the audience- we are so glad that the Dad arrived that we forget about Totoro and the magical. The joy of reality, however, is short-lived as very soon the girls find out that the return of their mother from the hospital is postponed due to some additional unexplained illness. And in a subsequent turn of events, the reality worsens as Satsuke becomes lost in wild.
So far we have only talked about My Neighbor Totoro in relation to its narrative, but if we shift attention to the reality offered by other than the story of the two girls and their parents, we may find that the reality unsettles us even more. In a first example, when the family first moves into their new house, it is rickety and barely seems to be able to hold up itself. This is reminiscent of the state of affairs immediately after the war, and I believe the film is meant to show this- the primitiveness and desolation of post-war Japan. In a second example, in the scenes when the girls travel from their house to the hospital, we see more of the rural and economic destitution of the nation- a long, thin, unpaved road that can barely hold traffic, and the multitude of farmers working in the rice paddies alongside the road.
Finally, in a sort of meta-context, we should remember that My Neighbor Totoro was released along with a companion- the classic anti-war animation Grave of the Fireflies. It was intended at the time for the two films to complement each other; Grave dramatic remembers the hopelessness of post-war Japan and thus suffered in the box office for its overly realistic portrayal, on the other hand Totoro was supposed to mitigate the emotional despair by offering reassurance. At the same time, one could reason that the very fact that both films relate back to the war at all begs the audience to sympathize with, and thus emotionally attach to, the on-screen portrayals of the impoverished citizenry.