Tom Morton-Smith: When you create something for children, you need to speak to something deeper than distraction

Tom Morton-Smith is a British playwright and screenwriter. His work includes Oppenheimer for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and most recently the stage adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro. First staged at the Barbican in 2022, the production went on to win five WhatsOnStage Awards and six Olivier Awards, including Best Entertainment or Comedy Play. Now playing in the West End, it features puppets by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Joe Hisaishi’s original film score.

In this interview for The Skylark, Morton-Smith reflects on adapting Totoro for the stage, the importance of childhood wonder, and the loss and nostalgia that come with growing up. He also talks about his own connection to the countryside and why making art with care and imagination still matters in an age of churn and automation.

It's good to take pleasure in small, beautiful things, whether that’s a snail, some fish in a stream, or the texture of flowers in a meadow. What I love about the original film of My Neighbour Totoro is the detail. So much work, so much love, and so much observation went into the landscape, into the trees, the movement of animals, the spirit of the place. It’s central to what the film is.

Adapting it to the stage meant finding a way to do the same thing with a different tool set. Rather than drawing a beautiful image or painting a backdrop, you have to create sets and atmospheres using the language of theatre. A lot of my approach in writing was to ask: what is theatre’s equivalent to what animation does? It wasn’t about copying the film’s images or words. It was about finding the theatrical version of it.

The beauty of nature, the importance of being close to it, and how calming and soothing it can be; that’s all there. Access to wildlife, greenery, and streams can be healing. It can support you when you’re going through a tough time. Sometimes you just need to get yourself into the countryside. Or, as people say now, touch grass.

Kids are a savvier audience than they’re often given credit for.

When you create something for children, you need to speak to something deeper than distraction. All the best art made for children works just as well for adults, just on a slightly different level. Pixar do it brilliantly. Ghibli and Miyazaki do it too. Totoro is multiple films all at once, depending on who’s watching it. That’s the balance you have to strike. You can’t just make the kids’ version of Totoro on stage. If you do, you lose the underlying sadness, the ecological message, the deeper emotions.

Kids are a savvier audience than they’re often given credit for. Even if they don’t fully understand the mother being ill or the father struggling to look after the children while worrying about his wife, they can sense it. If it isn’t there, it feels hollow. That’s why the silences in the theatre are so powerful. The laughter and delight are wonderful, but when silence descends, that’s when you know the play is affecting people. Children and adults are paying attention, feeling different things but feeling them together.

There’s a tendency in children’s theatre to rush to the next set piece, the next bright, flashy thing. But what you really want is to give children time to process what they’re seeing, and to share that moment with the adults who brought them.

One of the most important moments in Act One comes when the father, Tatsuo, responds to his daughters’ experience of meeting Totoro. A Western version of the story might have him dismiss what they say. If a child told a British father they’d just seen a magical creature, audiences might expect him to say, “Don’t be silly.” But instead, he stops. He says, yes, we once lived alongside animals and spirits. Then we started chopping down trees, building cities, and lost that connection.

There’s a gentleness in how the father says it, a hint of sadness. It’s not only the story of civilisation, it’s also the story of growing up. As adults, we lose that childhood link to nature. The joy of seeing animals, of collecting bugs in a bucket. I remember reading, around the time I was writing the play, about city kids taken to the countryside who had never seen cows or sheep before. I thought of Satsuki and Mei, moving from post-war Tokyo to the countryside, seeing wide open spaces, animals, insects, woodlands. That would be just as exciting as meeting Totoro.

So it was important for me to capture not only childhood wonder but also an adult sense of loss or nostalgia. That feeling of, “Wasn’t life simpler then? I wish I could just do a cartwheel, run around in circles to make myself happy.”

The line in the play goes, “We made animals our food, our pets, our labour.” Yes, we eat meat, yes, we keep pets. But those are choices we made. Rather than take them for granted, it’s about being aware of what is lost as you grow up, of what changes when you trade wonder for adulthood.

Sometimes you need to step outside the bubble of civilisation and look back at it.

I grew up in the countryside, in Sussex, not far from the Hundred Acre Wood of Winnie-the-Pooh. It was a privilege to step out of suburbia and see deer in the wild. I remember going badger-watching with my dad late at night in the woods. Experiences like that taught me the importance of being close to nature as a child.

The world is complex, but there’s something calming in seeing wildlife, and in comparing that to the constructed life we live. Sometimes you need to step outside the bubble of civilisation and look back at it. Working on Totoro chimed with me because of how I grew up.

As a writer, I’ve always written to make sense of things I don’t understand. My play about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the dropping of the atomic bomb came from that impulse. It’s a thorny subject. The bomb ended a war, but it killed thousands. The war was ending anyway. It changed science forever. It advanced science, but it put a terrible weapon in the hands of politicians. It’s a subject where you can’t come down simply as positive or negative. It’s messy. Wrestling with that chaos is where art comes from.

Totoro is also about chaos. It’s about a child realising their parents are mortal. That’s the biggest thing a child can feel. Some critics say nothing happens in the film, but for the children, everything happens. They’re dealing with the biggest emotions they’ve ever had. As a writer, articulating that for children in the audience is important. For adults, it’s a reminder that the most important things are your relationships; with family, neighbours, other people, and with nature.

I won’t write about things that don’t fascinate me. There are plenty of difficult subjects I could tackle, but if they don’t spark questions in me, they’re not what I’ll spend my time on. I want to use the time I have to write about what really grips me. That doesn’t mean those subjects shouldn’t be written about. Just not by me.

History moves in cycles. Lessons go unlearned. The same ideas return. Totoro has a universality that makes it relevant at any time. Family, neighbourliness, children’s sense of loss. But it was also made in the shadow of World War Two and atomic warfare. Children in the film are processing how adults were damaged by those events. Unfortunately, war is ongoing. The threat of nuclear weapons is more apparent than it has been for decades.

Nobody would have known to ask for a Catbus before Miyazaki drew it. That’s why writers and artists matter.

And when the film was made, people were just beginning to talk about global warming. Now we are much further along. Climate change is not background noise. It’s at the forefront.

I have a child now, and I think about the world I’ve brought them into. When I was five, the world felt more stable, but perhaps that was just childhood naivety. The 1920s feel uncomfortably close to the 2020s. The world is repeating itself in unpleasant ways.

What I’ve learned through Totoro and through recent years (the pandemic included) is the importance of entertainment. Not just as escape, but as messaging through entertainment. Allowing people to step away from the world for a while, but not simply pacifying them. Giving them reassurance, calm, hope. Fanning a flame.

We live in a world of AI, where art risks becoming a feedback loop; giving people only what they already want, leading to diminishing returns. Nobody would have known to ask for a Catbus before Miyazaki drew it. That’s why writers and artists matter. We think of things nobody asked for, but which expand the imagination. That’s why it’s so important to keep making things with love, with ingenuity.

So much is churned out for kids that feels soulless. I see it with my own five-year-old. We’re on the edge of more and more content being less handmade, less infused with human ingenuity. That’s why it’s vital to build things with love, so people recognise what will be missed if art becomes only an algorithm.

Working on Totoro has been joyous. The puppetry, the set design, the lighting, the sound, the actors and puppeteers. Everyone brought their skills, their love for the work. Often work feels like work. This never did. Everyone was doing what they loved. That makes you hungry for more.

But I do feel sorry for the parents whose children come out of Totoro saying, “I want to be a puppeteer”! But maybe that’s what the world needs. More puppeteers. More puppets.

My Neighbour Totoro is on at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, London, until March 2026.

This conversation took place on 18 August and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Thoughts from us

Nature is the foundation of health

Research shows that people who spend at least two hours a week outdoors are more likely to report good health and wellbeing. The benefits don’t just come from exercise, even sitting in a woodland, or touching the grass with your bare feet, can lower stress and restore attention.

Unequal access

In England, one third of people do not live within a 15-minute walk of green space, and those who miss out are more likely to come from disadvantaged communities. Nature loss deepens the divide: over the last century we’ve lost 97% of lowland meadows and 90% of wetlands, taking with them habitats for birds, bees and countless other species.

Ecomomic losses

Pollination is worth an estimated £500 million a year to UK farming, but declining insect populations put food security at risk. Globally, degraded soils are releasing carbon equivalent to 36% of annual fossil fuel emissions.

Children are among the most affected.

Today, many spend far more time on screens than outdoors, despite evidence that time in nature improves focus, reduces anxiety and builds creativity. Researchers call the gap “nature deficit”, a phrase that describes not only what children are missing, but what society is losing too.