Catbus

Catbus is one of the most beloved and surreal creations in all of animation: a fictional character in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro. As its name suggests, it is a cat and a bus at once — a large, grinning creature with a broad Cheshire smile, glowing eyes that double as headlamps, a great bushy tail, and, most memorably, twelve legs on which it races across fields and up hillsides at impossible speed.

What makes Catbus so magical is that its body is hollow and serves as the bus itself, lined with soft fur instead of upholstery, with windows and rows of furry seats inside. A rolled destination sign above its face flips to show wonderfully whimsical stops. It appears at pivotal, dreamlike moments in the film, ferrying the young sisters Satsuki and Mei on urgent journeys that ordinary transport could never manage, and it moves with the effortless, weightless grace of a cat rather than a vehicle.

In the original Japanese version, Catbus is voiced by Naoki Tatsuta, while the English-language dubs feature the voices of Frank Welker and Carl Macek. Like Totoro himself, Catbus exists in the film's gentle border-country between the everyday world and the spirits of the forest, visible chiefly to children, and it never speaks — communicating entirely through its enormous grin and its exhilarating turn of speed.

Decades on, Catbus remains an instantly recognisable icon of Ghibli and of Japanese animation as a whole, endlessly reproduced as plush toys and, at Tokyo's Ghibli Museum, as a giant soft version that children can actually climb inside — the closest most fans will ever come to riding the strangest, friendliest bus ever imagined.