Susuwatari

Susuwatari
Studio Ghibli race
Multiple Susuwatari in Spirited Away
First appearance	My Neighbor Totoro 1988
Last appearance	Zen - Grogu and Dust Bunnies 2022
Created by	Hayao Miyazaki

Susuwatari (Japanese: ススワタリ, 煤渡り; "wandering soot"), also called Makkuro kurosuke (まっくろくろすけ; "makkuro" meaning "pitch black", "kuro" meaning "black" and "-suke" being a common ending for male names), is the name of a fictitious sprite that was devised by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, known from the famous anime-productions My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Spirited Away (2001) where, in the former, they are identified as "black soots" in early subtitles, as "soot sprites" or "dust bunnies" in the Streamline Pictures English dub,^[1][2] and as "soot gremlins" in the Walt Disney Studios English dubbed version.

Susuwatari are described and shown as golf ball-sized, pitch-black and fuzzy-haired beings with two large eyes and long, thin limbs. They move by hovering around, but they can extend stick-like limbs from their bodies to do certain tasks, and can lift objects many times their own weight. They make a squeaky murmuring sound when excited, and dissolve into powder (soot) if crushed.

In My Neighbor Totoro,^[3] the house the main characters move into is full of Susuwatari, which are rationalized as Makkuro Kurosuke, an optical illusion caused by moving quickly from light into darkness. Seeing that the family consists of good people, the Susuwatari leave the house to move to another abandoned area.

They later reappeared in Spirited Away as workers in Kamaji's boiler room.^[4][5]

The protagonist Sen (Chihiro) befriends a number of them by helping them carry coal. Sen is told that if these Susuwatari are not given a job to do, they turn back into soot. Another character, Lin, feeds the Susuwatari much like farmers feed chickens, throwing handfuls of the Japanese candy konpeitō onto the ground for them to eat.^[4] After Sen is accepted among the staff of the bathhouse, chiefly by Kamaji and Lin, the Susuwatari become almost admiring of her,^[6] and help her in their small ways.^[5]

In 2022, Studio Ghibli and Lucasfilm collaborated on a Star Wars short for Disney+ where The Mandalorian character Grogu interacts with a band of dust bunnies that give him a flower as a gift.^[7]

• Dust bunny

• Nobuhiro, Watsuki (2005). The Art of My Neighbor Totoro. Studio Ghibli Library. Viz Media. ISBN 978-1591166986.
• Miyazaki, Hayao (2008). The Art of Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Studio Ghibli Library. Viz Media. ISBN 978-1569317778.
• Miyazaki, Hayao; Oniki, Yuji (2003). Spirited Away. San Francisco: Viz Communications. ISBN 1-56931-794-1.
• Miyazaki, Hayao (2005). My neighbour Totoro. San Francisco: Viz Communications. ISBN 1-59116-699-3.
• Fielding, Julien R. (2008). Discovering world religions at twenty-four frames per second. Scarecrow Press. p. 317. ISBN 978-0-8108-5996-8.
• Drazen, Patrick (2011). A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: from Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga. New York: iUniverse. p. 144. ISBN 978-1-4620-2942-6.
• Suzuki, Ayumi (2008). Animating the chaos: Contemporary Japanese anime, cinema, and postmodernity. Carbondale. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-549-60505-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Professor Tamah Nakamura (2013). Hiroshi Kudo; Bobby Recinos (eds.). "Spirited Away". "Hayao Miyazaki's World" 'Best Of' Booklet (PDF ed.). Kyushu University: 17–91.
• Hartman, Emma. "Tradition vs. Innovation and the Creatures in Spirited Away". Digital Literature Review. Vol. 4, no. 4 (PDF ed.). pp. 1–13.