My daughter has recently begun putting hand-drawn designs on her fingernails. Some of them are really pretty good.
No, this is not a pitch to have Dopers come to her to do their nails.
This week she has painted her nails with an anime character called Totoro. When she showed me, I immediately thought of that pissed-off-looking anime penguin who used to have a namesake here (before said namesake was banned, IIRC). I want to show her a pic of that penguin, but I can’t for the life of me remember the name.
Totoro is a mispronunciation of “troll” by the character Mei in the anime movie My Neighbor Totoro. (And Mei is a preschool Japanese girl, living in the late 1950s in rural Japan, whose name is derived from the English name of the 5th month of the year – her older sister’s name Satsuki gives that away.) Totoro is essentially a guardian spirit of the forest around Mei’s new home, who (in the story) saves Mei when she is lost.
I haven’t listened to the Japanese version but in the dubbed version Totoro gives his own name to Mei as “Totoro” (or rather “To…To…ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAW!!!”).
Rather annoyingly the Fanning girls spend the rest of the film pronouncing it “Toadero”.
Pointless Random Trivia: she actually mispronounces the Japanese word for troll, which is “tororu”. Itself of course a rendering of the English word “troll”.
From here it seems Satsuki is Japanese for the month of May…so they essentially named both kids after the month of May.
So if you know both Japanese and English, and you find out that the older sister is Satsuki, you can go “oh, I get it…and the little sister is Mei/May! Clever!” I guess?
