Bizarre theory: Totoro is Death?

Okay I came across this bizarre theory about Totoro the movie, note that this is not my intepretation, just what I saw other people were discussing:

1.It is saying that Totoro is in fact messenger of Death, and whoever sees him will soon die. The hospital that the sister's mother was in was based on a real hospital for terminally-ill patients.

2. Later in the story the villagers find a slipper in a pond, which is in fact May's, at this point she has already drowned in the pond. Satsuki lied that the slipper wasn't Mei's out of denial. Ever since this scene, the sisters appeared to have no shadow.

3. Satsuki pleaded the Totoro and the cat-bus to take her to where Mei is, while on the cat-bus, says "Nobody can see us...", this scene is Satsuki leading herself to the land of the dead (by taking the cat-bus).

4. At the hospital, the mother says "I think I feel May and Satsuki smiling there in that tree..." Why don't the sisters go and see their mom if they are already there? Why do they just leave the corn there instead? It is said that the sisters were dead at that point, and the Japanese pronunciation of "corn" is similar to "kill child".

5. The final scenes seem to be a happy epilogue, but they in fact happened "before" the major events in the movie.

6. The movie was set in a place in Japan where there was a case of murdering of two sisters which happened in the 60s. This event took place on May 1st, while the sister's names are Satsuki (May in Japanese) and Mei (May in English). In the real life case, the younger sister was missing first and the older sister was seen to be looking for her frantically. Nest day, the younger sister's body was found in the forest (stabbed to death). The older sister was in such a state of shock and kept rambling ambiguous words about seeing a "cat monster", "great big racoon monster" etc to the police. The sisters were in fact from a single-parent family (mother died of illness).

Ever since these rumors started to circulate, people have been calling Ghibli for verification "is Totoro Death" "Why don't the sisters have shadows later in the movie", and Ghibli made announcment on their blog site about the shadow issue saying that there was no shadow because the animators decided there was no shadow needed in those scenes (maybe bc of light source etc).

Here is Ghibli's blog site with the responses (anyone knows Japanese, can you verify?): http://www.ghibli.jp/15diary/003717.html

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I personally was a bit shocked to learn of this theory, kind of skeptical really, because the details of the "real-life" murder event are really sketchy, and how the older sister died was not said. It's just hard to verify. And 5. the issue with the epilogue being prologue, wasn't there a baby brother at the end?...How can that be before the story...

So what do you think...Too much BS? Or eerie coincidence?



Let nobody tell you what to do, gotta be the judge and the jury, too!