The Totoro Forest Project

Recently I was invited to contribute to the Totoro Forest Project, an auction of artwork by international animation, comic and illustration artists in service of saving Sayama Forest outside of Tokyo--the one that inspired Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.

The event will be held at Pixar on September 6th, and a selection of the artwork will be displayed at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco; a catalogue will also eventually be available. The whole thing is headed by some of my good friends at the studio, so a round of applause for Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, Ronnie Del Carmen and Yuniko Pang. It's a great honor and pleasure to be involved, and I hope we manage to raise a lot!





My piece, about a moment of person-plant communion, was kind of an homage to Helen Levitt and Marc Simont--and of course to New York city: a place with a lot of concrete and a lot of green. It's based on a little plant I saw bowing out of an apartment window in NY; a little cactus, I think. This one's for that cactus.