Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Catbus (2nd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep‎. ✗plicit 01:07, 24 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Catbus

AfDs for this article:

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Minor character in My Neighbor Totoro. No evidence of stand-alone WP:GNG from the article or my BEFORE. Just a plot summary and a list of (mostly very minir/cameo) appearances in other media. The best WP:ATD I can suggest is to redirect this to the movie, where it is briefly mentioned in the plot summary. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:35, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements, Science fiction and fantasy, Anime and manga, and Transportation. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:35, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Film-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 00:48, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Weak redirect -- it's inspired some other things and has links to it, but the article itself is essentially only sourced to the media, other than some news articles mentioning references to it in other games and similar stuff, which can be featured in those articles or in the main movie article. Doesn't see like there's that much independent discussion of it. It does mention a book discussing "the art of my neighbor totoro", but that can probably go in the main article. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:19, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, doing some more source searching, there are some things...

There's essentially decent coverage of both people building catbus-themed things, the Ghibli Park having a catbus ride, and catbus toys being sold. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:26, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to My Neighbor Totoro if there are not enough sources to justify keeping. The Catbus is a minor character, but an extremely memorable one. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 06:49, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep In addition to the above, we have
... an article in The Looking Glass: "Medium Totoro (Chu Totoro), Little Totoro (Chibi Totoro), Catbus (Neko Basu), and Mei are also favorite characters of My Neighbor Totoro fans. Catbus is not really "cute" per se; he strongly recalls the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland with his big grin. Tanaka compares Catbus with a Japanese cat monster (bake neko) because of his big eyes that see through the dark and his big mouth that lets out a horrifying noise. Yet fans find Catbus adorable and enjoy the humor in the way he runs on narrow electric cables and jumps over trees."
... Animation uses the Catbus as a metaphor and a jumping off point: "What would it look like, then, for more than the narrative content of animation to shift so that animation might not bring the catbus to life in human terms, but to walk far beyond the end of its line, into the territory of an umwhelt that its anthropomorphizing tendencies might be used to obscure? How might the form, technologies, and techniques of animation, a medium which rewrites and overwrites reality in a language made of visual metaphors, overturn the mythologies of capitalist life that are so firmly grounded in anthropocentric humanism?"
And these are simply two of the more scholarly finds on scholar. There's more like this, as well as references to a number of things clearly named after the Ghibli cat bus. It's one of Ghibli's first movies, and this character appears to have adequate cultural reference (i.e., meets GNG) to justify a standalone article. Jclemens (talk) 07:51, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as meeting GNG. Per @Jclemens and @Mrfoogles there are sources not in the article. The time out article in particular is independent and significant coverage of the article subject. We can add this Japan Today article as well (and yes, these describe the Toyota/Ghibli Park intepretation of the Catbus, but the article language shows that the real-world item derives its notability from the movie character). Oblivy (talk) 09:05, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep WP:GNG clearly shown with the sources listed in this AfD. RebeccaGreen (talk) 11:24, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: I agree that the sources listed here pass WP:GNG. Toughpigs (talk) 16:42, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep with Comment The number of sources seem to demonstrate notability, and while the character is minor in the film, it has clearly broken out and become a cultural influence. That said, I wonder, per WP:PAGEDECIDE, whether a single page discussing all of the film's characters is ultimately more appropriate. It is somewhat bizarre to have a Catbus page when there is no standalone Totoro page. Mgruhn (talk) 21:20, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Mgruhn Well, if a secondary character has stand alone notability but the primary does not, it's weird but it is what it is. Frankly, I would expect Totoro to be notable, although search for sources here is a bit annoying due to him being a titular character in question, so we get a ton of spurious hits :( Maybe I'll see if I can make an article for him one day, but hopefully someone else will tackle that (I assume Totoro has more 'fans' than the niche stuff I prefer to focus on, like obscure social science concepts or Polish sf...). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:55, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Per others, widely notable character. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 16:45, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep GNG is clearly met. DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 05:58, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep as sufficiently notable per sources above. S5A-0043🚎^{(Leave a message here)} 09:28, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Very notable feature of Miyazaki's work. Sources have been found. Archrogue (talk) 22:54, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.