Which is better? The 1998 animated film My Neighbor Totoro or a slice of bread fresh out of the oven. Can Hayao Miyazaki’s cozy hit take down the current Best Thing Ever? Let’s see:

• Pro: The movie is perfect and holds up 100%. Ezra’s kids watched this multiple times in rapt attention despite the fact that big parts of the movie include waiting for a tree to grow, standing at a bus stop, and going to school.
• Pro: Totoro is full of the most adorable things. You got soot spreaders, three sizes of Totoro and a cat bus. You even have Mei, the most kid-like kid that has ever kidded. It’s so good, Totoro doesn’t even have to show up in the first act for his own movie.
• Pro: If you like any studio Ghibli film it’s because of Totoro. This fluffy troll bear sold over a billion dollars worth of merch and secured the studio’s future so it could make Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. This goes double for Princess Mononoke since Miyazaki’s “girl befriends a forest spirit” started with Totoro. Miyazaki was just like, Mei and Totoro? Yeah, run it back, but this time drink more wolf blood.

But it’s not all good news for Totoro.

• Con: The sick mom gets better with the healing power of corn. Which means it’s just another propaganda piece by Big Veggie, pushing its pro-plant agenda.
• Con: Totoro looks like he’s seen some shit. He’s got that thousand yard stare of a kid who caught his parents boinking, slowly backed away and never blinked again. Also, since he’s the most cuddly thing, who’s going to cuddle him? You need an even bigger Totoro, then it’s Totoros all the way up.
• Con: it’s gonna be hard being the best thing ever when it’s not even be the best Ghibli movie ever. Porco Rosso is my new favorite and I’ve only ever seen the poster!

This is a real tough one but we just can’t quite unseat bread. Totoro looks and sounds better, but fresh bread tastes, smells and feels better, since it’s actually fluffy and Totoro is just pictures of fluffy.

What do you think? And where will “Playing Halo with the boys” fall on the list?

Is this better than this? But like the video of the first one vs the real version of the second.

This week on The Best Thing ever we have an incredible showdown: Cat Videos vs Fresh Bread. Which will win in the rankings? Let’s examine.

Cat videos

• Being gluten intolerant doesn’t change how much you can enjoy cat videos.
• Fresh bread gets stale, but I just watched Mary jumping into a box and after 12 years, that kitty still slaps.
• Finally, if it weren’t for cats, we might not even have bread! When humans went to surplus agriculture we had the great idea of keeping all our grain in a pile in a hole. All the mice were like, yay, free grain in a convenient hole, I’m in. Some humanity was almost screwed until cats were like, yay, free mice on a pile of grain I don’t care about. So if you like bread, thank a cat.

Fresh bread

• The smell. At best cat videos smell like nothing, unless you’re making them, in which case they smell like cats. Whereas fresh bread is possibly the single greatest smell we’ve ever created.
• Bread is part of humans harnessing the power of microbes to make calories easier to digest, meaning a bakery is basically a giant cow stomach. Pretty amazing.
• While cats are great and legit adorbs, you could pretty much delete every cat video this isn’t and we’d just switch over to armadillos. But get rid of bread and we lose half of humanity’s caloric intake. Plenty of people would eat rice, but rice sandwiches are way messier.
• You can make a pretty good loaf of bread on your own if you work at it! On the other hand, just try and getting a cat to do ANYTHING.

While we definitely owe a debt to cats for getting civilization kicked off and distracting us during this current late capitalist hellscape, fresh bread gets the nod for keeping us alive long enough to watch all the cat videos we want.

Am I right? Wrong? Let me know in the comments your favorite breads and cat videos. And for even more on bread and cats, check out our podcast the best thing ever, and tune in next week when we’ll see if Miyazaki’s timeless cat bus video, My Neighbor Totoro can unseat bread as the new Best Thing Ever.