6/08/2006: The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka!

A Movie Poster for one of Miyazaki's films, Howl's Moving Castle.

     Today we got to go to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. It's slightly outside of Tokyo and well worth the trek outside the city, especially if you're at all a fan of Miyazaki films. It is a whimsical, wonderful museum that with gardens and vines growing up the sides of the building and fully immerses the attendees in the many worlds that Miyasaki created for all of his films over the years.

     The building itself is an eclectic combination of rounded green and yellow mounds with iron bird cages that can be climbed via vine-covered staircases. Beautiful wooden doors with stained glass designs from anime that Miyazaki has created mark all of the entrances into the museum. There was no photography allowed inside the museum so I will try my best to describe what I saw.

     First, to the right after you enter, you can experience a history of animation viewing technologies (such as nickelodeons and cyclorama) that have been re-created using characters from anime like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. My favorite of them all was an exhibit that showed May jumping rope, Totoro jumping with an umbrella, and the little forest spirits crawling all around them. It was cute and very neat because they slowed it down to a stop periodically so that you could see how the machine worked.

     Next we got to go into a theater and view a short film by Miyazaki that was one of four shorts made only for the museum. The one we saw was called Hoshi o Katta Hi (星をかった日 "The Day I Harvested a Planet) The film is based on a story by Naohisa Inoue and it was almost like "Jack and the Beanstalk" in a way because it was about a boy on a farm who trades a bunch of melons for a diamond that grows into a planet that eventually turns into a potted planet (or mini-galaxy, depending on how you look at it).
 Wikipedia synopsis is as follows: "The film tells how a boy moves from the city to the country. He works on a farm and one day when going to sell vegetables on a market, his cart breaks down. A stranger offers him a strange seed in exchange for the vegetables. The boy accepts and finds that the seed grows into a miniature planet. It continues growing as he tends to it, forming an atmosphere, weather systems and life. After moving back to the city again, he meets the stranger who sold the seed to him, and they release the planet into a galaxy of similar planets, where it will grow for years until becoming a real planet."


 It was a very cute film and, as always, the Miyazaki studio animation was stunning. I believe the general theme, or moral, of the story was to accept that there are times when we must let things go for them to be on their own.

     Upstairs you could view a very special visiting exhibit dedicated to the animation company that produces Wallace and Gromit. The clay examples of all the characters from The Curse of the Were Rabbit were very cool. The film is a cute little story about a man and his dog who have to catch the gigantic rabbit tearing up vegetable gardens in a small village in England.

     Miyazaki's home studio was recreated in one part of the museum, and you could walk through and view animation cells and concept drawings from various anime and manga that Ghibli has produced. The office spaces were of a Victorian-England style, and I loved how detailed they were right down to some Dum Dum brand lollipops in a jar and the half-burnt cigarette butts in an ashtray on a desk.

     I took the time to explore thoroughly. Since my student loans had note yet cleared and I hadn't been dispersed extra spending money, Kristina bought me a stuffed Neko Basu (Cat-bus) from My Neighbor Totoro for my birthday. Thanks Kristina! It's so kawaii! (cute!)

Signing out,
 Lady Lara Jones















Totoro guards the main entrance to the museum. He was so big and lifelike!

Outside the Ghibli Museum. The designs were so intricate!





















A picture of me outside one of the doors with a stained glass characature of the forest/earth spririt from Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime).




















Me with one of the robots from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Nausicaa is my favorite anime film of all time for it's wonderfully written story, fantastic animation, and message concerning our environment and fighting to preserve our planet's fragile ecosystem.
















The Ghibli Museum courtyard. I was very surprised how European and Victorian England-inspired a lot of the architecture was in this museum. Apparently, Miyazaki's influences include including Ursula K. Le Guin, Lewis Carroll, and Diana Wynne Jones. Miyazaki confided to Le Guin that Earthsea was a particularly major influence in his works and that he kept copies of her books at his bedside.

Found this video on youtube and had to post it because pictures weren't allowed inside the museum. It's a Japanese documentary on the Ghibli Museum with English subtitles.