Yesterday was the long-awaited trip to the Ghibli museum. As I said on Wednesday, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside the museum, but I did manage to get a few of the outside; I've linked the photo album below. Two more quick pieces of background info: first, if I'm referring to something from a particular film, I'll put the film's name in parentheses after the item in question; second, Ghibli's latest film is called Gake no Ue no PONYO (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea). I'll be talking about it a lot, and will just be referring to it as "Ponyo". (Disney's bringing an English version to the states soon; you can see a trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/ponyo/)
THIS WAS QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST AMAZING EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE SO BE READY FOR LOTS AND LOTS OF CAPSLOCK IN THIS ENTRY!!!
We left from ICU a little after 1:00 and managed to fit all 30+ of us onto one bus which meant that I had my first man'indensha (really really crowded train/bus etc) experience, even if it was totally artificial. After we got to Mitaka station, we walked another fifteen minutes (through the classic crazy-humid Tokyo summer heat) to the museum.
Then we walked inside.
And I kind of exploded a little inside.
The first room explained a bit about the making of animation in general, including a (possibly seizure inducing) spinning contraption that basically generated 3-D, real-time animation. It had models of several characters in various stages of motion arranged in circles all along it. As it spun, the lights inside of its case were strobed to make it look like the figures were moving. Thus, 3-D, real-time animation. IT WAS FREAKIN' AWESOME. I was tempted to spend the whole day staring at it, but there was more interesting stuff going on.
Next, I went upstairs (via a spiral staircase of radius less than 3 feet. No, seriously. It was one of the few times that I was glad to be short, as anyone taller than 5' 6" had to duck to get up the thing) and found the Neko-bus (Totoro) play structure. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) only little kids were allowed to play on it, otherwise I might have spent the whole day THERE instead. It was at this point that I ran into Anju, who talked me into going up to the roof to see the GIANT ROBOT statue (Tenkuu no Shiro no RAPYUTA/Laputa: Castle in the Sky) up there.
And once again, I kind of exploded a little inside. There was another Laputa sculpture too; there are pictures in the photo album. It also let us see the outside of the museum which is pretty cool too; again, there are pictures in the photo album. We also got to see the outside of the skylight that had the Ponyo windows in it.
Fun fact: Apparently the museum adds stained glass windows for each completed Ghibli film. I got to see most of them (Totoro, Kiki, Mononoke-hime, Laputa, Spirited Away/Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), and they were pretty freaking amazing. (Info courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Anju; see above picture)
Unfortunately I couldn't get any good pictures of the Ponyo ones (bad angle) or anything from the inside (see above), but I DID manage to get this one:
Again, not very good because it was taken from the outside, but it gives you something of an idea.
We explored some more on the roof and I took pictures of the outside of the museum (see album) before we went back inside. We wandered down a hall that was currently featuring a study in the animation of Wallace & Gromit but which, according to Anju, rotates through different displays pretty regularly.
Anju and I split up at the bookstore, our next stop, because I was pretty sure that if I hung out any longer I was going to spend $100+ on art books, which was not in the plans, so I checked out the recreation of Miyazaki's workroom as well as one of Ghibli studio. It was really cool to walk through and see Miyazaki et. al.'s sketches and working conditions and get an idea of how the movie-making process works at Ghibli. Then I headed outside and ran into some other friends of mine and sat and had ice cream with them. I probably would have hung out with them, but they were about to go see the short film and I wasn't ready to do that yet. So I wandered some more and found the water pump and sort-of garden featured in my photo album. Then I headed back into the first room so I could get a look at it when it wasn't so crowded and chatted with Patrick for a while before I decided to go watch the short film of the week.
The museum boasts a small theater that boasts a different Ghibli short every so often, on some kind of weekly/monthly cycle if I'm not mistaken. The one that I saw centered around a group of elementary school kids at school. Half of them go on this adventure out to sea where they try to catch fish and wind up catching a whale. When they're trying to bring him back to class, though, they get hit by a typhoon. The whale gets them back to the school safely where their classmates are waiting for them and they all take pictures with the whale. It was TOTALLY CUTE and I ACTUALLY KNEW (slightly more than more-or-less) WHAT WAS GOING ON EVEN THOUGH IT WAS IN JAPANESE!! After that I wandered up to the gift shop to buy stuff for the family and ran into Anju again.
Before we left she took me through the Ponyo room which led us through the process of making that particular film. Anju did a bunch of translating for me which made the experience all the more exciting. They also had ALL of the base sketches (i.e. the paper sketches that the actual cells were drawn from) for Ponyo, as well as for Spirited Away. [I should note here that Miyazaki/Ghibli has made an active decision to continue animating by hand in spite of the significantly greater degree of difficulty when compared to computer generated animation.]
The Ponyo stacks measured about 8' by 3' by 3' in all.
The Spirited Away stacks measured about 8' by 4' by 6' in all.
No, seriously.
Ponyo is a pretty minimalist film.
It was kind of intimidating to think that all that had been done by hand, but it was also really inspiring to think about feeling so deeply about something as to work that hard to complete it.
Anyway, that pretty much made up the time at the museum; Anju and I walked by the Totoro statue on our way out:
and then chatted the whole way to the bus station and that was pretty much my day.
IT WAS PRETTY FREAKING AWESOME!!
Feel free to bombard me with any other questions, I'm sure I've left something out. You can find the photo album link below.
Take care!!
~ Anna
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031182&id=1186934580&l=357edb96b9
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