Robot Soldier on the museum roof.

I spend a Sunday afternoon at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo and end up having the best museum experience thus far in my life.

Studio Ghibli movies have occupied a special place in my heart since I saw Spirited Away (2001) at the Tromsø International Film Festival. The studio is often compared to Disney – not in tone or style, but in impact – but I personally hold Ghibli higher than any other animation studio. Their movies exhibit a unique world vision, solid and excellently paced storytelling, and an amazing craftmanship unseen elsewhere. Just writing this I have to curb myself – this is not about the movies, but the museum created by the studio’s visionary director Hayao Miyazaki.

The museum is in the corner of a park in Mitaka. I was unsure whether to go there from Mitaka station or Kichijoji, but landed on the former as that is the route provided by the museum itself. There is a shuttle bus running between the station and the museum, but I decided to take the 15 minute walk.

Ghibli Sign with a Totoro.

Even in late December, it was mild and sunny, and the area is a quiet and surprisingly green neighborhood of mostly two-story brick houses that reminded me of England. Signs with a Totoro ensured I did not get lost.. yet.

Getting lost

True to Miyazaki’s vision, the museum building is itself a part of the experience, looking as if it has grown out of the park grounds and is changing with the plants and trees growing and changing around it.

Ghibli Museum exterior with Christmas tree.

Inside and out, the building feels like being on a Ghibli movie set if those had been live action films and not animation. The interior embodies the museum motto “Let’s become lost children together.” It is like a maze with all kinds of nooks and crannys, a spiral staircase one has to try out to see where leads, and a bridge across the Central Hall. Children and playful adults alike can explore and see all kinds of wondrous things. There are obscure photos, paintings and mechanical objects everywhere. Turn a corner and you can suddenly see a model of a mechanical fish pedal driven by frogs. Pay close attention when you take the route across the roof of the Straw Hat Cafe (the museum restaurant), and you can see Prince Lune’s security guards from The Cat Returns (2002) scowling at you from a window.

Lune's cat security guards.

Also, it is a warm and inviting place, in wood and with lots of light filtering through oddly shaped windows – many of which are stained-glass windows depicting scenes from Ghibli movies. There are many comfortable chairs and benches as well, but I recommend that you go outside if you want to sit down for a while. There are several patios and verandas to relax on and appreciate the museum’s park surroundings.

From one of these verandas, you can take yet another spiral staircase to the roof garden. Besides being a beautiful and relaxing garden, its most striking feature is the fantastic Robot Soldier from Castle in the Sky (1986), which can be seen from afar. Although resonating most strongly with those of us who have seen the movie, the broken down robot with plants growing out of him is a haunting and beautiful sight.

Robot Soldier from Castle in the Sky.

Permanent Exhibits: The Beginning of Movement Room

This room puts animation in a historical context and embodies Miyazaki’s insistence that film is something physical and tactile, not just bits of information. It has several zoetropes and other machines to illustrate early examples of stop motion animation, including “Bouncing Totoro,” a three-dimensional zoetrope with clay figures of Mei, Satsuki and other characters from My Neighbor Totoro (1988).

Rows of panorama boxes use layers of handpainted glass to create three-dimensional scenes from movies like Princess Mononoke (1997), as well as movies that don’t exist. A projector shows loops of simple animations, for example what the fire inside the coal furnace in Spirited Away might look like when it eats the coal!

Even the bathrooms have unique decorations. Here a trompe l'oeil from Castle in the Sky.

Permanent Exhibits: Where a Film Is Born

The concept for this part of the museum is to recreate a succession of rooms that show the process necessary to create an animation film. It is such a simple, yet effective display of the unique vision, craft and soul behind the Ghibli movies. In the end, it is really moving to see.

It starts with the preproduction room, a small but cozy workspace with hundreds of concept sketches the size of postcards filling all the walls (many from Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)), overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee cups, a ton of books, strange objects piled everywhere, and lots of scrapbooks and photo albums of research to leaf through.

The next room is for background art, also filled to the brim with art, but this time beautiful, vividly colored hand-painted landscapes. After that comes the staging department, with a recreation of the director’s desk where storyboards are drawn, plus huge volumes of storyboards. I leafed through many fantastic storyboards of The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) in this room.

Finally, there is the animation room with the final frames, painted cels, ink and color swatches and an animation stand where you can see foreground being pulled across a background. It is a replica of the animation stands Ghibli used, although now they have also gone digital and don’t use them any more.

Special Exhibit 2011-2012: The View from the Cat Bus

The exhibits in this area change, and currently it is The View from the Cat Bus. It starts with a life-sized cat bus (not to be confused with the one in the playroom for small children). It may not sound like much, but the people I joined in there really enjoyed sitting inside the cozy and soft bus, touching its fur and quietly watching the “scenery” outside the bus. Moving on you could walk through highlights of other movies, and even sit down in front of a restaurant from Spirited Away without any risk of turning into a pig!

The Saturn Theater

Of course the museum has its own movie theater, and with Miyazaki’s insistence on the tangibility of film, you can see the projector and the projectionist in the back of the Saturn Theater.

Each visitor gets one ticket to the theater to see short films that are only being screened here. The ticket itself is a nice memento; it looks like a film strip with frames from a well-known Ghibli movie. I got the scene with Chihiro and the guest in the elevator from Spirited Away.

The Day I Harvested a Star (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Cynics might call the idea of showing movies in a museum like this lazy, but the movie I saw, The Day I Harvested a Star (2006) was anything but. On the contrary, it was one of the best Ghibli movies I have seen – and I have seen most of them! It is about boy who goes from a hyper-modern city to work at a farm. He gets some seeds from a couple of strange characters and grows a little planet hovering above the pot.

Getting out

Stained glass window from the outside (it is not allowed to take photos inside). Can you see Totoro?

I have been to many museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Henie-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo when they had an amazing Frida Kahlo exhibit, but there is no doubt in my mind that the Ghibli Museum tops them all. Not because Miyazaki and the other Ghibli artists are greater than Da Vinci or Kahlo, just in terms of the pure museum experience I had. In fact, I originally figured I would spend about two hours at the museum. However, the first time I even checked the time, three hours had passed! After spending a total of over four hours, I decided to leave.

First, though, I went through the gift shop, appropriately named Mamma Aiuto after the gang of sky pirates from Porco Rosso (1992) – if you like Ghibli you can really get fleeced!
I bought a tin of cookies with the museum logo on it for people at work, thinking (rightly) that my daughters would want the tin to keep things in afterwards, a great book about the museum with lots of wonderful photos for myself, a scarf and socks with susuwatari on them for my wife (it’s a private joke), a replica of Sheeta’s pendant from Castle in the Sky for my oldest daughter to adorn her cell phone with, and a cat bus for my youngest – who adores stuffed animals and Totoro.

My loot from the sky pirate shop Mamma Aiuto.

On my way back I decided to go through the park to Kichijoji station instead of back the way I came to Mitaka. I am glad I did, because the park itself is worth a visit. It’s not a carefully sculpted park, and I like that – having an area of untamed nature with paths crisscrossing it. I stopped for a while and watched a group of falconers and owlers (is that what you call an owl trainer?) train their beautiful birds. I had a look at the temple next to the lake, but skipped the park zoo.

Had I been there with my family, though, we probably would have gone to the zoo as well. Taken together with the unruly nature of the park and the equally chaotic and playful world of the Ghibli Museum, that could be an excellent family outing.