I went to the Ghibli Anime Studio Museum today, and I was blown away by how inspiring and artistic the place was.
The building is quite large, though in actuality there aren't a lot of exhibit rooms. But the small are surely mighty in Mikata. There're your requisite Japanese characters that all women scream "KAWAI" over...
...like Totoru and Kurosuke here. There's also the amazing Iron Giant from the Castle in the Sky on the rooftop garden, accessible only by an awesome circular staircase enclosed inside a cage with vines ascending the sides.
And of course there are the random unexplainable parts of the musem that make it feel at times more like an interactive children's museum, but they only add to the magic. Like the face drain in the star here:
But unfortunately, I can't show you the most amazing parts of the museum as there are no pictures allowed inside the exhibits.
On the first floor, there's an incredible room that has all sorts of moving exhibits showing the magic of animation. There's a giant spindle about 4 feet in diameter and 2 feet tall that has a whole tree of life of animation, and it stops every minute or so to show you that it's just a really fast, really phenomenally lit carousel that tricks your eye.
There are projectors, hands-on displays, and many familiar Yamasaki characters to make you feel right at home... even if you've only seen one movie (like me).
On the second floor, there's a rotating exhibit that today had all sorts of cels and production work from Ponyo, the newest studio film that came out here last May. After seeing this incredible work with lots of fish and water (I don't really follow the story yet), I can't wait to watch the movie.
There's also an incredible permanent exhibit that I could have spent hours in. The 5 rooms are covered wall-to-wall in drawings, sketches, paintings, cels, diagrams, and other various elements of work one would find over the course of making an anime film in the artist's studio. But even more interesting is the fact that the rooms are laid out as in-depth and detailed as the actual studio, with thousands of books and props and research lining the desks and chairs and bookshelves. And, because the Japanese keep their hands so clean, very little of the materials on the walls are covered or protected. In fact, you can touch just about everything in the museum and see thousands of beautiful landscapes, the books of research, photograph collections, storyboards, etc.
It truly is an astounding immersion into the sheer volume of an animator's work.
Yeah. I got pretty inspired by that.
Oh. And there's a giant cat bus (a character from one of the movies) that is a children's play area that I must have walked by 4 times because it was so incredible to watch.
Plus there are all sorts of "secret" passageways and cut-outs in the walls that provide interesting viewpoints, and the theming is about as thorough as parts of DisneySea. Which is saying a lot.
But the best part of the day (I mean, come on, you knew I'd save the best for last, right?) was the part where we got to go into a movie theatre and see a screening of a short 10 or 15 minute film that is only shown in the museum.
And, the universe had its eyes on me, it seems, because I was able to follow the film perfectly well, despite it being fully in Japanese.
Why, you ask?
Well, no, I didn't become fluent in Japanese overnight; instead, the movie happened to be mostly revolving around sumo wrestling, which I unabashedly delved into yesterday!
And here I was talking about fat men wrestling each other being a strange source of inspiration, and someone went and made a film about it!
This film, I believe called "Chuzumo", was about an elderly couple that lead very humdrum lives farming on the side of the mountain, until, whilst urinating in the middle of the night off the side of said mountain, the elderly man discovers rats parading off to a sumo match, and becomes entranced in their futile match efforts against giant Yokozuna white rats.
So he and his wife, cook a huge meal for the rats and train them, and the next night watch as the rats go back to the tournament and attempt to dethrone the giant white rats.
And it was AWESOME! The anime, the story, the humor, the music. I absolutely adored it.
Which is probably why I bought the illustrated storybook (in Japanese, of course) and a stuffed sumo rat key chain as souvenirs. It was just too cute and inspirational.
And I got some great postcards to send to my (very jealous, I'm sure) cousins and aunt, two who adore anime, and one who actually is a graduate in animation from an esteemed school in Florida.
I could have spent hours enjoying the merchandise in the shops, and I realized that I have somehow missed out on an incredible art form until. I will definitely be catching up on my Ghibli films as I stay here, but I'll always be stoked that I got to see the rats wrestle in style.
Afterwards, I finished my weekend with a delicious meal of shabu shabu, though I have to say I was quite irritated when I failed to receive notification that plans had changed. But, I might be making progress on the whole temper/passive-aggressive front, because I resolved the situation by finding my own way on a different bus there and even stopped to take a deep cleansing breath before I entered the dinner so I would have the lowest blood pressure possible. I didn't let my anger show at all through dinner and managed not to say anything under my breath.
Even if no one had the courtesy to apologize or acknowledge the awkwardness of my 20-minute-late arrival.
And I even kept my mouth shut after a few ume-chus. AND I just realized that I had no problems asking for help at the bus stop and deciphering the kanji and bus schedules in Japanese. Which means I'm really starting to adjust to living here that it's become second-nature.
Just in time to leave.
Well, what's inspiration for anyway? Big changes. Here we come!
