Day 5: The Ghibli Museum

Day Five, pirates. Let's take the train...

Catch the Cat-Bus in Mitaka...

And go to the Ghibli Museum! All right!

All right!

Studio Ghibli is one of the most celebrated animation studios in the history of cinema. Founded by director Hayao Miyazaki, it's produced such beautiful films as Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and rightly freaking so. The Ghibli Museum was opened by the studio to showcase their filmmaking techniques, their library of work, as well as the various characters from and inspiration for their stories. There is also a small theatre that shows short animated films once every 20 minutes.

The museum itself is designed to resemble a building that might be featured in a Ghibli film. Being a gigundus nerd-face, I agreed to a trip to this museum, located about an hour outside Tokyo-proper, in 0.7 seconds. I'm upset with myself that it took that long.

Ghibli as an institution is surprisingly secretive (Much like Miyazaki, who rarely appears in public). You have to be invited by the museum in order to gain admission, and in order to receive an invitation, you have to submit a letter to the museum through Japanese officials, along with your passport info, explaining why you want to visit the museum. They want to make sure that you are visiting in the spirit, to paraphrase, of wandering together like lost children.

A letter? Citizenship info? This is intense, people. It's like trying to get into an adorable college.

We sent in our letter and info and got the invite, which set our admission time for 10:30 AM. If you missed your entrance time, you weren't let in. Oh. Snap.

This is the bus that picks you up at the train station in Mitaka and drops you off at the museum. It's a bus done up to look like the flying cat-bus from My Neighbor Totoro. It's also covered in characters from various Ghibli movies. What'd you except, the tram from Universal Studios? They've won an Oscar folks. It's cat-bus or nothing.

Pictures are forbidden once inside the museum (Secret Secrets.) but you can take all the shots you want of the exterior. Here are a few of our favorites, which I also think give you a pretty good lay of the land.

This is the robot from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. He lives on the roof of the museum, in a garden.

He loves visitors.

To the left is one of the staircases that takes you through the four floors of complex. In the background is the Straw Hat Cafe (their restaurant), and in the lower foreground (Is that a term? "Lower foreground"? Whatever.) is the courtyard on the first floor. The layout is twisting and maze-like, seemingly random at times, designed, again, to encourage people to wander the grounds with no particular direction in mind. Doors change size. Spiral staircases pop up from nowhere. Every corner of the grounds has something wonderful to look at.

See?

Down in the courtyard.

The view from below.

Well, hello neighbor.

I'll be honest, we couldn't love this place more. I'm a huge, huge fan of Miyazaki ever since I saw Princess Mononoke. However, I do not in any way think that's a pre-requisite for enjoying this museum. Like the films Ghibli makes, the sheer care and detail put into every facet of the building is astonishing and the exhibits, are a joy to behold. I would recommend a trip here to absolutely anyone, any age. How many places on the planet can you say that about?

Well done, Ghibli.

Well done indeed.

Next: Odaiba.