Ghibli's Getting Close

On rare occasions, it pays to be a dumb tourist — or at least look the part…

One of the landmarks I was hoping to visit during this Tokyo trip was the Ghibli Museum. If you didn’t know, Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent of Disney, or more appropriately Pixar. 2003’s Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, in fact.

Anyway, tickets to the museum are sold out for about the next three months because the studio has just released a new film. But on the advice of Q-Taro I made the trek anyway to see if I could scam my way in.

Score!

And it worked! Probably because I was solo, but perhaps also because I was dripping in sweat from the long, hot walk from Mitaka Station, one of the staff members at the gate took pity on me and wrote me up this special voucher — all I had to do was walk across the street to a Lawson Convenience Store and trade it in for a ticket.

Was it ever worth it… The basic premise of the museum is to pull back the curtain on the craft of animation, so everywhere you look there are drawings, storyboards, even filmstrips and stop-motion cameras — and you’re encouraged to actually touch this stuff!

Such a place could never exist in North America; I can’t imagine the exhibits here not getting trashed in about five seconds. Mind you, there was also a room upstairs for the children to get their ya-yas out — with a giant plush scale model of the cat bus from Totoro.

I have no photos of the inside of the museum, as they are strictly prohibited. So you’ll just have to come to Tokyo and see it for yourself!