Inside the Studio Ghibli Museum Part 1

The Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo

One of my favorite places I've visited in Japan is the Studio Ghibli Museum, located in Mitaka, Tokyo. Case in point, I've been there three times in three years! In case you've got any doubts as to why this place would be worth visiting more than once, check out my article on izanau, including tips on how to snag tickets, costs, and transportation. The hard part is simply getting the tickets; other than that admission costs only 1000 yen (around 10 bucks!) so it's very affordable! What is not, sadly, is the gift shop, depending on your level of Ghibli fandom.

Everything about the museum is detailed and cute, even the special bus that goes straight to the museum from Mitaka station (sadly it's not a giant fluffy cat with twelve legs, but still good).

The Ghibli bus! Not an actual cat bus as we were all hoping.

It has all the cute characters from the opening scenes of My Neighbor Totoro!

Or you can walk about fifteen minutes from Mitaka station. Just follow the signs!

Ghibli Museum this way!

You've arrived! The entrance to the museum is to the right. After a long closure for touch ups and repairs, it's looking brand new with a snazzy paint job! Beautiful colors make it pop out of the forest! Before this it was covered in a lot of greenery.

Before

After

You can go around to the side before entering to see a few other details including a giant Totoro, who's posing as the employee behind the ticket counter (note that you can't actually purchase tickets at the museum).

Not the actual entrance.

Giant Totoro! And little soot sprites in the window below!

So big and fluffy! We all want one.

Posing with Totoro.

Thanks to the new paint, the museum is looking great! I really enjoyed the new colors, but there's still plenty of greenery left, too.

A blend of reds, blues, and greens.

See that tower on the left? It takes you up to the roof, where you can pose next to a giant robot from Castle in the Sky!

Passage to the rooftop. Tons of greenery!

The colors give it a fun, whimsical feel!

Beautiful colors AND foliage? Yes please.

You enter through here.

The real entrance.

Unfortunately the museum doesn't allow you to take pictures inside, but anything taken outside is ok. I love the gorgeous stained glass all around the museum!

A gorgeous stained glass of the cat bus and totoros!

Wish I had this at my house.

Satsuki and Mei waiting at the bus stop.

This was the last picture I could get before I entered the rest of the museum. The ceiling is painted in a beautiful fresco. In the center of a beautiful blue sky is a smiling, shining sun surrounded by vines, flowers, ears of corn, and fruit, and you’ll see Kiki and Nausicaa flying around!

Beautiful fresco on the ceiling showcasing fruit and veggies. See that little girl riding on her broomstick at the bottom?

Here's the full mural. It reminds me of the one in Bo's room in Spirited Away from the sunshine in the middle.

The fresco in all its glory.

You will be presented with a museum guide in your language of choice and a special film strip ticket that serves as a one-time entrance into the Saturn Theater. They are made from the actual 35mm film prints that were used in theaters! Hold it up to the light to get a good look at which character you got, and see if you can recognize the scene from the movie! In my book this is the coolest part of the whole museum experience, and hands-down my favorite souvenir.

Entrance ticket to the museum features real film strips from your favorite Ghibli movies!

You can find more stained glass scenes with characters from your favorite Miyazaki movies.

The forest spirit and kodama from Princess Mononoke.

Another with the same characters. The one little kodama is so cute!

This one is much more spectacular from the inside, but it's Spirited Away! You can see Haku in dragon form on the lower left panels.

Spirited Away stained glass. Look carefully and you'll see dragon Haku on the left!

What's Inside the Museum?

Central Hall

The central hall gives you a look at everything to explore in the museum.

The central hall is a spacious and bright and leads off to the many exhibition rooms and Saturn Theater. The museum consists of two floors as well as the rooftop and is connected by a bridged passageway as well as a twisted metal staircase, which can be a bit difficult to navigate if you’re really tall! The glass dome at the top acts as a skylight and features a yellow whale swimming in the ocean.

"Where a Film is Born" Artist Room

A look into the messy life of a Ghibli artist.

This is an intricately detailed walk-through room that gives you an inside look into the conceptualization, sketching, animation, and coloring process that bring Studio Ghibli movies to life. The exhibit begins in a room covered with artist sketches of characters from the films and conceptual artwork around an artist’s desk. There are books and toys slewn everywhere and hanging from the ceiling, so it looks just like the inevitable disarray involved with art. You’ll see other artists’ desks in the other rooms which detail the process of animation and coloring, however apart from the museum guide and café menu everything in the museum is written only in Japanese. At the end you can spin around a lever on an interactive machine that creates an animated scene.

Animation Room

This is another favorite room simply because you could sit and watch the animations for hours! It’s dim inside and full of peaceful, flowing music that could pacify you into a deep, restful sleep. You can take a peek inside a small house to see dioramas of pig family at the dinner table (Miyazaki likes to characterize himself as a pig), and admire all the plushes. There are several small animations on the walls, including one of a skull whose mouth keeps opening and closing hilariously. You’ll find the same skull on the twisting staircases warning you to watch your head! My friends and I were seriously surprised at how many skulls we encountered in the Ghibli museum!

There’s a really beautiful piece of animation that is an entire column of blue sky with white birds flying around the robot from Castle in the Sky. On a big screen plays a looped animation of an evolution process. It starts off with a small fish getting eaten by bigger and bigger fish, then the fish crawling out onto land and growing limbs, then another one appears and they start racing and turn into little dinosaurs. They eventually morph into cute human characters and race up to the top of a hill where they discover romance. The whole piece flows seamlessly from one to the next you could get lost in it for hours!

Finally, my other favorite part of this room is the zoetrope akin to the one that inspired the Toy Story version at California Adventure Park. It’s made of real molded characters laid out on the circular plane in different stages of animation – it’s 3D animation!

The mesmerizing Totoro zoetrope.

As it spins around it magically comes to life! There are hopping totoros, a jumping big totoro, flying cat bus and bats, Mei and Satsuki playing jump rope, and another Satsuki riding a unicycle. Another thing I could watch for hours! It’s mesmerizing.

Tri Hawks Reading Room/book store

Reading room and book store.

This room is called “Tri Hawks” as a pun on the kanji for Mitaka, where the museum is located. You can browse through the collection freely and purchase books, postcards, art print cells, hand painted cells, and woodblock prints of scenes from Ghibli movies made by Miyazaki’s son Keisuke. Miyazaki himself oversees the production of framed cell art!

Cat Bus play place

Giant fluffy cat bus at last! Wait a minute...it's only for kids.

Anyone who’s ever watched My Neighbor Totoro, especially at a young age, can attest to having a dream of someday boarding the cat bus. If you’re still a kid (12 and under), that dream is within reach; however it’s exclusively for children only. They get to climb all over it and play with giant soot balls while you watch on with hatred and curse the museum for denying you your dream experience. Luckily the museum featured a special exhibit where people of all ages could lounge inside the cat bus! At least until May 2017.

Special Exhibition

Giant cat bus for all ages comes to the Ghibli store! Score!!

A Special Exhibition room rotates throughout the year, with one new exhibition a year. The museum has been around for 15 years with 14 special exhibits! It started in 2001 with a Spirited Away exhibit, 2002's "Castle in the Sky and Imaginary Science Fiction Machines Exhibit", and others include 2005's "Heidi – Production Artists at Work Exhibit", 2007's "The Three Bears Exhibit", 2009's "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea – Making a Film with Pencils", 2011's "The View from the Cat Bus – A Special Exhibition", and 2014's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King – A Fairy Tale Treasure".

The latest exhibit through May 2017 is "All Aboard! The Cat Bus to the Ghibli Forest", which I was able to visit! It’s not the cat bus in its entirety, simply because it’s built to life size! You can see its head, however, pet its soft nose, and sit inside it’s plush, furry interior. You actually sink at least a food when you sit down! It’s incredibly soft and comfy. You’ll find everyone taking turns just to enjoy sitting!

The exhibit is actually a collage of previous exhibits including "The Three Bears Exhibit" and "Castle in the Sky and Imaginary Science Fiction Machines". There’s also a nifty replica of Howl’s castle, and a cool feature on the mythical inventions that often appear in Ghibli movies such as Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky. There’s a life size one-man plane, and you can watch a short movie that imagines even more fantastic flying inventions.

The new exhibit to take over will be called "Delicious! Animating Memorable Meals", focusing on the gorgeous food and eating scenes that make us all salivate while watching Ghibli movies! Who can forget how delicious that eggs and bacon frying on top of Calcifer looked, or the gluttony of Chihiro's parents and No Face gobbling gorgeous piles of food, or Chihiro gobbling down a plain rice ball with fat tears running down her face, or the tantalizing bowl of ramen with ham Ponyo and Sosuke share – even that fresh, crisp cucumber Satsuki chows down on looks pretty good!

New special exhibit featuring food in the Ghibli films. Looks delicious.

Food makes a big connection with fans in Ghibli movies. Their food is so well drawn and succulently colored you can't help loving the food scenes in their films! The exhibit is on display from May 27th to May 2018. Not sure if I could make it back to Japan within a year, but this is definitely one exhibit I'd love to see!

According to the site, the exhibit starts with "Scenes of Food". You can see how the animation of Chihiro eating the rice ball comes to life by documenting every deal of a few simple bites. There's a dining table where guests can use chopsticks and observe the details of how they eat. The second room shows two life-sized scenes of meals, Mei and Satsuki's kitchen in My Neighbor Totoro, and the mess hall of the Tiger Moth pirate ship in Castle in the Sky. You can see young Satsuki and Sheeta whipping up mouth watering food!

Another aspect the exhibit explores is the connection between food and culture and history. You can look through the books the studio referenced to draw food. The exhibition highlights how well-drawn food can look even more delectable than the real thing, and will definitely leave you hungry! (So make sure to head straight to the museum's cafe after!)

Saturn Theater

These people are watching an original short film shown exclusively at the museum!

One of the best parts of the museum is getting to watch a short Ghibli film! You can only enter once, but it doesn’t matter since the same short film is shown all day. Which prompts you to keep coming back to watch all of them! The film is shown every half hour and is approximately 15 minutes long. It’s a small space inside with only 80 seats, so you’ll want to line up in advance or you’ll have to stand at the back. On the ceiling is a blue sky with a crescent moon, sun, and clouds with colorful flowers on the walls. The film is shown via old school projector, and will capture your imagination in just 15 short minutes!

Read on to part 2 to find out about the 9 short films shown exclusively at the Ghibli Museum!