Ghibli

Saturday I headed to Kichijoji station to meet my friend and go to the Ghibli Museum. Ghibli is the Disney of Japan which created Totoro, Spirited Away and Ponyo. After a Kilometer walk through a park we reached the museum. Our tickets were for 2:00 PM, so we had to wonder around for a few minutes befor we could get in.


You have to buy the tickets in advance and they are usually sold out a couple of weeks beforehand. The only place to buy them is at a Lawson's convenience store kiosk. The kiosks are only in Japanese and even when I had my Japanese friend get the tickets, she was struggling with the system. Maybe that is why I saw only a few foreigners there.


The ticket they give you at the museum has a little piece of film with 3 shots (?) in it. Mine was from Totoro, we couldn't figure out what movie my friend's ticket was from.

A closeup of the ticket

The museum itself contains a a small theater where they show a 15 minute cartoon. The one we saw was "Koro no Oosanpo", about a puppy getting out and wondering the city. At one point it was found by a huge breasted Japanese student. Oh Japan, is there any time when you aren't perverted?

Unfortunately they are pretty strict about not taking photos, and I wasn't in top physical condition (see previous post) or mood to try and sneak some. There were a lot of interesting exhibits about how they layer the cells and different types of animation before cartoons. Everything was in Japanese, so reading was not required. One of the most interesting things was looking at the animators desks. You can walk around quite freely and almost nothing is roped off. On one of the desks was an ashtray loaded with cigarettes. I am glad Japan hasn't completely whitewashed cigarette history (we won't get into their whitewashing of other historical events) like the US seems to be doing (erasing cigarettes from old movies and photographs).


Another interesting thing was the exhibit where the model in the picture above would start spinning backwords and then a stobe light would turn on. It gave the effect that the pieces were realling moving (the jumprope was realling going around and the rabbits were really jumping). Picture taken from here.


On the roof is a giant robot from the movie Laputa, Castel in the Sky. It was hard to get a picture because of all the Japanese girls posing and having to get a shot with everyones camera and have different sets of people in each shot.



I could probably do a nice long post on Japanese girl photo posing, but I am just not able to wrap my head around it. The girl in the blurry photo just above purposely made her leg go into some weird bent out of shape way in an effort to look "cutie". I guess having a mangled looking foot is the cool thing these days.


These girls seemed to be in front of us much of the time, each needing about 5 pictures infront of everything.

A girl posing in a flooded park.

Some graffiti

A baby chair in the restroom. Don't point at the chair!!!!

Watch your head... or die.