The Ghibli Museum is a little difficult to get to. The museum is incredibly popular, and tickets are also very cheap (about $10 each). Thus tickets must be pre-purchased well (months) in advance. Not only this, but the tickets are not just for a day, but also a time, and entry will be refused if you are more than half an hour late. Thus I was rather overexcited and dragged Hunty out of bed a fair bit sooner than necessary for our 10 o'clock (first entry of the day) tickets. As it was, we successfully navigated the trains and had plenty of time for a pleasant stroll through the park on the way to the museum, with me jumping eagerly at every sign that we were getting closer.
From the first sight, the museum exceeded my already high expectations. The building complex from the outside is a whimsical combination of different styles which together add up to wonderful world of childlike fun.
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| Poor little sootballs |
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| Totoro the gatekeeper |
Enthusiastically, we queued up for entry, Hunty keen, me bouncing on the spot with excitement. Stepping inside was like stepping into a wonderland, with little Totoros everywhere. The ceiling in the entry hall had a wonderful mural with characters from a number of the most popular movies hiding between the vines and flowers. From there, the museum continued to surprise and delight. The attention to detail was incredible. I'm sure that no visible part of the museum was left to a default, everything was carefully selected, and mostly specially made, from the lift and the spectacular ceiling fan/propeller blade, down to the door handles and tap fittings. Many of the windows contained spectacular stained glass designs. Even the bathrooms had more than the usual amount of though put into them. It was like no museum I've seen before, and I suspect I'll never see anything like it again. Inside the museum, photos were not allowed, so you'll just have to go there yourselves one day to see how wonderful it was.
The main hall re-enforces the whimsical nature of the museum. The main building is three stories high, and the top two floors both have a large opening so that you can see back down to the bottom. From the second floor, a narrow bridge spans the gap, just because. Towards the back of the first floor is a tightly wound spiral staircase going up one and a half floors. Having climbed reached the top, you need to duck to get through the tiny doorway which leads back to the main staircase where you can either go half a floor up or half a floor down. This makes the spiral staircase pointless, but that's just part of the fun.
On the roof, a "life-size" robot from Laputa stands sentinel over the grounds. A staff member was up on the roof with the robot, and I thought that he must be there to prevent people taking photos. However, I decided to try my luck, and he said it was fine to take photos outside the buildings. I literally jumped for joy. Repeatedly. Then I ran up and gave the robot a big hug.
Also inside the museum is a small theatre showing short films not available outside the museum. We arrived just before the showing, and had to sit on the stairs, but the stairs were surprisingly comfortable. The film we saw was The Day I Havested a Planet. It was subtitled, which was a plus, but the subtitles were for the hearing impaired, not for the language impaired, and so they were not very much use at all for us English speakers. Despite understanding only a small portion of what was going on, it was beautiful and enjoyable. I only wish it would be released to DVD so I could watch it subtitled and actually understand what was going on.
There were a number of other displays which I won't describe, but I'll simply repeat that our time inside the Ghibli Museum was absolutely magical.
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