Ghibli Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ghibli Museum sits inside Inokashira Park in Mitaka, a western city within the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, and it operates by a rule that might strike first-time visitors as peculiar: no photographs, no video recording, inside. The reason given is straightforward. The museum describes itself as a "portal to a storybook world", and a camera in your hand, the thinking goes, pulls you out of it.

  Planning for this place began in 1998. Construction started in March 2000. On the 1st of October 2001, the doors opened. What waited inside was not a conventional gallery. It was something that blends the sensibilities of a children's museum, a technology museum, and a fine arts museum, all filtered through the imagination of one animator: Hayao Miyazaki.

  Miyazaki designed the building himself, sketching it the same way he drafts his films, through storyboards. His stated aim was simple but unusual for an institution. He wanted visitors to feel more enriched when they leave than when they entered. The slogan the museum settled on is "Let's get lost together." Both the slogan and the prohibition on cameras point to the same question: what kind of place is this, exactly, and how does it work on the people who walk through it?

• 2. Miyazaki's Blueprint

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  Hayao Miyazaki drew his design inspiration from European architecture, including the hilltop village of Calcata in Italy. The result is a building threaded with iron spiral staircases, both inside and outside, along with interior bridges and balconies that stretch through the full height of the structure.

  The stairways in the museum do not all lead somewhere useful. Some end in dead ends. Others cross bridges. Miyazaki built deliberate architectural puzzles into the structure, reflecting the fantasy building designs that appear throughout his films. The building itself, in his conception, is not a container for the exhibit. It is part of the exhibit.

  This philosophy extends to the smallest decisions. The Saturn Theater, located in the basement, was designed with small children specifically in mind. Miyazaki was aware that a closed-in theater space might frighten young visitors, so he fitted the room with windows. Automated shades lower and open before and after each showing, giving children a visible boundary between the outside world and the screen.

• 3. Inside the Exhibits

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  On the bottom floor, visitors encounter a three-dimensional zoetrope called "Bouncing Totoro", built around models of characters from My Neighbor Totoro, the 1988 film. A zoetrope is a spinning drum that creates the illusion of motion from a sequence of still figures. Miyazaki's version makes the principle of animation itself visible and tactile.

  The first floor holds a five-room exhibit called "Where a Film is Born". It is designed as a mock-up of a working animation studio, stocked with books and toys, its walls covered in drawings and illustrations. The rooms walk visitors through illustration techniques and the creative process of an animation filmmaker.

  A separate exhibit breaks down the technical steps of animated filmmaking: sketching, storyboarding, keyframing, cleanup, coloring, and background painting. The sequence is meant to demystify a craft that, in finished films, appears seamless. Beyond Ghibli's own work, the museum also hosts a rotating area showcasing work from other studios, a deliberate gesture outward from the institution's own catalogue.

• 4. Special Exhibitions

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  The rotating exhibition program at the Ghibli Museum has covered a wide range of subjects since opening. From 2003 to 2004, the museum dedicated a show to works by the Russian animator Yuri Norstein. From 2004 to 2005, it hosted an exhibition on Pixar Animation Studios. From 2006 to 2007, the focus shifted to Aardman Animations, primarily their work on Wallace and Gromit.

  From 2007 to 2008, the museum exhibited Panda! Go, Panda!, an early pre-Ghibli film from 1972 made by both Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. The inclusion of that film is significant. It dates from before Studio Ghibli existed, placing the museum in the role of archiving a creative partnership that predates the studio itself.

  The exhibitions also ventured into literary territory. A 2014-2015 show focused on The Nutcracker and the Mouse King as a fairy tale, while a 2012-2013 exhibition examined illustration as a source of popular culture. From 2008 to 2009, the museum hosted a show called Petit Louvre, suggesting an interest in drawing connections between Japanese animation and the broader history of fine art.

• 5. Hidden Details and Named Spaces

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  The bookstore and reading room inside the Ghibli Museum is called Tri Hawks, and the name has a story. It opened on the 6th of February 2002 and is filled with books recommended personally by Hayao Miyazaki. The name comes from a translation of "Mitaka", the city where the museum stands, which means "three hawks" in Japanese.

  The souvenir shop on the top of the building is called Mamma Aiuto, named after the band of sky pirates from the 1992 film Porco Rosso. The film is set in Italy, and the Italian phrase Mamma Aiuto translates to "mama, help me". Among the items sold there are classic and non-Japanese animated films released under the Ghibli Museum Library label.

  The café, called the Straw Hat Café, was created with the help of a housewife and mother of four. Miyazaki wanted the food to feel like home cooking. One item on offer is a beer called "Valley of the Wind", produced in collaboration with Dairy Kingdom Oratche, a microbrewery in Tanna Basin. The label for that beer was hand-drawn by Gorō Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki's son and himself an animation director at Studio Ghibli.

• 6. The Rooftop and Its Soldier

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  On the museum's roof, a five-meter-tall robot stands in the garden. The Robot Soldier is drawn from two sources: the final episode of Lupin III Part II and the film Castle in the Sky. It was made by the artist Kunio Shachimaru from hammered copper plate and took two years to complete.

  Nearby, in the same rooftop garden, sits a replica of the keystone from Castle in the Sky. The stone carries an inscription in Old Persian cuneiform. In the film, the keystone controls the floating castle Laputa. Placing a replica of it on the museum's roof, next to the Robot Soldier, recreates a small fragment of a fictional world in physical space.

  At the museum's entrance, the ceiling carries a fresco painting featuring characters from Studio Ghibli films, including Kiki on her broomstick from Kiki's Delivery Service, the 1989 film. Stained glass throughout the building depicts Totoro and the lesser-known blue Chu Totoros, figures that many visitors may not recognize by name even if they recognize the larger Totoro from the more widely seen 1988 film.

• 7. Admission and Access

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  Tickets to the Ghibli Museum cannot be purchased at the door. They are sold in advance only, a policy that shapes the entire experience of visiting. Pricing is tiered: adults pay ¥1,000, visitors aged 13 to 18 pay ¥700, children aged 7 to 12 pay ¥400, and children aged 4 to 6 pay ¥100. Children younger than four enter free.

  In February 2020, the museum closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reopened first to Mitaka residents only in July of that year, then fully in September. The phased reopening reflected the museum's relationship to the city it occupies: Mitaka is not just its address but the source of its bookstore's name.

  The short films screened in the Saturn Theater are exclusive to the museum, unavailable elsewhere, with one exception. They are also screened at the Cinema Orion in the Grand Warehouse section of Ghibli Park, in Nagakute, a separate facility that carries some of the museum's programming into a different city.