Spirited Away

In America, animation companies build ginormous theme parks. In Japan, they create museums. The New Yorker this week ran a profile of animator Hayao Miyazaki by Margot Talbot. She opens the piece with detailed descriptions of his Ghibli Museum, or Museo D'Arte Ghibli, a Tokyo museum which highlights and documents the work of his studios and the general techniques used in animation. By the sound of it, Ghibli is a fantastical environment that gives concrete reality to an animator's vision, but might also teach a bit about the artmaking process and the science behind moving pictures. Below is an excerpt from a Q & A with the author (sorry, the article itself is not available online, but you should really be reading the New Yorker anyway. I'm just saying).

You visited the Ghibli Museum, on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is dedicated to his work. What is it like, and how does it compare with other museums, especially those designed for children?

The museum reminded me of an old term for the precursors of museums—“cabinets of wonder"—because the idea of it is really to trace the creative process that goes into animated films—and especially Miyazaki's, of course—in a way that is both trippy and very beautiful. It has all these rooms where a dreamy child might be sketching backgrounds for a movie or coming up with an idea—they are kind of romanticized places, with oak furniture, jars full of colored pencils, watercolors and postcards tacked to the walls, model airplanes and flying dinosaurs hanging from the ceiling. In one of the exhibits, there's a very cool zoetrope with figures from “Totoro”—John Lasseter told me that he was enchanted by that, because it reminded him of the original meaning of animation—to bring to life, to set in motion. The museum has a movie theatre that is designed to not overwhelm children. It lets in a lot of natural light, has bench-style, child-scale seats, and a soft sound system. And it's a great building: painted in candy colors, with stained-glass windows, wooden floors, high ceilings, sort of Arts and Crafts meets Lewis Carroll. You feel good being in there.