Ghibli Museum

Since I haven't posted in a while, since there hasn't really been anything new to tell you about the trip, I've decided to make a little post about one of the places we'll be visiting; the Ghibli Museum.

Ghibli Studio is a company that makes animated films. Their movies are widely known, even here in America. Hayao Miyazaki, a co-founder of the company, has directed most of the films made by Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki's films are very beautiful and have moral stories in each. I would say they are children's films, but they are all so deep that I can't do that. There are some, like "My Neighbor Totoro", a film about two girls meeting the spirits of the woods, spirits that take on the look of giant teddy-bear like creatures, and "My Neighbors the Yamadas", a short film about a Japanese family the Yamadas and their crazy and funny lives. Other than those there are always sincere meanings in Studio Ghibli's films. Usually, you find stories about

I've seen many films by Miyazaki, including "Spirited Away", one of my favorites out of the many. The story of "Spirited Away" is one of his more serious ones. The story is of Chihiro, a small girl moving away from home. In the car, her parents decide to take a detour down a tunnel, despite Chihiro's protests, into an empty pasture with a small ghost town on the horizon. Chihiro wanders through the pretty town with her parents, wondering how such a town got abandoned without anyone's knowledge.

Chihiro's parents find a mound of fresh food, seemingly abandoned. They dig in, Chihiro continuing to wander. After getting bad feelings from the town, she rushes back, only to find that they have literally become pigs. Chihiro has now become lost in a new strange world, her parents pigs, a strange bathhouse owner hiring her, a mysterious boy who knew her name before she told him, and the chance of her never getting home if she forgets her name after recieving a new one, which she is on the verge of doing.

I'm excited to be able to go to the museum, I've heard they've designed every room to be part of one of the movies, the garden in back made to look overgrown like the land in "Castle in the Sky" or the forest that Totoro lives in. They also show a short extra to "My Neighbor Totoro" they don't show anywhere else.

Some other movies by him include "Princess Mononoke", a story about a girl living with wolves who protects the forest and a boy who is cursed by the woods and tries to make peace between humans and nature, "Howl's Moving Castle", a book by an English author, the movie is about Sophie, a girl who unknowingly is a bit rude to The Witch of the Waste, who in turn curses her, making her an old woman. She goes to work for the wizard Howl as a cleaning lady, trying to figure out how to get him to help break her curse when part of it that she cannot talk about it.

Right now in Japanese we are watching these films and if you get the chance I highly recommend them! Though some of them are for older viewers as a side note, "Princess Mononoke" being one of them.