Ghibli Museum

This past Wednesday I was in for another unique (although sort of world famous) treat - a visit to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (a Tokyo suburb). Ghibli is the movie studio, that has produced Miyazaki's animation films such as Spirited Away, Howls Moving Castle and until last week unbeknowst to me also my childhood's beloved "Heidi" cartoon from which I probably learned most of my first German. The Museum is a full on adventure experience, hosted in a specially constructed building with Ghibli-ish architecture both in- and outside. It is also extremely popular, which means that you actually have to buy tickets and reserve a visit time slot in advance!

I personally enjoyed the museum a lot, while not very big, it does house some really amazing artifacts from the movie productions and what I really liked, these are wrapped in mood board like rooms (decorated with all sorts of 'junk' ranging from fake fireplaces to british jam-glasses), so that you get the idea of actually truely entering the world of Howl's Moving Castle and you can imagine how they used all of these props to create/visualize the atmosphere they wanted the illustrators and animation artistst to bring to paper... Unfortunately the Museum is strictly "no photos", so if you're curios you might just have to come to Tokyo to see for yourself!