On Sunday morning we went to the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art to see the exhibit of three dimensional models from all the Ghibli film that they had on display there. Once again we were there just as they opened and, once again, we could not take any pictures inside of the exhibit, so you're going to have to put up with my written descriptions of most of it. At the Ghibli Museum you get a film clip as part of your ticket. For this exhibit they do something similar, but a little less expensive. When you turn in your pass, you are given a little passport wallet and a card to go into it. The card has the image of the advertising poster from one of the Ghibli movies, but it's hidden when you get it, so you don't know which film you got until you open the packet. Between the three of us we got Nausicaa, Grave of the Fireflies, and Mononoke.
Once inside the exhibit you see a series of models and semi-life sized figurines showing scenes from each of the Ghibli films. I assume that these were constructed by Ghibli (certainly under the supervision of Ghibli) and I'm guessing that they will be used in other exhibits in the future. The booklet I bought for the exhibit showed not only the scenes they had there, but also photos of other models and scenes they didn't have on display. So again I'm guessing that if they went to that much trouble to build the extra ones then they're planning on using them somewhere else in the future.
My favorite scene was the first one we encountered when we walked into the exhibit. There were three human-sized "secret service" cats from The Cat Returns all standing guard around a stand with an Academy Award statue on it. But the statue was also a oversized model and when you looked at the base it said (in English) "Academy Award--Best Animated Feature 2003--The Cat Returns". (We can only hope that they hurry up and release it here in the US by December so it will be eligible. ^_^)
For each film they had one or two life-sized scenes along with a glass case next to it that contained material related to that film such as production drawings, shooting schedules, newspaper and magazine clippings, advertising, etc. There was a lot to read there, but it was all in Japanese. Nobutoshi was kind enough to translate bits and pieces for me, but it would have taken several hours to have him translate and read aloud everything in the exhibit.
It was fun to see all these favorite characters and scenes in three dimensions right in front of you, but I noticed something odd. The non-human characters (Totoro, Baron, Porco, etc.) looked just fine, maybe even better as 3-D models. But the human characters (Kiki, San, Chihiro, etc.) tended to look too stiff and "unreal". "Unreal" probably isn't the best word here since these are cartoon characters after all, but several of them looked disturbingly different from what they looked like in the animation. I don't know whether this was a case of the model builders trying to make them look more realistically human (i.e.--less cartoony) having that ruin their appearance to the audience, or maybe it's a psychological thing. We're more forgiving when we see a 3-D model of a non-human cartoon being than when we see a supposedly human 3-D model. After all we're used to seeing real people all the time, but seeing a "real" Totoro is very rare. I wonder what the Ghibli folks really thought of the quality of the "human" models in the exhibit.
Here is a quick rundown of the films and what scene was shown for each:
Nausicaa--Nausicaa flying on her mehve with Teto on her shoulder and the royal bug flying behind her.
Laputa--The Tiger Moth flying through the night sky. They had it in a corner where they were projecting a film of clouds floating past onto it the background walls to give the illusion that it was flying through the sky.
Totoro--The classic scene of Satsuki, Mei, and Totoro standing together at the bus stop.
Grave of the Fireflies--Seita and Setsuko in the cave looking into the pot containing the fireflies.
Kiki--This was a vertical setup with Tonbo riding his "flying bicycle" on the ground and Kiki (with Jiji) flying on her broom just above him.
Only Yesterday--The adult Taeko and the fifth grade Taeko standing together by the railroad tracks.
Porco--The scene of Porco dozing in his beach chair.
Pom Poko--A scene of the two tanuki, Kiyo out in the reeds posing alluringly to attract Shokichi .
Whisper of the Heart--A wall is set up and on one side is the workbench with Seiji building his violin and on the other side is Shizuku's desk where she's writing her story.
Mononoke--This one had two scenes: San and the wolves in the woods and Ashitaka riding Yakkul.
My Neighbors the Yamadas--A scene of everyone sitting on the floor in the living watching the TV.
Spirited Away--Also had two scenes. One of Yubaba in front of a small model of the bathhouse and one of the "River God" coming out of the bath and shocking Chihiro and Lin.
The Cat Returns--The house where Baron lives with Baron standing in front of it.
Ghiblies 2--This was just wall mounted relief showing a train running down a crooked track with the various characters' heads sticking out of the window. Meanwhile the character with the pig nose (sorry, I don't know if any of them have names) is driving a small red car and the manager with the round glasses is riding inside a Catbus.
Some interesting notes on these exhibits: The movie version of Sherlock Hound was being released about the same time as Nausicaa was, so the display case showed some of the newspaper ads for the two movies. At first the ads for Sherlock were much bigger and the Nausicaa ads were tiny additions next to it. Nobutoshi explained that Sherlock was the best known of Miyazaki's works at the time and they weren't sure how well Nausicaa was going to do at the box office. However as time when on (and I guess Nausicaa did better at the box office) the ads for it got bigger and the Sherlock ads shrunk.
The most effective scene (for me at least) was the one for Grave of the Fireflies. They had the entrance to the "cave" that Seita and Setsuko were living in with the two figures back in the recess of the cave. They were both squatting down and looking into the pot where Seita has put the fireflies. There was no lighting inside the cave for the scene, so the only light was the orange-yellow light coming out the bowl which would slowly increase, then decrease, illuminating their faces. In this case the look of wonder and joy did come through on the faces of the models. Seeing how beautiful this looked, and knowing what you know about their fate in the story, made this the one scene that was hard to look at for long.
In the Kiki exhibit there was a rough pencil sketch (that was obviously a Miyazaki original) of a seated Kiki looking straight on at the viewer with a serious look on her face. It took me a bit to realize that there was an old fashioned water tank (with a chain) up above her head and that she was seated on a toilet! (Since you're viewing her from the front and her dress hem is pulled down to cover her knees you can't see what she's sitting on in the picture.) I knew that Miyazaki had put the scene in where Kiki runs to the bathroom in the morning because someone (a movie critic?) had complained that no one in cartoons ever had to go to the bathroom. According to Nobutoshi (and I assume he got it from the Japanese caption) Miyazaki had joked about continuing the in-joke by having the advertising poster art for Kiki be a picture like this. Obviously they decided this was too much, and so below it was the rough pencil sketch of the image they did go with, the famous picture of Kiki sitting behind the bakery counter.
Over at the Spirited Away section I looked at the models and at the display cases (which only had a couple of things from the US release on display) and started to walk on when I noticed there was one more insignificant glass case off to the side of the main display case that I had almost missed. It was easy to overlook since not only was it small and set back slightly relative to the much larger case for the Spirited Away material, but it was also bare save for one object: a small statuette. It took a couple of seconds for it to sink in what I was looking at, then I bent closer to read the engraving on the base: Best Feature Animation 2002 / Spirited Away / Hayao Miyazaki. They had stuck the Oscar into the exhibit almost as an afterthought.
I looked around the room at the dozens of people in just that part of the exhibit and realized that no one else was looking at the award, no one else had noticed it. They were all too busy looking at the wonderful artwork and enjoying the power of Miyazaki and Takahata's imaginations to bother noticing this award one of them had received. And in my humble opinion, that's just the way it should be. ^_^
Over in the main hall they had a projection TV in a cloth tent and some HDTV screens set up which were showing a continual loop of all the trailers from all the Ghibli films from Nausicaa through The Cat Returns (and even the trailer for the new Japanese dub of Kirikou and the Sorceress that Takahata has done and that is being released theatrically this summer in Japan under Ghibli sponsorship).
And over to one side of the main gallery they had a glass case about 8 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet that had an extra diorama there. It was some scene from what looked like a samurai drama, except that the 12-inch tall costumed warrior caught in midair wielding a sword and doing a flying foot kick was quite obviously Miyazaki. ^_^ The object of his attack was another, slightly younger, warrior on the ground and I'm guessing that was Toshio Suzuki (Studio Ghibli's managing director and producer). Over to the side was a fisherman wryly watching the scene who just happened to look a lot like Takahata. According to Nobutoshi, this is a famous scene from the Japanese story Ganruujima no Kettou ("Duel at the Ganryuujima Island") with Miyazaki playing the role of Miyamoto Musashi (the author of The Book of Five Rings) and Suzuki playing his opponent, Sasaki Kojirou.
While I was watching the trailers on one of the wide screen TVs four things happened. First, Totoro walked out into the middle of the museum floor. Okay, it wasn't really Totoro. It was somebody in a 6 foot high gray Totoro costume. Second, Totoro was immediately mobbed by most of the children there. (Beto was a bit shy so he stayed back to watch Totoro with me.) Third, almost every other adult there pulled out a camera or a cell phone with a digital camera and started taking pictures. (I swear, I saw more cell phones with cameras there at the museum that day than I've seen in Dallas all this year.) Fourth, some poor staffer ran out and began waving her arms and saying (in Japanese) "Please, please, no photographs in the museum."
The centerpiece of the exhibit was the model of the moving castle from Ghibli's current production of Howl's Moving Castle. It was very impressive, but of course you could not take any pictures of it. However they did have posters up all over the storefronts on the walk to the museum, so I took pictures of those. The posters show the giant model of the walking castle while it was under construction. This is the only picture on this set of webpages where I have a link to the full-sized version (960 x 1280) of the picture so you can see the details.
If you look at the people in the picture you can see how big this model is. My estimate was that it was about 22 to 25 feet high. They have it set up in the largest gallery there and the painting behind it (that you can see slightly here) is of a battle scene where everything is on fire. They had built up a raised and inclined platform that covered the base of the model and was high enough that the castle's legs rested on it so that they appeared to be actually supporting the weight of the castle (instead of just dangling like they are in the poster). Unlike the other models in the exhibit, this one was designed so you could walk up on the platform (which looked like part of a hill) right up to the model to touch it and look inside. You can tell from the picture that there are houses and cottages hanging off of the sides of the castle. You could look inside the windows of the little houses (at least the ones you could reach) and see how they had set up the rooms in there. There wasn't much, just some small tables and chairs and brooms and some fireplaces with red glows coming from them, just your typical fairy tale cottage. None of the fires had any sign of a face in them, so I guess Calcifer must be in one of the rooms higher up.
Outside of the exhibit they had more stuff set up in the museum courtyard. Here you were encouraged to take pictures, not that you needed any encouragement. First off they had the inflatable Catbus for kids to go inside of and jump around.
Here you can see the blowers (in the yellow boxes) that keep Catbus inflated. On the other hand, the poor mice never did get properly inflated.
Here's a shot of the front of Catbus showing the area were the kids took their shoes off before they got into Catbus. There was a line for this (of course!) but it was only about a 15 minute wait.
They had three other things there in the courtyard: large color backgrounds on the walls (sponsored by Epson printers!) where you could have your picture taken. One was the banner (or whatever you call it) from Pom Poko.
And there was the image of Mei and Satsuki's house. (By the way, we didn't tell Beto to make the little V-sign when he posed. He picked that up from watching all the Japanese kids around him.)
But the one thing that EVERYONE was in line for was to take a picture of this:
Yes, there was a 30 minute line for this. Yes, we stood in it. Yes, it is extremely kawaii (cute). Yes, they had a stack of umbrellas off to the side for you to use for the picture. Yes, it was worth it. Yes, we now have our Christmas card picture (thanks to Nobutoshi for taking it for us!)
If you look closely at Totoro's umbrella, you can see the water drops on it. Ironically it started drizzling on us as we stood in line, so the staff quickly handed out extra umbrellas to all of us in line. But I think it adds a nice bit of verisimilitude to the picture.
Later after we had left the exhibit, we wandered around the Museum and took a picture of the courtyard from above so you can see the layout (and the lines!)
Before we left the museum I learned one more lesson about Japan and being a naive gaijin. There was a shop next to the exhibit that had even more Ghibli stuff than the Ghibli Museum had! (Becky found some Totoro house shoes she liked, but decided that she wouldn't wear them enough to make it worthwhile.) Unlike the Ghibli Museum, this shop had little wicker baskets to put your choices in while you looked around. And the crowd was so thick that it took you several minutes just to work your way from one end to the other to reach the check out line. After all that I got to the register with about 7000 yen (~$60) worth of stuff and pulled out my credit card. "I'm sorry," the clerk said in her hesitant English, "Cash only." Whoops. I had misjudged how much cash I would need for the weekend and only had about 3000 yen left on me. But it never occurred to me that at a major art museum in the center of Tokyo they wouldn't have the ability to take credit cards! Fortunately, Nobutoshi came to my rescue and floated me a loan until the next day when we could get to a bank to cash some more traveler's checks. ^_^; (And I learned another lesson later that afternoon as we repeatedly tried several ATMs: Never, ever, believe Bank of America when they tell you in the US that your Visa/ATM card will certainly work at any ATM machine in Japan that takes Visa cards.)
Outside of the Museum we had one more Ghibli moment. There was a small gallery in the next block that we had passed on the way which advertised they carried the artwork of Naohisa Inoue, the artist who did the beautiful Margritte-like background paintings for the fantasy sequences in Whisper of the Heart. Here you see the gallery and its ad with the Museum in the background in the next block.
And here are the close ups of the advertisements for the artwork they had outside.
Since we had passed it before 10am when we arrived at the Museum, the gallery was closed, but I had hoped it would be open that afternoon after we left the Museum. Unfortunately they were still closed when we walked back past it. That's just as well. I'd hate to think what sort of prices they were charging even for the reproductions of his work. And they probably only took cash.....
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