WWWWWOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

[LucasM]

I'm heading to Japan in a few hours

Awesome!  Have fun!

Are there any particular things your trip is for, beyond enjoying the country?  Are there things that are a priority to see while you are there?

It was just a holiday - Our first real international one. (I have been to Christmas and Cocos Islands, but technically they count as part of Australia, and my wife has been to New Zealand, which also hardly counts )

We managed to snag tickets to the Nintendo Museum in the lottery, so we were there on the second day it was open to the public. Had a really fun time there - I've been a Nintendo fanboy all my life.

We also managed to get tickets tot he Ghibli Museum, which was my highlight of the trip.

We hit the shrine of 500 statues, saw some of the toilets from Perfect Days (they were even being cleaned while we were there, for the authentic experience) and so many awesome little places.

The whole trip was incredible. We're already talking about going back.

That sounds awesome!  Incredible luck on the Nintendo museum.  I played quite a bit of it early on myself (one way to get a temporary break from grad school studying).

The Ghibli museum sounds great.  Was it artwork mainly?  Like pre-production and final backgrounds and cels and such?  Or more about Ghibli himself and how the films came about?  Or a combo.  That sounds like it could've been many hours of interesting stuff.

I hadn't heard of it before, but Googling it and checking out a couple of the top results, the shrine of 500 statues looks like it would be incredible.

Sounds like a great time.  Glad you had fun.

[Edward J Grug III]

I found the Ghibli museum to be quite magical. I was surprised to find it was stubbornly Japanese only, despite it being a big tourist attraction. You are also not allowed to take photos inside of the museum, so getting your phone out to use google translate wasn't really on the cards.

There's a theatre that shows a short animated film that is not available anywhere else - Ours was House Hunting.

There's a room on the process of animation - it has zoetropes, and it shows them both running and not, and a few other examples of how early animation works.

The best room was one that was specifically Ghibli focused, but that also shows there's process for making a film. No labels or explanations, you need to intuit it all. Unsure how people without any knowledge on how animation works would have gone, but anyway - the rooms were lair out like the offices they animated out of - desks with ash trays full of butts and coffee mugs, and reference material everywhere - but the desks were half in the real world and half painted onto the wall. It was a fantastic effect.

The walls are lined with drawings. It is busy enough that you can't just stand and stare though, so you move through at a slow walk taking in as much as you can. It's all very packed with details and drawings.

At first you see concept art, then storyboards, background paintings, character animation art, cels and then cels over backgrounds. Each with lots of examples. It's very well done.

There is a multiplane camera which you can view through and operate to create the illusion of animation over a multilayered background.

Then they had books with the entire storyboards for several Ghibli movies that you can just look through.

There was a room that I think is a temporary exhibitions gallery? It currently has material from the Boy and the Heron (I didn't spend too much time here as I haven't seen this yet, sadly).

There's a room with a catbus from Totoro for kids to climb and play on.

You can head outside onto the roof to see a garden area with statues of the robots from Castle in the Sky.

There is a cafe - I had a curry chicken sandwich with raspberry sauce as it seemed to be the most Ghibli item on the menu.

There was a book shop (almost entirely in Japanese) and a gift shop.

I think that about covers it, except that the place is packed with beautiful references and details.

Highly recommended if you are ever heading to Japan. (Note they sell the tickets months in advance and they are not easy to get)

[LucasM]

Thank you for the detailed explanation.  Wow - that sounds even better than I would've hoped for for such a thing!

It is a shame that they don't have both Japanese and English labels so it could've been appreciated with additional depth.  Or heck: wall-mounted tablets hard-linked to Google Translate.  But it sounds well worth seeing regardless if one possibly can.

Sadly, I'm likely to spend 99+% of the remainder of my life in this house.  The head injuries have just taken too much functional capacity from me.  I'm still not recovered from a 250 mile trip to go through my parents' house after they'd both passed on (mainly to get memorable and collectible stuff I'd stored in their attic as a kid) - and that was over five years ago.  (Additional things like dentist and doctor visits in August have left me struggling to do more than eat regularly throughout the day for the last six weeks.)  So travel for pleasure is no longer pleasurable.

As a former amateur animator (mostly 3D stuff like clay and Captain Action and such, thanks to my love of Harryhausen's work), the Ghibli Museum sounds like it is incredible.  Thanks again for the description.  I could visualize it as a kind-of mature Disneyland exhibit (like the old tours through their animation building [no clue if they still have those tours, I was there in the mid-'80s])... but WAY more detailed.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I paid off a big loan today.  I borrowed $25,000 for some debt consolidation last September and paid it off today.

I have $4400 on a Visa, but I should be able to get that paid off by January 3rd at the latest.

[LucasM]

Congrats PoM!    That's excellent.

[Edward J Grug III]

Nice - that's a good feeling.