Studio Ghibli is the company behind some of Japan's most popular and beloved animated films. The associated museum is so ridiculously popular I was advised to buy tickets several months before even arriving in the country.
When we got there it became apparent why this was necessary. We joined on to a mass of people at the entrance and crawled through the exhibitions with hundreds of other fans. The small building contained several beautifully crafted displays about the history of the studio and animation techniques, but the sheer number of people was frustrating and slightly alarming. Then everyone disappeared and we watched a short film about sumo mice. The highlight of the museum was a furry life-sized model of the cat-bus - a character from one of the studio's most famous films 'My Neighbour Totoro'. (It's a cat that's a bus.) Children were encouraged to climb inside and hurl plush anthropomorphised dust balls at each other. I wasn't allowed to. I found this mildly discriminatory.
(For more about the cat-bus, visit Studio Ghibli's official explanatory page, 'Poof, Boing! The Cat Bus!'.)
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