Our first transgression at Park Ghibli was hoisting our 1-year-old onto the polyester belly of a forest spirit creature. Another would have let him shelter under a barricade and inside a fluffy bus with cat eyes for headlights.
“He’s not following protocol,” I told my wife, as the staff manning the cat-bus play zone looked on anxiously.
“He’s mocking it,” he said. But we did not stop him.
Ghibli Park, which opened outside Nagoya, Japan in November, pays homage to the whimsical, enchanting films of Studio Ghibli, co-founded by director Hayao Miyazaki in the 1980s. We took our two toddlers there because their favorite movie was “My Neighbor Totoro,” the beloved 1988 Miyazaki film starring a spirit creature and its cat-bus sidekick.
As parents, we thought it would be fun for our boys, 3 and 1, to experience the “Totoro” immersion. And as long-time Ghibli fans, we’re excited to see what the place looks like.
American visitors may wonder how Park Ghibli compares with Disney World. It really isn’t. It feels more low-key and has no rides, exotic animals, jumbo turkey legs or animatronic American presidents, among other things. The point is to hang around soaking up the Miyazaki vibes.
Also, the park is not complete. Grafted into an existing municipal park, it opened late last year, but as of early July only three of the five planned ticket sites were open. When I booked for a June visit, tickets to only one of those sites — a building called “Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse” — were available to international visitors who book through the park’s website. (The other two sites were able to be booked through Japanese travel agencies, but I learned that much later, from a Japanese speaker.)
Susan Napier, Mr. Miyazaki’s biographer at Tufts University, who visited Park Ghibli in April, said she was struck by “a work in progress.” He described the ticketing process, which involves lotteries and long online queues, as “byzantine and not fun”.
Perhaps this is why Studio Ghibli itself seems ambivalent about promoting Park Ghibli. In Japan, it ran ads advising fans to visit “your time”.
A fictional theme park celebrating Nintendo or Pokemon, two other Japanese creative brands, feels more assuredly like Disney World, said Matt Alt, author of the 2021 book “Pure Invention: How Japanese Pop Culture Conquered the World.” But he said the park’s diffuse layout and low-key marketing befits the studio, co-founded by director Mr. Miyazaki, who has never hidden his capitalist politics.
Park Ghibli is not a place to “turn your brain off,” Mr. Alt told me. “It demands a level of intellectual engagement that most parks don’t.” When I booked our visit in March, a little mental boost was nice. I imagine our boys wandering the fields in the sunlight, pondering Mr. Miyazaki’s cinematic works while pausing to gather acorns, as the two sisters who starred in “Totoro” do. (Boys who are Anglo-American love acorn scenes so much that they learn the Japanese word for nut, donguri, before the English word.)
In reality, we arrived just before our three-hour afternoon visit slot at Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, and our intellectual capacity was limited. Our parents’ nerves were frayed by the hour-long journey from Nagoya and the general struggle of moving small, wiry humans around an unfamiliar place.
Our morning in Nagoya woke up at 4am and was already tainted by a few public displays of unchecked toddler emotion. Based on the 17th-century Nagoya Castle, for example, our 3-year-old, nicknamed T, burst into tears when he learned the castle was closed for renovations.
To break his mood, we took the emergency step of buying him and his brother B, ice cream cones as a second breakfast. It stopped crying, but our increasing fatigue increased the stakes of our visit to Park Ghibli. Is a trip to meet our favorite magical creatures worth all the time, money and energy?
Park Ghibli may see a bump in domestic tourism this summer as Mr. Miyazaki releases a new film in Japan this month. But for my family, a pilgrimage there was all about seeing Totoro and the cat bus.
“Totoro” follows two sisters, May, 4, and Satsuki, 10, as they settle in a spooky house in the Japanese countryside with their archaeologist father. His mother is stuck in a nearby sanatorium suffering from an unknown illness.
After Mei meets Totoro, who stumbles into its lair inside a giant camphor tree (and sleeps on its belly), she and her sister encounter the creature a few times and learn more about its magical powers. Finally, as his mother’s condition worsens, he is offered some major favors by Totoro and the wild-eyed cat Bus.
Professor Napier explains to me the beauty of walking through the “Totoro” Ghibli catalog, and it’s more obscure and subtle than Disney’s. She described it as “the immersive, low-key magic of being connected to other things.”
“It’s a world you love,” Professor Napier, who is writing a book comparing Ghibli to Disney, said of Mr. Miyazaki’s animated universe. “But it’s unpredictable and complicated and sometimes scary.”
Totoro and the cat Bus can actually be a bit scary, especially when they flash their teeth. But the movie is more sweet than scary. Mr. It’s set in “a time before television,” as Miyazaki once told an interviewer, and filled with gorgeous, hand-drawn rural imagery — pastel sunsets, snails crawling up plant stems — that make you want to be a kid growing up. In rural areas.
The film also celebrates a child’s sense of wonder. Mr. Miyazaki created “Totoro” with children in mind – he hoped they would like to pick acorns – and many critics have seen it as an ode to childhood innocence. Totoro and the cat are only visible to the bus sisters, not the adults.
Maybe this is why I cry every time I watch the end credits roll: “Totoro” reminds me that my boys will never be this young or innocent.
In our Seoul apartment, he plays with Totoro and cat-bus dolls, sleeps in Totoro pajamas, and sits on the Totoro potty. His fandom is so intense that my mother-in-law bought us tickets to the stage adaptation of “Totoro” at the Barbican Theater during our last trip to London.
In Nagoya, before we left for Ghibli Park, B demonstrated his enthusiasm by bringing a plastic cat bus to the hotel buffet – and feeding it a whipped cream breakfast. He showed the toy to a man in a ninja costume who posed for a selfie with us outside the castle.
The ninja flashed a knowing smile, indicating that he too was a “Totoro” fan. “Cat bus,” he said in Japanese, the phrase like a code word.
Park Ghibli is located in Nagakute, a small city in the hills outside Nagoya, a few stops up the highway from Ikea. Not exactly a Ghibli entrance; You just wander into an unremarkable municipal park and you’ve booked tickets months in advance for the Ghibli sites.
The Grand Warehouse is a sleek, multi-story building about the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with plenty of sunlight streaming in through skylights. It will be near a grass lawn, an ice rink, and some future Ghibli sites under construction.
Inside, there are replicas of sets from the movies, including an elevated bathhouse from the Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away” and dozens of Instagram tables made of Ghibli scenes and props.
The attention to detail is remarkable. In the area devoted to the Ghibli film “Arrietti,” for example, I saw a giant drop of plastic dew stuck to a giant fake flower. Nearby is an intricately detailed replica of the castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” my oldest son’s favorite Miyazaki film after “Totoro.”
“Castle, Dad!” Three-year-old T said happily. In the end, the Japanese castle did not make him cry.
The problem was, most of the tableaux were filled with Ghibli fans — and lines we didn’t have time to stand with restless toddlers. The building’s only restaurant is similarly oversubscribed. We finally found a kiosk advertising cake, but the staff said the cake was empty.
After canvassing the warehouse for about an hour, we headed to “Children’s Town,” a play area dedicated to scenes from “Totoro” and other Ghibli films.
Children’s Town has three rooms. The first is a labyrinth that incorporates scenes from more Ghibli films than I can count: the orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” and so on. The boys loved it, even if dad poked his head through the crawl space.
Other rooms were dedicated to “Totoro” and mercifully had high ceilings. There was a house where Mei and Satsuki lived with their father. There was a camphor tree where a giant Totoro was sleeping next to some huge Donguri. And in the far corner sat a magnificent, fluffy cat Bus.
It’s all fun, kid-friendly and immersive — almost, in fact, like what you’d find at Disney World. The boys were in heaven.
“A row of toes! To-to-ro!” said B, standing inside the tree, with the same tone as the film’s rousing, marching-band-style theme song.
“Hey, Totoro!” T. was carefully inspecting the giant acorns. “Get up!”
But while Children’s Town seems designed to nurture the childlike sense of wonder that Miyazaki celebrates in his films, the warehouse staff dampened the vibe by telling us several rules. Notably, it’s forbidden to put children on Totoro’s plush belly, or allow the cat to play inside the bus zone for more than three minutes – even if the zone isn’t crowded, which it isn’t.
The staff members were friendly, but their rules made little sense to little kids like us. I wonder if this is another sign that Park Ghibli is still a little rough around the edges. The studio says take your time to visit.
We grudgingly agreed to the gluttony policy, but B didn’t want to play anywhere else inside the cat bus. We were with him. We spent several months – the best part of his life! – Waiting for this moment.
Sensing our resolve, the staff suggested a compromise. Special time extension may be granted under special circumstances, he said. Rather than the usual three minutes, our B may have six.
Make that nine. Then 12. et cetera. At 5 p.m., he was one of the last and smallest Ghibli fans to leave the building.
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