Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times by Tracy Brown on September 10, 2020.
In Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, 4-year-old Mei chases a couple of mysterious creatures through some shrubs into a forest and stumbles into a hole at the base of a giant tree. There, she meets a giant, slumbering creature who roars out his name — Totoro.
Visitors to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will follow a similar journey to enter its inaugural temporary exhibition, “Hayao Miyazaki,” according to details revealed Thursday. Described as the first North American museum retrospective of the prolific Japanese filmmaker’s work, the exhibition is slated to launch April 30 — the museum’s long-awaited opening date.
Mei’s sense of curiosity and imagination, as captured in the sequence, is something Academy Museum exhibition curator Jessica Niebel leaned into for the first transitional section of the Miyazaki exhibition, called the Tree Tunnel gallery. …
Hayao Miyazaki First Look: Academy Museum Unveils Storyboards, Details of Historic Exhibit
Reprinted from IndieWire by Zack Sharf on September 10, 2020.
When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has its long-awaited grand opening on April 30, 2021, it will do so with the first North American museum retrospective dedicated to the legendary career of Hayao Miyazaki. The renowned Japanese animator and Studio Ghibli co-founder is the subject of the Academy Museum’s first exhibit, the initial details of which have been provided [last week] by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Miyazaki exhibition is curated by the museum’s Jessica Niebel and J. Raúl Guzmán in collaboration with Studio Ghibli and features over 300 objects from the director’s career, from hand-drawn storyboards and character designs to posters and film clips. Many of the objects featured in the exhibit have never been seen outside of Japan.
“It is an immense honor that ‘Hayao Miyazaki’ is the inaugural temporary exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures,” said Ghibli co-founder and producer Toshio Suzuki in a statement. “Miyazaki’s genius is his power of remembering what he sees. He opens the drawers in his head to pull out these visual memories to create characters, landscapes, and structures that are bursting with originality. It is our hope that visitors will be able to experience the entire scope of Hayao Miyazaki’s creative process through this exhibition. I am deeply grateful to all those who have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition.” …
