A Visit to Ghibli Park, a Miyazaki Theme Park - The New York Times

Tyler has been thinking that he would like his graduation trip destination to be Tokyo. Tammy had listened to this article on the Sunday Read and she played it for us while driving back from Big Cedar Lodge. However, I promptly fell asleep and missed parts of it so I found the article. As a bonus, the article has some photos and a ton of images from different Studio Ghibli movies.

My first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion. For a surprisingly long time after I arrived, I could not tell whether or not I had arrived. There was no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient Ghibli soundtrack, no mountainous Cat Bus statue. Instead, I found myself stepping out of a very ordinary train station into what seemed to be a large municipal park. A sea of pavement. Sports fields. Vending machines. It looked like the kind of place you might go on a lazy weekend to see a pretty good softball tournament.

Ghibli Park sounds pretty incredible. It all made me think that we should see Spirited Away again and to my delight I found it was playing at a local theater as part of Ghibli Festival. We are going on Sunday afternoon to experience it in the theater for the first time.