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Suginami Animation Museum
The Suginami Animation Museum is situated in Tokyo's Suginami area-- which is also known as the 'Silicon Valley' of anime industry because most animation companies are situated in this area.

This new museum will give you an idea on the history on Japanese animation and give you a glimpse of the technology used in the anime industry.

Japan made its first animation back in 1917about 11 year after America made its first animation. At the museum you can get to see the oldest available cartoon “The rabbit and the Turtle” (1920)telling you the old story on how the turtle beats the rabbit in a race.

In 1945, a Japanese company named TOEI started following the footsteps of Disney by making animated feature films. In 1958, it made its first colour full length feature film “Panda and the Princess.”

In 1963, the Japanese anime industry made its major breakthrough in television by serialising “Astroboy”. Renowned cartoonist Osamu Tezuka created Astroboy as manga and that became a hit. He was then involved with the first ever Japanese anime TV series.

Museum staff Yanagiya points out, “It was a great challenge to make a 30-minute cell animation every week. So the animators used a lot of still scenes and labour-saving techniques like moving only the mouth part (during the dialogues) and repeated same scenes in different parts. Many criticised it saying that it is not animation, but a picture book.”

“But as a manga, Astroboy was already very popular. So the anime also gained popularity,” he quipped.

Another product of the sixties was Speedracer.
Then from the seventies, the golden age of Japanese anime kicked off with Heidi, Lupin III and the likes. In the eighties and nineties, hordes of characters from Dragonball to Pokemon, not only became big hits inside Japan but also around the world.

The Suginami Museum also puts on display some interesting devises like the Thaumatrope, made in the UK in 1825, or the Belgian Phenakistiscope (1833), or the Zoetrope (1834) and the Proxinscope (1876). Now don't be scared by their teeth-breaking names they are just different forms of 'bioscopes'. These queer devises used to create the illusion of motion which ultimately boiled down to the present filming techniques.

You can also see the animation production board, which resembles a press from a distance. This device has a camera that can be moved up and down like a lift. Below the lens of the camera, the artists used to pin their paintings on layers of transparent sheets. This involves immense manual labour and all the drawings on the sheets were done manually. Some specimen fruits of this fantastic labour of art are there on display too.

Just swallow this fact: if an animator creates a 90 minute film using 24 different frames per second, he has to make 129,000 cells.

This device was used till the year 2000. Now this is just a history as computers have replaced it entirely.

Today's anime makers still take help of external drawings, but they also use 3-dimensional characters for actions. This way, their anime is a mixture of 8-cells per second for external drawings to 24 frames 3-d actions.

The museum also has an anime production studio. At one part, an animator was shooting a clay animation (like Pingu) taking frame by frame shots of the movement of clay dolls.

Ghibli Museum: welcome to the fantastic world of Miyazaki
Before we enter this very popular museum in Mitaka of Tokyo, I must first a few paragraphs on Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is now perhaps the world's greatest animator alive. His works are a must-see for any audio-visual lover of any age. His animated feature film “Spirited Away” bagged 40 awards world wide, including an Oscar. In fact, all of his films bagged multiple awards for fantastic artworks, vivid imaginations and amazing story telling.

His latest work “Howl's Moving Castle” has been released in USA theatres just two weeks ago.

But be warned, Miyazaki is full of wild imaginations. His works will often remind you of the world of Alice in Wonderland.

Miyazaki and his friend Isao Takahata founded the Ghibli Films in the early eighties which released 15 feature animation films. Each of these films bagged huge awards.

Now in his sixties, Miyazaki started his career as an animator in the sixties. He and Takahata collaborated in making the 52 episode world-wide hit tv series Heidi in 1974.

Miyazaki also directed master-piece Lupin-III movie “The Castle of Cagliostro” in 1979 which Steven Spielberg once called “one of the greatest adventure movies of all time.”

Other must-sees of Miyazaki include “My Neighbour Totoro”, “Kiki's Delivery Service” and “The Prices Mononoke”.

The Ghibli Museum was a dream-creation of Miyazaki. He passionately designed its exterior and interior. He notes on the museum in his own words, “
Something interesting but that would put visitors at their ease. A museum where various things can be discovered. A museum based on a clear and consistent philosophy. To make such a museum, the building must be put together as if it were a film…
a space where people can make themselves at home…something to make people want to touch the things in it.”

Subsequently not only the museum building itself looks like an object to keep in a museum, but its interior will surprise you and take you to a fantasy world. For instance, he used a slow-moving airplane turbine as the central fan in the building. Some of the staircase are spiral-ways just like in castles drawn out in the cartoons. And of course, you get to enter different rooms recreating the world of his characters.

One of these rooms has this cat-bus (a cat-cum-bus) in accordance with a character in “My Neighbour Totoro”.

A couple of rooms dedicate themselves for Heidi. Heidi was originally written by Swiss writer Johanna Spyri (1827-1901). When Japan turned it to a tv series, it became so popular that many people thought it was a story written by a Japanese author. This series has been translated in many languages and even broadcasted over the radio. A visit to these rooms will reveal that to make this series, the animators actually visited Switzerland country sites and drew the backgrounds as loyally as possible. They also made a good research into the real utensils of the turn of the century before drawing them for the series.

Besides, there are some rooms showing an ideal animator's workstation. According to the guide of the museum, Miyazaki's own studio is not so glamorous. Here you get to see the real paintings of different Miyazaki movies including Spirited Away or the Howl's Moving Castle.

Because of the museum's popularity and its policy to allow entry of visitors in shifts, visitors must go there by availing tickets in advance, or make reservations. About 2500 people visit the museum everyday in four different times of a day.

Some other top anime personalities
Those who are interested to collect top of the line anime works should also look for works of Katsuhiro Otomo whose manga and anime Akira made a major anime breakthrough in the eighties. Otomo is very detail in his work. Unfortunately he made very few animes. Beside Akira, he made Roujin Z, Steamboy and Memories.

Koju Morimoto's works are also note-worthy. His significant works include Animatrix.