Miyazaki Exhibit at the Seoul Arts Center

So, many of you have heard of Hayao Miyazaki, the world-wide renown Japanese director and animator for Studio Ghibli.  I am a huge fan of his and own many of his movies, though sadly my collection is incomplete.  I was teaching a newspaper class and one of the articles was about a Miyazaki exhibit at the Seoul Arts Center.  This exhibit had the original story boards for many of Miyazaki's movies.  Now I never go anywhere by myself but this actually made me go find the Seoul Arts Center on my own.  Shows you how much I wanted to see this exhibit. 

So, I printed off a map but it wasn't very good.  Luckily is didn't take me too long to find the Seoul Arts Center after exploring some back roads.  The art center was really crowded and the exhibit was on the second floor.  It was a little confusing as I still needed to buy a ticket but I found it eventually.  The ticket cost me 15,000 won (basically $15) and then I had to wait.  The Miyazaki exhibit was so popular that they had to have numbered tickets for entry.  So I had to wait an hour.  While I waited I took some pictures of the Miyazaki designs and pictures that they had outside the exhibit.  While I was waiting, someone dressed up as Noh Face from Spirited Away came out and people were taking pictures with him.

So, I was the next group to go but the Korean lady allowed me to go with the group before mine which was nice.  Sadly, I was not allowed to take pictures of the original story boards but I expected that.  The artwork was amazing and had notes written on them by Hayao Miyazaki himself.  Most were drawn by Miyazaki.  Some were really simple designs while others were so detailed that they made my eyes widen.  Remember that these are just the story boards and not the end products, so to put so much detail into the story boards just shows how much effort and skill Miyazaki puts into his animations.  Along with the original story boards, there were also short movie clips showing the final product next to the original story boards which was neat.  Also, there were some paintings from Ponyo next to the Ponyo story boards.  It was really cool seeing the pencil sketches next to the fully painted images of the same scene. There were story boards from many of his movies, including a few I hadn't even heard of before.

So there were 1300 original story boards which took a while to see them all but it was definitely worth the time.  There was also a room that was designed to make it feel like you were walking down the long corridor to Yubaba's office to sign a contract.  That was really cool though I almost walked into a mirror.  At the end of the exhibit was a place where people could draw there own Miyazaki characters and put them on the wall.  Though I didn't draw anything (because I could never do Miyazaki justice) but I did take some fun pictures of that room since I couldn't take any pictures of the original story boards. Then there was the gift shop where I could buy some replicas of the original story boards .... which of course I did (though some are for gifts and not for me ^.^).  And that was all there was to the Miyazaki Exhibit.  I found it exciting to actually see the original story boards that Hayao Miyazaki created.  I recommend anyone interested in Miyazaki or Japanese animation should definitely check out this exhibit at the Seoul Arts Center.