A Night in the Valley of Witches makes its screening debut, and Hayao Miyazaki’s first-ever art exhibition created for Ghibli’s theme park, three years in the making, opens too.

Back in April, Studio Ghibli announced that it was producing a new anime that would screen exclusively at the Ghibli Park theme park in Aichi Prefecture. As of July 8, it’s made its debut, and so has a brand-new art exhibit from Hayao Miyazaki, the Ghibli co-founder’s first-ever work created for Ghibli Park.

As also revealed in the spring, Hayao Miyazaki has spent three years producing a series of “panorama box” dioramas, depicting iconic scenes of his filmography stretching all the way from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind up through The Boy and the Heron, his most recent work.

Each panorama box is a collection of flat illustrations, but layered in a way that communicates the spatial relationships between the scene’s elements. As such, it shares certain characteristics with the multiplane camera technique used in cel-based animation production, making the exhibition a unique and fresh application of Hayao Miyazaki’s mastery of the craft that bridges the gap between two and three-dimensional art.

The exhibition space itself is a recreation of one of the interior locations from The Boy and the Heron. Each panorama is positioned at a height that allows children to stare straight into it for the strongest sense of immersion, so the park recommends that adult fans crouch down for the same experience, even if it might be a little uncomfortable for their more mature knees and back.

There are a total of 31 panorama boxes on display, representing not only Miyazaki’s theatrically released films but also the short anime films he directed for screening at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, which have since also been shown at Ghibli Park.

In a special event commemorating the exhibition’s opening, Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro, Ghibli Park’s head designer, spoke about the impetus for the project. “In terms of the planning of Ghibli Park, Hayao Miyazaki essentially had no involvement whatsoever, but it seems he wanted to leave his mark on it in some way, so he said ‘I’m going to make this thing!’”

Speaking of the younger Miyazaki, he also has a new project that’s just debuted at the park, and it’s the first new anime from Studio Ghibli in three years. A Night in the Valley of Witches, co-directed by Goro Miyazaki and Akihiko Yamashita, began screening at Ghibli Park’s Orion Theater on July 8.

▼ The first promotional still from A Night in the Valley of Witches

A Night in the Valley of Witches is set within the actual Ghibli Park’s Valley of Witches area, home to its recreations of the worlds of Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Earwig and the Witch. “Ghibli Park doesn’t have the selection of rides people usually associate with theme parks,” says Goro Miyazaki, and he instead felt that a creating a movie specifically for, and taking place in, Ghibli Park would be the most Ghibli-like attraction. As for the inspiration to set the anime in the Valley of Witches section, he says “Howl’s Moving Castle moves [in the anime], but the Howl’s Moving Castle at Ghibli Park is stationary. I thought it might be bad for the castle’s health if it didn’t get up and move around once in a while, and that’s where the idea [for the anime] came from.” With co-director Yamashita having been the animation director for Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle anime, it sounds like there’s a good chance of mobile architecture being featured in A Night in the Valley of Witches, and official preview synopsis reads:

A new employee has started working at Ghibli Park, and today he’s gotten a bunch of strange building repair assignments. Odd things have been happening, like a fireplace lighting itself, or water spraying out of a faucet that was supposed to have been turned off. “Something weird is definitely going on here!” he says to his more experienced coworker Kikue, but she doesn’t seem interested in listening to him.

Then, on his first overnight shift, he goes into the Valley of the Witches, and who does he see there but Kikue, only now she’s wearing a cape and tells him “I’m a witch.” She lowers her lantern, begins to chant a spell, and then…!

The Panorama Box Exhibition appears to be a permanent, or at least semi-permanent, part of the park, as there’s no mention of it’s run being only for a limited time. On the other hand, all short anime films that screen at the park do so on a limited-time, rotating basis. Usually most films screen for roughly a month, but there’s been no announcement so far as to when the 14-minute-long A Night in the Valley of Witches’ initial run will end.

If either of these is on the top of your to-see list at Ghibli Park, don’t forget that the it has a somewhat complex admission system, with different ticket types providing access to different parts of the park. Both the Panorama Box Exhibition and Orion Theater are in the Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse section, so you’ll want to make sure the ticket you purchase will get you in there.

Related: Ghibli Park official website
Source, images: PR Times
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