Give Totoro, No-Face, and Jiji a little time every day, and they’ll make sure you don’t forget the date.
From a practical standpoint, smartphones have more or less made watches obsolete. If your phone can already tell you what time it is, in multiple parts of the world even if you’d like, and includes stopwatch and timer functions, there’s really no need for a separate device that doesn’t do all the other stuff your phone can. And yet, wristwatches are still a thing, as many people like their fashionable aspect.
Along those same lines, there’s not much need for a physical calendar anymore either, since you can just as easily keep track of the date on your phone. But again, calendars can make a nice visual statement. What’s more, unlike a watch that needs to be, more or less, a band that you wrap around your wrist, the design options for a calendar are wide open. You could, for example, have a calendar that’s a three-dimensional recreation of a Studio Ghibli anime scene.
Ghibli specialty shop Donguri Kyowakoku is offering three such calendar figures/sculptures, one each for fans of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Instead of a boring old square chart, they display the time through dice-like cubes, one for the month, two that combine to show the date, one for the day of the week, and another with some sort of decorative nod to the calendar’s associated anime film.
In addition to Chihiro and No-Face’s unforgettable train ride, the calendars show Totoro and his little buddies having a treetop tsuchibue jam session…
…and Kiki and Jiji in the middle of some downtime for their fledgling delivery service, but still waiting patiently for a customer to walk into the door of the bakery they operate out of.
The spots to place the dice in are cleverly woven into the figurines’ environments. Totoro’s tree, for example, lets you put them on the branches and among the roots…
…and the Spirited Away set lets you store them on the train’s parcel shelf or on No-Face’s lap.
For the Kiki’s calendar, the dice actually look like boxes on the store’s shelves, but apparently not ones that she’s been contracted to courier.
Unlike with a standard paper calendar, you will have to manually adjust the cubes to keep their displays up to date. This does, though, also give you an excuse to take a few moments every day to relax and look at your Ghibli objets d’art, which should make for a soothing daily destressing ritual for any anime fan.
Since the cubes are only for displaying the month, date, and day of the week, the calendars can be used for any year, in perpetuity. And if you don’t want to bother with fiddling with the date displays, they still look very cool as decorative figurines.
For that matter, since the cubes are removable, you could take them all out and use the spaces they used to occupy to store other small items instead.
Regardless of how you choose to use them, the calendar figurines, which range in height from 10.4 to 14 centimeters (4.1 to 5.5 inches) are restocked and once again available for preorder through the Donguri Kyowakoku online store here, here, and here, with the Spirited Away, Totoro, and Kiki’s models priced at 8,800, 8,250, and 9,240 yen (US$55, US$52, and US$58).
Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3)
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