The forthcoming theme park based on the much-beloved films of Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary Studio Ghibli will throw open its door to the world Nov. 1, the company and Japanese officials revealed Thursday.
Ghibli Park will be located within 494 acres of natural parkland in Nagakute in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, around 90 miles east of Kyoto and 150 miles west of Tokyo. With an estimated budget of 34 billion Japanese yen ($295 million), the project is a joint venture between Studio Ghibli, the government of Aichi Prefecture and the local Chunichi Shimbun newspaper. Ghibli has complete creative control over the park’s design, and Hayao Miyazaki’s son, Goro Miyazaki, is said to have been heavily involved in its planning.
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At launch, at least one of the park’s five planned themed lands — a large area based on Ghibli’s 1988 classic My Neighbor Totoro, featuring a life-size re-creation of the characters’ family home and other natural environments of the Japanese countryside — will be ready for visitors. Other sections, such as a Princess Mononoke attraction, a Kiki’s Delivery Service area and a re-creation of Howl’s Moving Castle — will open sometime next year. Additional planned amenities and attractions that have leaked out to the world, so far, include antique shops modeled after those in Whisper of the Heart, substantial exhibition space and a theater.
Officials said Thursday that they expect approximately 1 million visitors to the park in its soft-launch phase, followed by as many as 1.8 million per year once the facility is fully completed.
The studio already operates the wildly popular Ghibli Museum in the western Tokyo district of Mitaka, near where Miyazaki and his family reside. Tickets for the museum go on sale at the beginning of each month and usually sell out within hours.
Miyazaki, now 81, is currently at work on his 12th feature, How Do You Live?, based on the 1937 children’s novel of the same name by Japanese author Yoshino Genzaburo. Miyazaki’s longtime producer and business partner Toshio Suzuki said in 2018 that the great animator was working on the film for his grandson as his way of saying, “Grandpa is moving onto the next world soon but he is leaving behind this film for you.”
