The Ghibli Museum Library

As collectors of animation on DVD well know, Japan is one of the best countries in the world to find beautiful editions of rare world treasures. In fact, you are more likely to find more Eastern European animation on DVD in Japan than in the home countries of the artists themselves, let alone elsewhere in Europe or North America. The down side is that the Japanese releases tend to only have only Japanese subs or dubs, yet many fans of animation are simply so grateful just to be able to see these great classics at all that they collect these editions anyway.

One company that has been instrumental in giving new life to world animation classics is Studio Ghilbi. The animators at Studio Ghibli are known for their admiration of American, Canadian and European animators – in particular Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata are known to be big fans of the work of German-Canadian animator Frédéric Back (b. 1924) who won the Academy Award for Animated Short film in 1982 for Crac! and again in 1987 for The Man Who Planted Trees. You can read about Miyazaki’s views on other animators in my recent post Hayao Miyazaki’s Taste in Animation.

A number of years ago Studio Ghibli began a partnership with Disney and Cinema Angelica to create the Ghibli Museum Library (三鷹の森ジブリ美術館ライブラリー /Mitaka no Mori Jiburi Bijutsukan Raiburarī). They have used this label to release subbed/dubbed DVDs of world animation classics from Dave Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town (USA, 1941) to John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s Animal Farm (UK, 1954). The label also represents modern animation classics including the works of Nick Park and Michel Ochelot. They event support theatrical releases of great world animation in Japan – most recently Sylvain Comet’s The Illusionist (UK/France, 2010).

Studio Ghibli has also acquired the distribution rights to anime classics that Miyazaki, Takahata and other Ghibli animators worked on before the formation of Studio Ghibli. Some of these feature on their Ghibli Classics label, but the Ghibli Museum Library umbrella includes the theatrical feature of Anne of Green Gables and the first TV series of Lupin III.

Here are the highlights of the collection. Clicking on the images will take you to cdjapan where these titles are available for international purchase:

Japanese Animation

Anne of Green Gables - the Path to Green Gables