Kazuo Oga’s “The guy who painted Totoro’s forest” background art exhibition, held at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in summer earlier this year was one of the most amazing art exhibitions I’ve ever visited. (Read about the exhibition on this older post.) An official dvd documenting the event was available for pre-order during the exhibition but it only just arrived in my mail a few days ago.

With a running time of almost 2 hours packed with numerous documentaries this dvd’s worth goes beyond just a casual view for the average Ghibli animation fan but is also an invaluable resource for illustrators and background artists. The contents on this dvd include :

1) Documentary on Kazuo Oga’s “The guy who painted Totoro’s forest” Background Art Exhibition ( 73 minutes )

2) Documentary “The charm behind Kazuo Oga’s background art” ( 41 minutes )

3) Still image gallery collection of ALL 600 piece of artwork shown at the Kazuo Oga’s “The guy who painted Totoro’s forest” Background Art Exhibition.

4) Kazuo Oga’s Techniques – A documention of Kazuo Oga’s working on one of his pieces, from start to end. ( 20 minutes )

To make up for the delayed delivery the vendor bundled a special Ghibli matchbox
with the dvd. Nice. :]

I’ve only managed to skim through the contents of the disc at the moment but I hope to set aside some quality time to watch all the features soon.

Update : There is now a blu-ray version of documentary available, which I highly recommend because the HD images show off Kazuo Oga’s beautiful artwork even better than the dvd version. To purchase, follow this link.

Buy From Amazon.com | Buy From Amazon CA | Buy From Amazon UK

You might also be interested in these items :