Brooklyn Children’s Museum x Hayao Miyazaki

Concept development · Drawings · Experience design · Lighting design · Visualization

This project revisits the Neighborhood Nature permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and recontextualizes the concept by adding a new layer to the story through light. We picked the work by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli because of its richness in color, its use of light, and how it’s connected to human emotions. We were truly inspired by the stories told in Miyazaki’s movies, and how, despite the fantasy, they always try to connect on a human level. 

To illustrate how we envision the collaboration between Studio Ghibli and The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, we chose the pond exhibit area at the Neighborhood Nature and told the story of Ponyo through three different lighting scenarios that match the story arc –Awakening, Underwater, and Quintessence–. Ponyo tells the story of the friendship between Ponyo, a little goldfish princess who becomes a human, and a boy named Sosuke.