Friday Road Show and Ghibli Exhibition

Friday Road Show and Ghibli Exhibition is a touring exhibition on the shared history of the television film slot Friday Road Show and Studio Ghibli. Its Saga stop fills the Saga Prefectural Art Museum and the Saga Prefectural Museum.

Friday Road Show (金曜ロードショー) is a weekly film broadcast on Nippon TV. It began in 1985, when Wednesday Road Show, on air since 1972, moved to Friday evenings.

Studio Ghibli was founded the same year. Nippon TV first broadcast Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984, directed by Hayao Miyazaki) as a special programme in 1985, and Friday Road Show aired it in 1986. Since then the programme has shown Studio Ghibli films more than 200 times. From 1997 to 2009 its opening sequence was an original Studio Ghibli animation with music by Joe Hisaishi. Its mascot, Friday Uncle (Friday Ojisan, フライデーおじさん), was conceived by Miyazaki and finished by Yoshifumi Kondo, director of Whisper of the Heart.

The exhibition

The exhibition follows Friday Road Show and Studio Ghibli side by side, in four parts.

The first part is an archive timeline from 1985 onward. It sets each Ghibli film's cinema release and its Friday Road Show premiere against the events of its time, from the Showa era through Heisei to Reiwa. Storyboards from nearly every Studio Ghibli film, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) to The Boy and the Heron (2023), show how the films were planned.

The second part, the Ghibli Film Poster Studio, is a set of photo spaces built inside the posters of five films: Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, The Cat Returns and Ponyo. An AR experience by special sponsor au (KDDI), in the SATCH X app, shows the world of The Secret World of Arrietty at the size of its tiny heroine.

The third part is the Ghibli Phantasmagoria Tower, a large glass installation lit from within. Its glass pieces, shaped after Ghibli characters, were made by the Toyama Glass Sculptural Institute, Toyama Glass Studio and local artists from Toyama, under the supervision of Studio Ghibli.

The fourth part recreates the Sea of Corruption from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind with models by the sculptor Takayuki Takeya and other artists: the Ohmu, giant dragonflies and other creatures of the film. A second SATCH X experience brings an Ohmu into the room in AR.