Many Many Miffy Premium

About once a year, a Tokyo department store uses some reason or other to host a Miffy exhibit. I last went to one around 10 years ago which coincided with the 45th anniversary of the creation of Miffy. It tracked creator Dick Bruna's career, from his start in graphic design and creating covers for 007 books.

 

The latest exhibit (titled Many Many Miffy Premium), which was held in Seibu Ikebukuro from December 15 to 25, was much smaller in scale. The twist this time was a sneak peek of the upcoming Miffy the Movie, to be released in spring 2013 in Japan. The film was produced by production companies in the Netherlands. (Miffy is a Dutch creation.) 

You might be curious as to what a Miffy film would look like. Being familiar with only stationary 2D pictures of Miffy, I found the idea of a 2D Miffy film a bit unnerving. (Though in reality, a 2D TV series was produced in the early 1990s.)  A stop-motion series was produced in 2003, and the new Miffy film uses the same techniques, with stop-motion puppet animation carried out by an animation studio in Latvia. Trailers can be seen here.   

Unusual for an exhibit, photographs were allowed, which meant it was one huge photo op for the people that love Miffy -- not so much little kids but adult women.

 

Miffy rendered in various forms, for example, using Legos...

...a Miffy hat, interpreted by a Japanese artist...

...a Miffy Christmas tree...

  

 

...and the most impressive, a heavily marzipan-ed Miffy cake. Children always gripe about how difficult it is to draw Miffy (you can never seem to get the proportions of the face and the x mouth right), and I found it amusing that the decorator had gotten the trees, the house, and Miffy's friends right, but Miffy herself looked a bit too oval in the face.

 

The cake from the side. Even if you cannot work up any interest in Miffy, you have to appreciate the attention to detail.