Mei and the Kittenbus

♫Totoro, Totoro♫

In March of 2007 I was doing research on Mei and the Kittenbus (めいとこねこバス, Mei to Konekobasu), an animated short “sequel” to My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. It was “released” in 2003 for regular showing at the Ghibli Museum in Japan, and has unfortunately never seen a wide release. I believe the Ghibli museum shows different animated shorts on a random basis for their tours.

While researching, I was only able to find three sites on the whole internet at that time that had any real information on it. I decided to backup their contents for mirroring, which I am finally getting around to putting up :-). This information is directly copied from those sites and I do not claim to be the original source of, or in any way own, any of the below content in this post.

моцартинка (mozartianka) wrote in miyazaki_ru, @ 2007-01-28 21:44:00 Entry tags: Mei to Konekobasu/Мэй и Котобусёнок, Studio Ghibli Shorts/Короткометражки, Tonari no Totoro/Наш сосед Тоторо, картинки Mei to Konekobasu Album Полный альбом про Мей и Котобусёнка! обложка Громадное спасибо nazarovsky!

Going back to this Russian Ghibli blog, I noticed he also has a lot more content on it:
http://community.livejournal.com/miyazaki_ru/184770.html
http://community.livejournal.com/miyazaki_ru/tag/Mei to Konekobasu/Мэй и Котобусёнок

Mei and the Kittenbus     This is a short film about 20 minutes long, which was shown for a limited time only at the Ghibli Museum. It tells the story of Mei and her friend the kittenbus (the child of the original catbus from My Neighbor Totoro). Mei is just small enough to ride in the kittenbus, which is only big enough to stir up dust devils, rather than making whole fields of rice sway in its breeze. One night they have an adventure in which they fly into the forest with many other cat-based vehicles, including many buses and trains. There they meet Totoro and many similar spirits, all heading for a gigantic catliner. This liner cruises off into the sky and the kittenbus takes Mei home. Small Version Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Original story, screenplay and direction: Hayao Miyazaki Music: Joe Hisaishi Animation Directors: Maikiko Futaki, Sachiko Sugino, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi Length: 13 minutes 43 seconds Pictures and synopsis by Chris Kuan

The Ghibli Museum [English] (I did not worry about backing this one up.)

This is definitely one of the things on my must-do list for when I visit Japan one day ^_^.

How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You

I love kitties! =^.^=

I have just now finished working a 16.5 hour shift for my current contract programming job, culminating from 5 days straight of work with an average of 13 hours per day, so I’m pretty fucking tired x.x;. I think I’ll be taking a bit of a break from posting, and possibly responsibility, for a little bit... especially since next week = Thanksgiving + Family :-).

Anywho, I was given this link earlier today, and it really made me laugh, so I thought I’d point everyone to it: How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You. Any cat owner/lover should get a good kick out of this ^_^.

This page is owned and was drawn by Matthew Inman, Founder & Designer of Mingle² for said website. Also, check the page source for a cute Easter Egg at the top of the HTML.

I have mirrored this below since I never trust websites that I want to share to stay online. Curse you Internet and your servers going down and domains being lost!