What are the Ghibli Museum short films?

The Ghibli Museum holds a body of work that exists nowhere else. Its Saturn Theatre screens short films produced by the studio exclusively for museum visitors, beginning with works such as The Whale Hunt, Koro's Big Day Out and Mei and the Kittenbus, the last a short sequel to My Neighbor Totoro in which Mei rides a kitten sized catbus to meet Totoro and the grandmother of the cat spirits. Miyazaki directed the core shorts himself, treating the museum as a place where small ideas films could not carry could still be finished properly.

The catalogue grew with the museum. Later shorts include House Hunting, a sound led experiment built around onomatopoeia in place of dialogue, Mon Mon the Water Spider, Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess, written from a folk tale register with a witch Miyazaki readers will recognise, Treasure Hunting, and Boro the Caterpillar, a project Miyazaki had carried since before Totoro, about a newborn caterpillar's day, made with extensive hand drawn work and screened from 2018.

The museum's rule is absolute: the shorts are not released on disc, not streamed and not shown elsewhere, with the single related exception that a collection of museum shorts has been included in the Japanese Miyazaki Blu-ray box in limited form, an exception collectors should verify title by title rather than assume. Rotation means a visitor sees one short per visit, chosen by the museum's schedule, which spreads the catalogue across years of repeat visits by design.

Documentation, again, is the paper trail: the museum publishes information on the current short in its guides and site, exhibition and anniversary publications have covered the shorts' production, and the museum's own booklets are the authoritative record. Any disc or file offered for sale as the museum shorts should be treated as unofficial on its face, since the studio's position on their exclusivity has never changed.