SoraNews24 —Japan News—

Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.

TOP

» Japan
» Clever design trick means beautiful Ghibli Artboard Jigsaw Puzzles won’t have bittersweet ending

Featured

Weird
Studio Ghibli
Jobs

Clever design trick means beautiful Ghibli Artboard Jigsaw Puzzles won’t have bittersweet ending

Casey Baseel Dec 18, 2024
Tweet

No need to worry about breaking these lovely pieces of Ghibli art apart or gluing them so they can’t be puzzles again.

With the Christmas/New Year’s vacation periods coinciding with some of the coldest weather of the year, a lot of people are looking for indoor entertainment options right now. If you’re a Ghibli fan, the obvious choice is to sit down for a re-watch of your favorite anime film from the storied studio, but if you’d like a more active activity than movie night, these jigsaw puzzles might be just what you need.

Offered by Ghibli specialty shop Donguri Kyowakoku, the Ghibli Artboard Jigsaw Puzzle line has a few clever design details that set them apart from regular puzzles, which we’ll get to in a second. First and foremost, though, they all feature beautiful artwork of the characters and settings from Ghibli classics such as My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Castle in the Sky/Laputa.

▼ The second Totoro design has more distinct linework, while the moonlit night one has a softer brushed-paint style.

With each puzzle having 366 pieces, they’re going to take some time to put together, but that shouldn’t be a problem for jigsaw puzzle fans who don’t want the fun to be over too soon. What might be an issue, though, is that once you are done putting the puzzles together, you’ll probably want to display the finished form for a while, since the illustrations aren’t just beautiful, but pretty big too, at 30.7 x 23.7 centimeters (12.1 x 9.3 inches). Unfortunately, repositioning a jigsaw puzzle from whatever table or flat surface you were assembling it on means you’ll either need to use glue to bond the pieces to each other (making putting it together it a one-and-done activity) or finding a frame that’s just the right size so that you can slide the puzzle in without so much empty space that the pieces come apart when you try to hang it on your wall.

▼ Kiki’s Delivery Service gets two designs too, one with Kiki taking one last look in the mirror before leaving on her journey…

▼ …and the other with an imagination-stirring view of the town by the sea where she sets up her delivery service.

But as you can see from the angle of these photos, the Ghibli Artboard Jigsaw Puzzles aren’t flat, and actually have thickness similar to what you’d see on a canvas painting board. That extra side-to-side surface contact keeps the pieces of a finished puzzle connected, even when being picked up and moved about, without the need for any sort of glue or frame, Donguri Kyowakoku says.

▼ Sometimes the artwork even wraps around onto the side edges, like on the Nausicaa puzzle.

In other words, after you’ve spent an evening (or more, depending on your level of puzzle-solving intensity) putting one of these together, you can easily pick it up and place it wherever you want in your home, and then move it just as easily if you think it might look even better positioned somewhere else. If and when you decide you want the fun of putting it together all over again, no problem. Simply separate the polystyrene pieces, and you’re back at the beginning of the project with no need to try to dissolve any glue and running the risk of damaging the pieces in the process.

The Artboard Jigsaw Puzzles are priced at 4,180 yen (US$28) each and can be ordered through the Donguri Kyowakoku online store here thanks to a recent restock.

Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!