Starwars and more at Sapporo Snow Festival 2015

Starwars snow sculpture

The huge Starwars snow sculpture when lit up to show a red light saber

Every year we have the Sapporo Snow Festival here for one week. We get 2 to 3 million visitors (which is a lot in a city with less than 2 million citizens) during this week. There are huge snow sculptures, and there are large snow sculptures. There are very many snow sculptures. And it is cold.

This year, the coolest sculpture is the Starwars one. The temple above has some very nice projection mapping at certain times during the night, which was also very good.

I expected a lot of "Frozen" (the Disney movie) themed sculptures this year, and I was right. There were many many Olaf. There were a few Elsa and Anna too.

There are also many Yokai Watch (a game/anime/manga for kids that is very popular now) themed sculptures. Koma was very common, as was Jibanyan. I liked Whisper best.

It is the year of the ram now, so there were many sculptures along these lines.

Sapporo is famous for Jingisukan, barbecued lamb. This meant that there were also many sculptures featuring the "Jin-kun" Jingisukan character. The year of the ram is the year of the "sheep" in Japanese, so Jin-kun is very topical this year.

I liked this Evangelion (an anime/manga popular among nerds in the West and in Japan) sculpture.

This is supposed to be Yo Oizumi (and actor). I have met him (we were in the same TV show when I did magic on TV) and it kind of looks like him.

The "kao nashi" from the Ghibli movie "Spirited Away" was popular.

Hatsune Miku, a Sapporo vocaloid (singing computer program)

Funasshi was popular this year too, and I like the thing from the Nausica movie on the right

More projection mapping

Very interesting looking smoking room

They also build a trick jumping slope in the middle of the park during the festival

Some sculptures are made from ice instead of snow