Animation Museum & Toy Robot Studio

From glass film to Foley

A nineteenth-century glass-film projector, dubbing booth and Foley station make animation feel mechanical before it feels digital; next door, spider robots, slot cars, drones and a robot dog put movement back under the visitor’s hands

The Animation Museum begins well before television. Its first floor traces the idea of making images move through cave imagery, early projection devices and the development of animation itself. One display follows the history of projectors back through magic-lantern technology and includes glass film used in the 1890s. The emphasis is useful because it makes animation a chain of physical tricks, devices and timing rather than a parade of familiar characters

Upstairs, the visitor starts doing some of that work. A pinscreen records pressure as an image. Foley stations ask visitors to make sound effects for moving pictures, and dubbing booths separate a character’s voice from the drawing on screen. Other displays compare animation traditions across countries and preserve material from Korean animation history

The robot building turns spectators into operators

The Toy Robot Studio opened in July 2013 beside the animation museum and changes the type of participation. Instead of making a voice or sound track for an existing image, visitors increasingly control the machine itself

On the first floor, spider robots and mission robots can be operated directly, while an AR robot mirrors a visitor’s movement. The second floor spreads the idea across toys and machines: slot-car racing, moving toys, drone simulation followed by hands-on drone control, and a robot-dog interaction program. A metaverse experience mixes robots, people and environment inside game-like digital space

The relationship between the two buildings is stronger than the broad label “animation and robots” suggests. One explains how motion is created, recorded and edited; the other lets visitors issue the commands. The combined ticket therefore joins two related forms of making movement rather than two unrelated family attractions

The robot building also adds a third floor with Gallery Toon and a lake-facing café space, so the campus does not end at the last interactive station

Chuncheon made animation part of its cultural infrastructure

The Animation Museum opened on October 1, 2003 inside Chuncheon’s advanced culture-industry district. It was built as a specialist institution for collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting animation material, and its operator still describes it as Korea’s only dedicated animation museum

By 2011, the museum had passed one million cumulative visitors, and reporting at the time described a collection of roughly 50,000 animation-related items, including film, projectors, scripts and original material. The museum later reopened after a major exhibition renewal in September 2018

Those dates matter because the site was never conceived only as a play centre. The museum functions as part archive, part production explainer and part hands-on learning space; the Toy Robot Studio later broadened that model into robotics and interactive technology

Before you go

The integrated ticket covers both the Animation Museum and Toy Robot Studio. A visit to both buildings typically takes roughly 90 minutes to two hours, depending on time spent at the hands-on stations

On weekdays, the Toy Robot Studio pauses from 12:00 to 13:00. For late-morning arrivals, the Animation Museum can fill that interval before the robot building reopens. Advance booking and walk-in ticketing are both available, although some discounted categories are handled only at the ticket desk