Visitors to Leeds City Museum can now hop in to the venue to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Miffy, the beloved bunny created by Dutch artist and illustrator Dick Bruna.
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00:00My name is Yvonne Hardman. I'm the Head of Collections and Programs for Leeds Museums
00:05and Galleries and we're at Leeds City Museum. We're in Miffy's 70th Birthday Exhibition.
00:11Miffy is Dutch and she was created by the artist Dick Bruner. He was born in Utrecht
00:18in the Netherlands in 1927 and he had had a career kind of early on making illustrations
00:28for book covers for his family's publishing business. He went on to design his first and
00:34write his first book in 1953 which was called The Apple. And then Miffy came about a couple
00:40of years later, so obviously 1955 because we're celebrating 70 years, after he told
00:47stories about a small white rabbit to his son as a bedtime story and this translated
00:54into a whole character. There have been over 85 million Miffy books published. They've
01:01been translated into over 50 languages and there are over 120 Miffy titles. And over
01:07the years Miffy has changed, so in the exhibition you can see a timeline of how Miffy's ears,
01:14for example, have changed from when they were first created to kind of how they looked in
01:20the 2000s. The exhibition has been really popular with our visitors so far and interestingly
01:26a real range of ages as well. I think Miffy has that real kind of intergenerational appeal,
01:34so maybe older people who read the stories as children, but a whole generation of younger
01:42people who are enjoying Miffy from under fives to school children, but also that kind
01:50of real appeal to young people maybe in their early 20s. So we're really looking forward
01:56to the rest of the run of the exhibition.