Isao Takahata

• 1. Introduction

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  Isao Takahata survived a United States air raid on Okayama City on the 29th of June, 1945. He was nine years old, separated from his parents for two days, and he later called it the worst experience of his life. Decades on, he made a film about children dying in the aftermath of wartime Japan. That film, Grave of the Fireflies, is considered the work that established Studio Ghibli's international esteem. How did a junior high school principal's youngest son, a student of French literature, become one of the most celebrated animators Japan has ever produced? And why did someone who had no interest in drawing pictures spend his entire career inside an art form built entirely on them?

• 2. The French Connection

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  At the University of Tokyo, where Takahata studied French literature, a single screening changed his life. He saw the French animated film Le Roi et l'Oiseau, known in English as The King and the Mockingbird, and became absorbed by what animation could do as a medium. His interest was not in draftsmanship. He wanted to write and direct, not to draw. A friend suggested he try for a directing position at Toei Animation; Takahata passed the entrance exam and was hired.

  At Toei, a senior animator named Yasuo Otsuka took Takahata under his wing, mentoring him on the television series Wolf Boy Ken. Otsuka's influence on Takahata was deep and lasting. It was Otsuka who eventually pushed Takahata toward directing a feature film of his own, and it was Otsuka who served as animation director on that debut. The young key animator assigned to the project was a fellow Toei employee named Hayao Miyazaki.

  That debut, The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun, arrived in 1968. Though it would later be recognized as one of the first defining works of modern Japanese animation, it failed commercially. Takahata was demoted. The film's subsequent reputation as a landmark could not protect him from the immediate institutional consequences of a box-office loss. His influences never left him, though. Paul Grimault, Jean-Luc Godard, and French New Wave cinema shaped his visual thinking, and the French-born Canadian director Frederic Back, known for Crac and The Man Who Planted Trees, remained a touchstone throughout his career.

• 3. Pippi, Heidi, and the Road Out

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  By 1971, Takahata had decided Toei could offer him nothing more. He left, along with Miyazaki and animator Yoichi Kotabe, and the three began searching for new footing in the industry. Takahata and Miyazaki landed on an ambitious idea: an animated feature built around the stories of Pippi Longstocking. They developed storyboards, partnered with a studio called A Production founded by former Toei animator Daikichiro Kusube, and flew to Sweden to meet Pippi's creator, Astrid Lindgren, hoping to secure the rights.

  Lindgren said no. The agreement could not be reached, and the project died. But some of what Takahata and Miyazaki had developed for the Longstocking concept would not be wasted. When the studio Zuiyo Enterprise approached them to create an animated series based on the novel Heidi, they adapted the unused material and directed Heidi, Girl of the Alps in 1974. The animation production section of Zuiyo was later established as a subsidiary named Zuiyo Eizo, which eventually became Nippon Animation; both Takahata and Miyazaki joined it.

  Takahata remained at Nippon for roughly a decade. Among his most significant works there was a World Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Anne of Green Gables in 1979, a project he saw as sharing thematic ground with the abandoned Pippi concept. Takahata told a journalist that the carefree spirit of Heidi's child protagonist stemmed from his own ideal image of what a child should be like. His years of following that ideal through different properties, different studios, and different formats would soon converge into something more permanent.

• 4. Building Ghibli

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  Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which Takahata helped produce, was both a commercial and critical success. That momentum gave Miyazaki the standing to propose something larger. He approached Takahata with the idea of co-founding their own studio. Studio Ghibli was formed in 1985 by Miyazaki, Takahata, and two of Miyazaki's collaborators, Toshio Suzuki and Yasuyoshi Tokuma.

  The studio's primary output was directed by Miyazaki. Takahata served as producer on many of those films, including as music director for Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989. But Takahata also directed. His first feature for Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies in 1988, drew directly on the semi-autobiographical short story by Akiyuki Nosaka, and drew also on what Takahata himself had lived through in Okayama City. The film was praised for its emotional force and its anti-war perspective, and it placed Studio Ghibli on the world's critical map.

  The Ghibli films Takahata directed after Grave of the Fireflies moved in different directions: Only Yesterday in 1991, Pom Poko in 1994, and My Neighbors the Yamadas in 1999. Animator Yasuo Otsuka, who had first recognized Takahata's potential at Toei, later observed that Miyazaki's sense of social responsibility came from Takahata, and that without him Miyazaki might have stayed with comic book material. French animator Michel Ocelot counted Grave of the Fireflies and Pom Poko among his favorite films.

• 5. Princess Kaguya and a Final Goodbye

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  For his last film as director, Takahata returned to a subject he and Miyazaki had noted years earlier, after completing Heidi. They had both remarked that someday they should make a Japanese Heidi, recognizing the similarities between Heidi's story and the ancient tale of Princess Kaguya. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya arrived in 2013.

  When the film reached Western markets the following year, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. It was the only film Takahata directed that received that recognition. After the film, he took on the role of artistic producer for The Red Turtle, the first feature film by Dutch animator Micheal Dudok de Wit, made in collaboration with Ghibli. It premiered in September 2016.

  Takahata had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on the 5th of April, 2018, at a hospital in Tokyo, at the age of 82. A farewell ceremony was held on the 15th of May, 2018, at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo. Hayao Miyazaki spoke publicly about Takahata's death, saying he had been convinced that Paku-san, Takahata's nickname, would live to be 95 years old. "It makes me think my time is also limited," Miyazaki said. "Thank you, Paku-san." The words were Miyazaki's, but the career they honored had shaped everything he made.