My Neighbors the Yamadas

• 1. Introduction

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  My Neighbors the Yamadas arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 17th of July 1999, looking like nothing Studio Ghibli had ever released before. Instead of the lush, detailed cel animation audiences had come to expect from the studio, the screen filled with loose watercolor washes and sketchy, almost cartoonish figures. The Yamadas were not heroes on grand quests. They were a family arguing about who controls the television remote.

  The film came from director Isao Takahata, one of Ghibli's co-founders, and was animated for a consortium of backers including Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Hakuhodo, and Buena Vista Home Entertainment, then distributed by Shochiku. That last detail alone marked it as unusual: it was the only Ghibli film never released by Toho or the Toei Company.

  At its heart, the film adapts the yonkoma manga Nono-chan by Hisaichi Ishii, a four-panel comic strip format built for quick, punchy observations rather than sprawling stories. Takahata's challenge was to carry that comic-strip energy into a feature-length film. What he built in the attempt would raise questions about what animation is actually for, and why a film that barely tells a story can leave a lasting impression.

• 2. The Yamada Family

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  Six characters share the film's stage. Takashi and Matsuko are the husband and wife at the center. Matsuko's mother Shige lives with them, as do their son Noboru, who is approximately fifteen, and their daughter Nonoko, who is approximately ten. The family dog Pochi rounds out the household.

  The film does not follow a plot so much as a succession of vignettes, each announced by a title card carrying a deadpan heading: "Father as Role Model," "A Family Torn Apart," "Patriarchal Supremacy Restored." The gap between those grand titles and the modest domestic scenes they introduce is itself the joke.

  The subjects are stubbornly ordinary. A child gets separated from her parents in a department store. A teenager navigates his first girlfriend. Husband and wife bicker. The relationship between Takashi and Matsuko is a recurring focus, their small rivalries and frustrations balanced against the source's note that their love for one another, despite their flaws, is the overriding theme.

  Shige, Matsuko's mother, emerges as a particularly sharp presence. She dispenses proverbs and advice to every family member, and the source describes her as having a great strength of character. Her relationship with her son-in-law Takashi offers the film some of its most pointed comic moments.

• 3. A New Visual Language

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  Takahata wanted the film to look like watercolor pictures rather than cel pictures. That ambition required new tools. The computer graphics department that Ghibli had set up for Princess Mononoke in 1997 became the infrastructure for the experiment. Paper sketches drawn in the traditional way were scanned into computers and then colored through digital painting.

  The film was advertised as the first from the studio to be entirely digital, though the source is precise about what that actually meant: only the coloring stage was fully computerized. The drawing itself remained hand-done.

  The result is an aesthetic that looks deliberately sparse. Faces are simplified, backgrounds are often nearly empty, and the overall impression is close to the yonkoma comic strips the film adapts. Where other Ghibli films built worlds dense with texture and detail, the Yamadas' world is defined by what is left out.

  That restraint extended to the music. Composer Akiko Yano built the soundtrack around very short piano themes, a deliberate contrast to the long orchestral scores that Joe Hisaishi had composed for the studio's other films. Classical pieces performed by the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Mario Klemens, also appear in the film. The soundtrack was released by Tokuma on the 1st of July 1999, two and a half weeks before the film itself opened.

• 4. Reception and Box Office

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  Critics who saw the film responded warmly to what it was attempting. Ryan Lambie of Den of Geek gave it four stars and observed that anyone expecting the soaring beauty of a typical Ghibli production would probably be a little bemused by the mundanity of the Yamadas' existence, but that there was a soothing calm to their daily struggles, a haiku-like sense of tranquillity. Empire also awarded four stars and called it an episodic piece that swaps narrative through-lines for a string of comedic observations on family dynamics, adding: "Witty, playful and gorgeous to look at." Sam Sewell-Peterson, writing for The Film Magazine, called it a soothing balm, a leisurely and pleasant look at domestic mundanity.

  On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 78% based on eight reviews, with an average rating of 7.1 out of 10. The praise clustered around three qualities: the visual style, the humor, and the film's observational accuracy about modern Japanese suburban family life.

  At the Japanese box office, however, the film did not perform as well as other Ghibli productions had. The gap between critical warmth and commercial results placed it in a category of its own within the studio's catalogue. Later that same year, the film received an Excellence Award for animation at the 1999 Japan Media Arts Festival.

• 5. Home Media Legacy

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  The film's distribution history is as unconventional as the film itself. Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan released it on VHS and DVD on the 17th of November 2000, making it the first Studio Ghibli film to appear on DVD in Japan.

  American audiences had to wait considerably longer. The US DVD release came on the 16th of August 2005, packaged alongside another Takahata film, Pom Poko, through Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.

  A Blu-ray version appeared in Japan in 2010, then in the UK the following year. Disney never released the film on Blu-ray in the United States. That gap was eventually filled by GKIDS, which released the film on Blu-ray for the first time in the US and also re-issued it on DVD under a new licensing arrangement with Studio Ghibli, on the 16th of January 2018. The English-language version features a cast that includes Jim Belushi as Takashi, Molly Shannon as Matsuko, and Daryl Sabara as Noboru, with David Ogden Stiers serving as the haiku reader and narrator.