Yoshifumi Kondō

• 1. Introduction

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  Yoshifumi Kondō died on the 21st of January 1998, at age 47, of an aortic dissection at Tachikawa City Hospital in Tokyo. He left behind one film he had directed, a story about a girl who discovers that her grandfather carved a statue of her likeness. That film was Whisper of the Heart. And it was only a beginning.

  At Studio Ghibli, Kondō was considered the heir apparent to Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. He had spent three decades learning every layer of animation, from in-between work on television serials in the late 1960s to character design and animation direction on landmark films. His death at 47 cut short what many at the studio believed would be a defining era. Who was this animator, and what did his path through Japanese animation look like before that single, complete directorial work? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Gosen to Tokyo

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  Gosen, a city in Niigata Prefecture in Japan's northwest, is where Kondō was born on the 31st of March 1950. He joined the art club at Niigata Prefectural Muramatsu High School when he enrolled in April 1965. His senpai there was Kimio Yanagisawa, who would go on to become a manga artist.

  In April 1968, Kondō moved to Tokyo after graduating, enrolling in Tokyo Design College's animation department. He did not wait long to enter professional work. On the 1st of October 1968, he began at A Production, the studio that had formerly been called Shin'ei Dōga. His earliest credits were on Kyojin no Hoshi, known in English as Star of the Giants, and on Lupin III.

  Those television productions gave Kondō his footing in the craft of in-between animation and key animation, the two roles that teach an animator how movement actually works frame by frame. By the early 1970s he was already being listed as key animator on multiple series, including Dokonjou Gaeru and Panda! Go, Panda!, a short film that connects to Studio Ghibli's future because Isao Takahata directed it.

• 3. Building a Craft at Nippon Animation

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  In June 1978, Kondō moved to Nippon Animation, the studio behind a string of ambitious adaptations of Western literary classics for children. His first major project there was Future Boy Conan, a series directed by Hayao Miyazaki that ran from April through October 1978. Working on Miyazaki's series at that stage in both men's careers was no small thing.

  Anne of Green Gables followed, running across all of 1979, and Kondō's role expanded. He was key animator, animation director, and character designer on that series, a combination of responsibilities that marks a significant step upward from pure drawing work. The same year he joined Nippon Animation, 1978, he co-authored a book aimed at people just entering the field: Animation Book, published in Japanese as Animēshon no Hon. Co-authoring a textbook for beginners while also working as an animation director suggests how seriously he took the transmission of craft.

  His run at Nippon Animation also included The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1980, another literary adaptation where he served as key animator and animation director. These years were defined by his ability to handle character design alongside the demanding work of keeping a series visually consistent across dozens of episodes.

• 4. Character Design and an Unexpected Illness

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  On the 16th of December 1980, Kondō moved to Telecom Animation Film, a studio with close ties to the emerging world that would eventually become Studio Ghibli. There he worked as character designer on Sherlock Hound, which ran from November 1984 through May 1985, and his name appears specifically against episodes 1 through 13.

  He resigned from Telecom on the 16th of March 1985. The months that followed brought a serious interruption. From June through August of 1985 he was hospitalized with a condition the Japanese medical term identifies as shizen kikyō, a type of pneumonia. After his recovery he did not return to a staff position immediately. He became a contract worker for Nippon Animation, moving through a period of project-to-project work.

  During those contract years his filmography shows a range of credits, including character design work on The Blinkins and The Wuzzles in 1985, the latter an American animated production. His willingness to cross into foreign-produced projects during this period points to how marketable his character design skills had become. He moved to Studio Ghibli in January 1987, the same year as his key animation work on Ai no Wakakusa Monogatari.

• 5. The Ghibli Years

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  Studio Ghibli accepted Kondō in January 1987, and his first major credit there was Grave of the Fireflies, released on the 16th of April 1988. He served as storyboard artist, character designer, and animation director on that film, one of the most discussed works in Isao Takahata's career.

  Kiki's Delivery Service came next in 1989, and Kondō contributed concept art and animation direction. Then, in the 1990s, the credits accelerated. Only Yesterday, released on the 20th of July 1991, listed him as animation director and character designer. Porco Rosso followed in 1992 with his key animation work. Pom Poko in 1994 included his key animation. And then Princess Mononoke, released on the 12th of July 1997, brought him back to the roles of animation director and character designer on one of the highest-profile Japanese animated films of the decade.

  Through all of those productions, Kondō was accumulating a record that stretched across nearly every significant Ghibli release of the late 1980s and 1990s. The studio's founding directors, Miyazaki and Takahata, had worked alongside him across multiple films. The expectation at Ghibli, widely held, was that he would eventually step into a director's role and carry the studio's work into a new era.

• 6. Whisper of the Heart

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  On the 15th of July 1995, Whisper of the Heart opened in Japan. It was Kondō's directorial debut, and it arrived after more than a quarter century of supporting roles. The film stands as the only feature he directed before his death.

  The film was not an original story. It was an adaptation, and the production drew on his long-developed skills in character design and the kind of careful, grounded animation that had defined his work on literary adaptations at Nippon Animation years earlier. His credit on Whisper of the Heart is simply "director," a clean statement after a career of roles that carried three or four job titles at once.

  I Can Hear the Sea, a 1993 television film, appears in his filmography as a key animation credit in the years just before Whisper of the Heart. That smaller credit shows him still contributing to other productions even as his own directorial project was presumably in development. Princess Mononoke in 1997 then appeared as his final credit, released two years after his debut as a director. By that point the aortic dissection that would kill him in January 1998 had not yet announced itself. He died at Tachikawa City Hospital, and the directorial succession at Studio Ghibli that many had assumed was a matter of time became instead a permanent question.