RIP: How Isao Takahata’s haunting war masterpiece changed animation

IT IS the animated war masterpiece that still moves men and women to tears.

It ranks right at the top as “the saddest film ever made,” ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ writerdirector Rian Johnson said on social media.

“No animated movie has made me cry more than this tender, gorgeous, profound, soulful and landmark film,” tweeted Annie Award-winning writer-director Jorge R. Gutierrez (‘The Book of Life’) on Friday.

And the late Pulitzer Prizewinning film critic Roger Ebert once called the movie “an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation.”

The 1988 film is ‘Grave of the Fireflies,’ a haunting tale of young siblings trying to survive the bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. And its director was Isao Takahata, who, born in 1935, was nearly the age of his ‘Fireflies’ boy protagonist when he witnessed the groundlevel toll of World War II for himself.

“Grave of the Fireflies” would help establish the internationally esteemed status of the fledging Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio that Takahata co-founded in the 1980s with his long-time friend, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, as well as Toshio Suzuki.

The studio is also known for such films as Miyazaki’s ‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997) and the Oscar-winning ‘Spirited Away’ (2001).

Takahata died on Thursday at a Tokyo hospital, Studio Ghibli announced. He was 82. Takahata received an Academy Award nomination in 2014 for the animated feature ‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya,’ which he directed and co-wrote. He also directed such films as 1991’s ‘Only Yesterday’ and 1994’s ‘Pom Poko,’ more than three decades after he first broke into the television animation industry, where he befriended Miyazaki in the 1960s.

Yet ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ will stand for generations as Takahata’s creative pinnacle - a mournful tone poem of a movie that helped grow the perception of animation as an art form that can rival liveaction film in its emotional power. — Washington Post

No animated movie has made me cry more than this tender, gorgeous, profound, soulful and landmark film. – Jorge R. Gutierrez, Annie Award-winning writer-director

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Takahata had received an Academy Award nomination in 2014.