A LIFE IN ANIMATION
Cinema bids farewell to Ghibli’s Isao Takahata
Isao Takahata, co-founder of the prestigious Japanese animator Studio Ghibli that stuck to a hand-drawn manga look in the face of digital filmmaking, has died. He was 82. Takahata started Ghibli with Oscarwinning animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, hoping to create Japan’s Disney. He directed Grave of the Fireflies, a tragic tale about wartime childhood, and produced some of the studio’s films, including Miyazaki’s 1984 Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which tells the horror of environmental disaster through a story about a princess.
Takahata died Thursday of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement Friday.
He was fully aware how the floating sumiebrush sketches of faint pastel in his works stood as a stylistic challenge to Hollywood’s computergraphics cartoons.
In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Takahata talked about how Edo-era woodblockprint artists like Hokusai had the understanding of Western-style perspective and the use of light, but they purposely chose to depict reality with lines, and in a flat way, with minimal shading.
That, he said, was at the heart of Japanese manga, or comics.
“It is about the essence that’s behind the drawing,’’ he said at Ghibli’s picturesque office in suburban Tokyo.
“We want to express reality without an overly realistic depiction, and that’s about appealing to the human imagination.’’
In the interview, Takahata confessed to an almost love-hate relationship with Mr Miyazaki because their works were so different.
He said he tries not to talk about Mr Miyazaki’s works because he would have to be honest, and then he would end up getting critical, and he didn’t want conflict with an artist he so respected.
His last film, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, based on a Japanese folktale, was nominated for a 2015 Oscar for best animation feature, although it did not win.
He is also known for the 1970s Japanese TV series Heidi, Girl of the Alps, based on the book by Swiss author Johanna Spyri.
A native of Mie prefecture, Takahata was a graduate of the University of Tokyo and initially worked at Toei, one of Japan’s major film and animation studios.
Although he did not win an Oscar, Takahata won many other awards, including those from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Lorcano International Film Festival.
Strong female characters were a Takahata trademark.
He was planning to do a film about exploited girls, forced to work as nannies with infants strapped on their backs. Most lullabies in Japan were not for parents singing babies to sleep, but for such young women, crying out about their suffering, Takahata had said.
All his stories, he said, held the message of urging everyone to live life to their fullest, to be all they can be, not bogged down by petty concerns like money and prestige.
“This earth is a good place, not because there is eternity,’’ he said.
“All must come to an end in death. But in a cycle, repeated over and over, there will always be those who come after us.’’
Funeral services are planned for May 15. Details of the services were still being planned.