Japanese animation pioneer Isao Takahata

Isao Takahata, co-founder of the Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli, has died aged 82.

The studio was famous for sticking to a hand-drawn “manga” look amid the rise of digital film-making.

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 of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement on Friday.

He was fully aware how the floating sumie-brush sketches of faint pastel in his works stood as a stylistic challenge to Hollywood’s computer-generated cartoons.

In a 2015 interview, Takahata talked about how Edo-era woodblock-print 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”.

His last film, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, based on a Japanese folktale, was nominated for a 2015 Oscar for best animated feature.

He was planning to make a film about exploited girls, forced to work as nannies with infants strapped on their backs.

All his stories, he said, held the message of urging everyone to live life to the 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.”

Isao Takahata.