Isao Takahata
Co-founder of the Japanese Studio Ghibli who helped to revolutionise the art of film animation
ISAO TAKAHATA, who has died aged 82, was an award-winning Japanese animator and a co-founder, with Hayao Miyazaki, of Studio Ghibli, an enterprise regarded with near reverence by students of animation for its artistic integrity, high production values, and its attention to mood and emotional detail.
The studio took its name from the name given by Italian pilots during the Second World War to a hot Saharan wind, and when it was founded in 1985 Miyazaki was quoted as saying that he wanted to “blow a hot wind through the world of Japanese animation”.
He and Takahata had become frustrated with the limitations of having to work predominantly on a low budget for television. At the time, Japanese animation was mainly the domain of young Pokemon obsessives and of adolescent fans of the more unsavoury fringes of anime, such as the Urotsukidoji films which specialised in sadistic scenes of eroticised “demon” rape.
Miyazaki and Takahata wanted animators to have the scope to develop their art and to tackle serious and powerful themes. Their hand-drawn films paid homage to the origins of “manga” in Japanese woodblock prints in the 18th century and featured believable characters who, while often cute, were invested with moral responsibility.
Though Ghibli films cost a lot to make, the studio quickly rose to be the dominant force in Japanese animation. It was slow to gain recognition in the West, but when Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2003, Western critics began to examine the treasures hidden in the Ghibli back catalogue.
Takahata, although popular in Japan, did not enjoy the overseas profile of Miyazaki, but his influence permeated the whole of the studio’s output. Though there were tensions between the workaholic Miyazaki and his more laid back partner, the animator Yasuo Ōtsuka once observed that Miyazaki got his sense of social responsibility from Takahata and that without him, Miyazaki would probably have confined himself to “comic book stuff ”.
There was no doubting the visceral impact of Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), a film widely regarded as his masterpiece. A beautifully drawn animation, it concerns the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of a 14-year-old boy to protect his young sister after their mother is killed during the firebombing of Kobe in March 1945.
Based on a novella by Akiyuki Nosaka, it incorporated many of Takahata’s own childhood memories of bombing raids on his home town of Okayama. Some saw it as an anti-war film, a charge Takahata rejected. Rather, it was bleak portrayal of Japanese society at the end of the war, with the adults in the film shown as being wilfully indifferent to the children’s desperate plight. One American critic described it as “one of the greatest war films ever made”, its poetic restraint making it all the more emotionally devastating.
Isao Takahata was born on October 29 1935 in Mie Prefecture on the main Japanese island of Honshu and grew up during the war, surviving an American air raid on Okayama aged nine.
At the University of Toyo he read French Literature, and it was this that informed his style as a film-maker. He acknowledged the influence of the French animator Paul Grimault, as well New Wave filmmakers as Jean-luc Godard and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert.
In 1959 he got a job as an assistant director at the Toie animation studio where he met Hayao Miyazaki, with whom he worked on Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), his directorial debut. The pair left Toie in the early 1970s and worked together on a string of films including Heidi, Girl Of The Alps, a 1970s television adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s stories. Strong female characters would become a Takahata trademark.
His other Ghibli films included Only Yesterday (1991), a restrained, naturalistic tale of self-discovery in which a 27-year-old woman office worker reflects on her childhood as she tries to find a sense of where she belongs; Pom Poko (1994) about man’s threat to the environment conceived as a comedy about raccoon dogs who use their shape-shifting powers, and their magical testicles, to take revenge on their human invaders; and My Neighbours the Yamadas (1999), a series of comic but psychologically convincing vignettes of Japanese family life, exploring such everyday challenges as losing a child in a department store, arguing about who has control of the television, and getting one’s first girlfriend.
Takahata’s most recent film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), a technically ravishing meditation on themes of mortality and impermance, was based on a 10th-century Japanese legend about a poor woodcutter who finds, in the forest, a tiny girl sprouting from a bamboo shoot. It won Takahata an Oscar nomination in 2014 for best animated feature, the Telegraph’s critic Robbie Collin describing it as resembling “an ancient scroll-painting come to life”.
Isao Takahata, born October 29 1935, died April 5 2018