Isao Takahata: The Ghibli Co-Founder Who Made the Saddest Film in Animation History

Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki met as young animators at Toei Animation in the 1960s and remained creative partners for over fifty years. They co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, and their partnership was the studio's creative foundation. But where Miyazaki's films are defined by a consistent aesthetic — painterly landscapes, female protagonists, flight, environmental concern — Takahata's filmography is defined by formal restlessness: each of his major works uses a different visual approach, a different narrative structure, and a different emotional register. The only thing they share is an ambition to use animation as something more than entertainment.

"Grave of the Fireflies" (1988), released on a double bill with Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro," is the film that established Takahata's international reputation and has defined it ever since. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka about the deaths of his sister and himself from malnutrition in the final months of World War II, the film is structured around the knowledge of its own ending — the first shot reveals that the protagonist is already dead — and proceeds to show, with absolute precision and without sentimentality, how two children died. It is the most emotionally devastating animated film ever made; it is not a film that is easy to revisit; and it is genuinely great in ways that easy films cannot be.

The films that followed demonstrated Takahata's range. "Only Yesterday" (1991) is a slice of life film about a woman in her late twenties revisiting her childhood memories while staying in rural Japan — the first non-fantasy Ghibli film, and one whose formal restraint is so complete that it initially seems to have no subject. What it has, revealed gradually, is one of the most precise portraits of ordinary adult melancholy in cinema. "Pom Poko" (1994) is a political satire about tanuki using their supernatural shapeshifting abilities to resist suburban development of their forest — comic and tragic simultaneously, and stranger than any description of it sounds. "My Neighbors the Yamadas" (1999) is a deliberately flat-looking domestic comedy adapted from a newspaper comic strip, using a visual simplicity that looks like the opposite of effort and requires extraordinary skill.

"The Tale of Princess Kaguya" (2013), his final film, took fourteen years to produce and used a deliberately rough, ink-wash aesthetic derived from Heian-era Japanese illustration — a visual approach so far from the "Ghibli style" that many viewers initially found it hard to see past the strangeness. What it contains is a story of unusual emotional complexity about what is lost when someone is fitted to a life not suited to them — and a visual language capable of expressing states of feeling that clean, polished animation cannot reach. The final sequence is among the most beautiful in animated film.

Takahata died in April 2018, at 82. He received less global recognition than Miyazaki during his lifetime — his films were considered more demanding, less accessible, less immediately pleasurable — and the asymmetry was consistently noted by people who knew both men's work well. He made fewer films and made them more slowly, and each was a formal experiment rather than a genre fulfillment. The result is a body of work that rewards attention in proportion to the attention given, which is the mark of seriousness.