TSPDT

Key Production Country: Japan
Key Genres: Anime, Animation, Drama, Family, Comedy, Adventure, Hand-Drawn Animation, Fantasy, Iyashikei, Coming-of-Age, Slice of Life, Action-Adventure
Key Collaborators: Takeshi Seyama (Editor), Kazuo Oga (Production Designer), , Hayao Miyazaki (Director), Kazuo Fukazawa (Screenwriter), Toshio Suzuki (Producer), Yutaka Fujioka (Producer), Atsushi Okui (Cinematographer), Kei Kuroki (Cinematographer), Michio Mamiya (Composer), Takeo Watanabe (Composer), Shinichirô Ikebe (Composer), Nizô Yamamoto (Production Designer)

"Isao Takahata is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Japan's most commercially - and many would say - successful anime house. He established the studio in 1985 with Hayao Miyazaki, with whom he had been working in film and TV since the 1960s. Most of the duo's earlier work focused on children's stories, which included a hugely popular animated series called Panda! Go Panda! (1972), inspired by Pippi Longstocking, and an anime version of Heidi (1974). However, at Ghibli, Takahata forged a different path, creating films for a largely adult market, with realism often coming to the fore." - Mark Ellingham (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Takahata, unsung in many respects, defines the Ghibli style as much as Miyazaki; his grasp of the beauty of the mundane and his impressionistic apprehension of memory and feeling, is as memorable as Miyazaki’s epiphanies in flight." - Paul Wells (The Conversation, 2018)

"There is an intimacy in Takahata’s work that stands in contrast to the sheer magical scope of Miyazaki’s worlds — an attention to the tiniest details, to the most intimate sorrows and joys, to the smallest physical moments and the big feelings they spawn within us. As a result, there is, in his relentless search for the real, a romanticism as well. The English poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Isao Takahata saw it in the way someone cuts open a melon." - John Maher (Polygon, 2020)

"Takahata was doubtless an auteur, even if the medium of feature animation has been slow to accommodate that label. Though refracted through outwardly very disparate styles, his “kind of realism” is palpable across his oeuvre. Like the man himself – whom I first saw at a festival’s reception banquet, standing apart, alone, in a corner – his films are not showy: not for them the swaggering heroes and bravura fantasy set-pieces that many expect from animation. Their protagonists are, by and large, ordinary folk, all the more relatable because they are not mired in the particulars of human actors. The thrill of his works comes not from action or song, but from their exquisite attention to the details of the real world." - Alex Dudok de Wit (Sight & Sound, 2018)

"One of Studio Ghibli’s three co-founders, alongside filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki, Isao Takahata has created a body of work that is delightfully eclectic… Altogether, Takahata’s films reflect a warmhearted filmmaker fond of stories about quirky families and enchanted creatures. Unlike Miyazaki, Takahata did not draw and perhaps due to this fact he consistently experimented with different animation styles throughout his career, sometimes making films that looked like Studio Ghibli productions but sometimes venturing into radically different styles." - Bernardo Rondeau (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 2022)

"Without Takahata, anime would not exist as it does today. His refusal to compromise his vision would frequently result in revolution in production and output. A creator never satisfied with sticking to the familiar and with more to say than time would allow, there’s truly no director like him." - Alicia Haddick (Letterboxd Journal, 2024)

"Where Miyazaki films – My Neighbour Totoro, Ponyo, Porco Rosso – are fantastical and dreamy, Takahata finds intimate moments in normality, whether it’s small but pretty moments of pineapple-eating in Only Yesterday or the comedic moody family dog’s facial expressions in My Neighbours the Yamadas. Family life, childhood, loneliness, our environment, are treated intricately with his stunning storytelling talent. For Only Yesterday, he recorded the voice actors first and encouraged dialogue imperfections that he could work in." - Anna Cafolla (Dazed, 2018)

"I like animation films that use a pictorial style with the power to stir people’s imagination and awaken their memories. I recognise that there are excellent works among 3D CG films, but I personally don’t care for that style of expression." - Isao Takahata (Sight & Sound)