Isao Takahata is the friend, collaborator, slight senior in age, and fellow director of Hayao Miyazaki who is known for his variety in filmmaking and television.
Takahata's first film directional credit was as the director of Horus Prince of the Sun. This was a historical fantasy adventure film and was a cornerstone in the foundation of modern anime's style. His next film, Chie the Brat, was a comedy drama set in Osaka about a girl, her dad, several cats and other members of her family based on a manga. The next film, Gauche the Cellist, is in a similarly semi-cartoon style but is based on a story by Kenji Miyazawa. It is a drama about a cellist who can't play his part quite right and is visited by forest animals in his country house. So a semi-fantasy drama.
After producing two films for Hayao Miyazaki, he directed Grave of the Fireflies, a drama about the life of two children trying to get by in Japan during World War 2. This film shows that Takahata was capable of dramatic range. For his next film he directed Only Yesterday. The film, based on a manga, was about a woman reflecting on her childhood while she was visiting relatives on her first trip to rural Japan. After that, he followed up a realistic relatively modern film with a cultural fantasy film, Pom Poko, based on Tanuki, giant racoon-like creatures that can shape shift using their scrotums. This film was a sad lament of how nature is being ruined by over-industrialization and urbanization as the tanuki fight against the development of their land with diminishing results.
After a few years away producing Isao Takahata returned with My Neighbors the Yamadas, a film that is not only cartoony but fully steeped in newspaper comic strip linear aesthetics. It uses computer drawn animation and 2D shaded 3D models to create a film unlike any before it.
Isao Takahata's last film, a long time in the making, was Tale of the Princess Kaguya, an adaptation of the well known Japanese fairy tale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. It is very stylistically similar to My Neighbors the Yamadas stylistically, though it's based on scroll paintings instead of a modern comic strip. This film falls more into a fantasy label than a cartoon because it's slightly more naturalistic and because it's a more serious film than MNtY.
So let's look at the progression. Started in mythological fantasy. Shifted to a mundane, for lack of a better word, cartoon. Made another cartoon but as a fairy tale. Made a hard shift to tragic realism. Then went to a more optimistic and modern realism. Then he made a fantasy film set in the everyday world. Then he took a hard turn and made a film with a comic strip style. And then he finally ended it all with his last film which is a fairy tale fantasy in a style that combines new and old visual styles. Of course that ignores his large TV output at Toei, Nippon Animation and elsewhere.
I hope you enjoyed this post. If I rushed something let me know. I wanted to get it out before the year ended in my time zone.
