Series Site
July 2–August 28, 2026
Despite his sixty-year career as a director of hand-drawn animation, Isao Takahata (1935–2018) would be the first to say, “I myself really don’t draw.” He instead took pride in selecting talented animators and steering them toward his vision. Not being tied to his own style of drawing allowed him to transition from the maximalist fantasy of Pom Poko (1994) to the sketchlike, comic-strip minimalism of My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), and the impressionistic watercolor and charcoal renderings of his final film, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013). Of his process with the animators, Takahata said, “I really get involved in the details of their drawings, and then have them draw and [I] check those drawings, and work collaboratively in that fashion.” His attention to detail reveals itself in the reverence his films have for both the natural world and the present-tense, unremarked-upon moments in life, such as the family in Only Yesterday (1991) learning how to properly slice a pineapple.
Takahata cofounded Studio Ghibli along with his protégé, friend, and rival Hayao Miyazaki in 1985. He worked slowly; Miyazaki referred to him as a giant sloth but was also quick to point out that “sloths actually have very sharp claws.” With his first animated feature for the studio, he challenged the preconceived notions of the medium with the unrelenting antiwar film Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Takahata pushed feature animation into uncharted territories, and as Miyazaki remarked in his eulogy for his friend, “he never bent the knee to anyone or anything.”
—Jeff Griffith-Perham, Associate Film Curator