Mentor of Miyazaki and Ghibli's most talented director. His films are smart, tender, down-to-earth, deeply humane and magnificently animated. The fact that he kept challenging himself until the very end makes his oeuvre a joy to explore.
Movies
A simple screenshot cannot capture the amount of love and detail this film houses. The animation is exceptional, the music a blast and the film consists of one big succession of memorable moments.
Not the ideal film for a fun evening on the couch, but it reaches well beyond the boundaries of traditional animation films and delivers an experience you'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else
There aren't any big dramatic swoops, nor any major events or surprising plot twists. The setup in simple, the setting is simple, but the execution is absolute perfection.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya is still a marvel to behold and definitely worth your time, but it's also a film that feels like a natural end to Takahata's career.
Isao Takahata's Pom Poko is a delight. It's been way too long since I last watched the film, I'd forgotten most things about it (apart that one thing everyone remembers), but it hasn't lost any of its original appeal. The film offers a familiar story (animals battling humans as their homes are being destroyed), Takahata takes a more down-to-earth approach compared to his Western peers. At least, if you look at how the battle plays out. Don't expect a very depressing or dark film, there's quite a bit of wonky Japanese folklore and the characters are fun and charming. Add a touch of Ghibli magic, and you have another winner.
Winter Days
A very peculiar anthology. It's not like many other anthologies, where the link between each short film is frail and negligible, and yet many of the shorts couldn't have been more different from each other. A wealth of directors were given a chance to add their entry, with quite a few international names on the roster too. The film is set up around the renku poetry of Basho. There's a little documentary that comes with the film that gives some insights into the how, why and what of this film, but basically each director was assigned a short poem, which then served as inspiration of the animation piece. Most of them are under 1 minute. There's a huge range of styles on display and the overarching concept is pretty interesting, but too many shorts fell flat, and the impressive ones are few and far between. Someone like Isao Takahata stands out among the rest, but with only one minute on the clock, he too struggles to impress. Certainly worth a watch, but there's some untapped potential here.Read all
Prince of the Sun: The Great Adventure of Horus
Anne of Green Gables: Road to Green Gables
Not really a 2010 film, instead it's a compilation/rework of the first 6 episodes of the original TV series (1979), which lists Takahata as series director. Just to say that you shouldn't expect a modern Ghibli-like Takahata, but an early 80s TV anime with strong Western influences, recut to resemble a feature film. I'm not familiar with the original Montgomery novel, nor with the original anime adaptation, but I've seen plenty of similar series on Dutch TV when I was younger. The style is very typical, charming but rather basic, with a clear love for rural environments and traditional values. The animation is basic, but there are some dream-like sequences that rise well above expected TV quality. Anne is also a fun character. Quite chatty and a little exhausting, but her inquisitive outlook on life is refreshing. The film is a too slow though, with hardly anything happening within these 100 minutes. It's not bad, but it's clear the pacing is better suited for a TV series than a feature film.Read all
