Isao Takahata
The dialogue-less film follows the major life stages of a castaway on a deserted tropical island populated by turtles, crabs and birds.
Documentary about Yasuo Otsuka, famous Japanese animator and mentor of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Featuring interviews with Japanese animation legends such as Masaaki Osumi, Youichi Kotabe, Sadao Tsukioka and Isao Takahata.
Aki Asakura, an actress who played the voice of Princess Kaguya, travels around Japan to visit the scenery that appeared in Takahata's work. The documentary also includes an interview with Director Takahata. This documentary is composed from the fragments of a program, aired by «BS Nittele» TV station on the 1st of January 2014, dedicated to the release of «The Tale of Princess Kaguya».
For his first film in fourteen years animation director Isao Takahata embarked on a visually sumptuous adaptation of The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. A dream project for the director that would hopefully establish the recently formed Ghibli Studio 7, created to meet the demands of a new type of modern animation process. But almost immediately the epic production is faced with difficulties and falls dramatically behind schedule. In this compelling and insightful documentary we follow Isao Takahata and his dedicated team of artists as they frantically strive against adversity to make their vision a reality and bring Studio Ghibli into a new Era.
Found inside a shining stalk of bamboo by an old bamboo cutter and his wife, a tiny girl grows rapidly into an exquisite young lady. The mysterious young princess enthralls all who encounter her - but ultimately she must confront her fate, the punishment for her crime.
Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.
Anne is an orphan full of imagination. When she arrives at her new home she learns that sometimes you have to be a sensible person too; at the same time her unique character changes, or at least attracts, the people around her. The story covers Anne's growth from about eleven to seventeen years old as she makes friends, goes to school and studies. At a difficult point in her life, Anne will have to make a hard choice and perhaps find a new dream.
Woody, Buzz, and the rest of Andy's toys haven't been played with in years. With Andy about to go to college, the gang find themselves accidentally left at a nefarious day care center. The toys must band together to escape and return home to Andy.
Cheerful Mimiko has a wonderfully strange family—a Panda for her Papa; and his son Panny, calls her Mom! When Panny follows Mimiko to school, he must pretend to be a teddy bear so Mimiko won't get into trouble. Despite his efforts to behave, Panny causes trouble in school and now the school is after Panny! Then, Panny makes a new friend, Tiny, a baby tiger who's wandered off from the circus.
From July 21 through September 10th, 2007, the Museum for Contemporary Art Tokyo held an exhibition honouring Oga Kazuo, the art director and background artist for many famed works from Japan's Studio Ghibli. Over 600 works from the artist were on display, and numerous fans flocked to the one-of-a-kind exhibition celebrating the lush, gorgeous background artwork typifying many a work from Miyazaki Hayao and other Ghibli filmmakers. International fans of Oga and Studio Ghibli have not been left out, however. The Oga Kazuo Exhibition: Ghibli No Eshokunin - The One Who Painted Totoro's Forest (Blu-ray + DVD) allows fans the opportunity to attend the exhibition, as well as watch interviews and testimonials with Oga's contemporaries and collaborators, all subtitled in English.
Studio Ghibli is Japan's most successful animation studio, with helmers Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro") and Isao Takahata ("Grave of The Fireflies," "The Tale of Princess Kaguya") creating a bonanza for producer/prexy Toshio Suzuki. Generously adorned with clips from their films and their influences, the docu follows Ghibli's arc from a mid-'60s rebellion against working conditions at Toei Co. to its present powerhouse position, complete with public fun park. All interviews are illuminating, but Miyazaki is teasingly confined to pic's tete-a-tete finale with esteemed French comic artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Meeting of the wizened European, whose imprint is on films from "Blade Runner" to "The Fifth Element," and the apparently relaxed Nipponese helmer makes an interesting contrast, and will be of special interest to Francophiles. All credits are impeccable
Yasuo Otsuka was the mentor of Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, the man who taught them to feel the joy of animation. As the supervising animator of their films and through the creation of superb scenes such as Lupin leaping from turret to turret in Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro, Otsuka made the impossible believable, and touched people’s emotions. To look back at the many works he was involved in is to review the history of Japanese animation after WWII. This film is a must for anime fans who want to learn how Japanese animation evolved.
Winter Days is a 2003 animated film, directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. It is based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names of animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).
A promotional film by Studio Ghibli about the work on the film "The Cat Returns" (directed by Hiroyuki Morita)
The Yamadas are a typical middle class Japanese family in urban Tokyo and this film shows us a variety of episodes of their lives. With tales that range from the humourous to the heartbreaking, we see this family cope with life's little conflicts, problems and joys in their own way.
A documentary film following Isao Takahata to Canada to meet Frédéric Back.
The Raccoons of the Tama Hills are being forced from their homes by the rapid development of houses and shopping malls. As it becomes harder to find food and shelter, they decide to band together and fight back. The Raccoons practice and perfect the ancient art of transformation until they are even able to appear as humans in hilarious circumstances.
It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside, and as the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys. At the station she is met by young farmer Toshio, and the encounters with him begin to reconnect her to forgotten longings. In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.
In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.
An (almost) live action documentary movie, this independent movie was produced by Nibariki (Miyazaki's personal office), with the royalty revenue from Nausicaä. At first, it was supposed to be an animated film which took place in the town of Yanagawa. After the success of Nausicaä, Tokuma wanted to produce another animated movie (of course, they wanted a Nausicaä sequel), and Miyazaki was looking for a good project. Miyazaki visited Yanagawa, and was impressed by the beautiful town with its canals, and came up with an idea for a film about high school boys and girls in Yanagawa, and thought that Takahata, who worked as a producer for Nausicaä, should direct such a film...
A young boy and a girl with a magic crystal must race against pirates and foreign agents in a search for a legendary floating castle.
After a global war, the seaside kingdom known as the Valley of the Wind remains one of the last strongholds on Earth untouched by a poisonous jungle and the powerful insects that guard it. Led by the courageous Princess Nausicaä, the people of the Valley engage in an epic struggle to restore the bond between humanity and Earth.
Gauche is a diligent but mediocre cellist who plays for a small town orchestra and the local cinema in the early 20th century. He struggles during rehearsals and is often berated by his conductor during preparations for an upcoming performance of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral Symphony). Over the course of four nights, Gauche is visited at his mill house home by talking animals as he is practicing.
Chie Takemoto is a dependable girl who struggles to help her troublesome father run a small tavern in Osaka. Unbeknown to her dad, she occasionally visits her mother who left him not too long ago. She plans on trying to reunite them, but not until her father gets a job.
Yasui is the president of a large company. After the war, he wandered into the world of evil spirits, where he obtained a hidden treasure "Geomancer's Eye". With the magical power of this treasure Yasui received enormous wealth. But the great miracles have a great price... A retelling of episode 37 from the 1971 TV anime.
A young Italian boy named Marco is devastated when his mother must leave home to work in Argentina to pay off the family debt. She sends the family letters, but soon the messages stop coming, which worries Marco and sets him off on an epic quest to find her.
Patterned after Japanese art and silk screens, Taro, The Dragon Boy is an animated feature about Japanese mythology and cultures, focusing on Taro, a young boy who has to make a voyage to a distant lake to save his mother, who has been turned into a dragon.
Heidi (1974) Japanese anime series by Zuiyo Eizo. It was directed by Isao Takahata, has been dubbed into many languages. The TV series was directed also in Italy, has been distributed in 1978. After divided also in three feature films, Heidi a scuola (1977), Heidi in città (1978), Heidi torna tra i monti (1979), produced by Beta Film and Riccardo Billi and distributed by Sampaolo Film. The third feature, Heidi torna tra i monti, summarizes the latest episodes of the television series. Heidi finally back from his grandfather, but continues to maintain the friendship at a distance with Clara. Which, precisely during a visit to the girl initially hampered by Mrs. Rottenmeier, on this occasion will resume the use of his legs.
Anne of Green Gables is an animated television series, part of Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater. It was adapted from the novel, Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Produced by Nippon Animation in 1979, it was first broadcast on Fuji TV from January 7, 1979 to December 30, 1979. Fifty episodes were produced in total. It has been exported to neighbouring Asian countries and also to Europe and Canada. As with the novels, the animated version of Anne is much beloved in Japan to this day and "DVD memorial BOX set" was released on August 22, 2008 and a new anime series that serves as a prequel to the series, Kon'nichiwa Anne 〜 Before Green Gables, which premiered on April 5, 2009 in Japan.
Heidi (1974) Japanese anime series by Zuiyo Eizo (now Nippon Animation) based on the Swiss novel Heidi's Years of Wandering and Learning by Johanna Spyri (1880). It was directed by Isao Takahata A feature-length film Heidi in the Mountains, aka The Story of Heidi, was edited from the series by Zuiyo (which by then was a separate entity from Nippon Animation, which employed many of the TV series' animation staff) distributed in 1979. All cast were replaced excluding Heidi and the grandfather. This movie is also the only incarnation of the Heidi anime to have been released commercially in the United States in English (on home video in the 1980s). Isao Takahata remarked "Neither Hayao Miyazaki nor I are completely related to any shortening version" on this work.
The family consisting of two pandas and one girl lives happily when suddenly a little tiger appears at their home. It arrives that the circus had come to their town. All of a sudden starts the pouring rain but it can't stop them.
The plot follows Mimiko, a bright little girl left alone when her grandmother leaves on a trip. Making a few stops at some local stores, Mimiko comes home to her house in a bamboo grove and finds a baby panda named Panny sleeping on the back doorstep. She quickly makes friends with the little panda, and invites him in for a drink. His father, PapaPanda, soon comes to visit, and they decide to become a family after PapaPanda offers to.
TV pilot based on an original manga by Tetsuya Chiba, about a 10-year old girl named Yuki. An orphan who's being adopted by a family.
Horus, a kid living in an unnamed Scandinavian/Eastern Europe culture of the Iron Age, recovers the Sword of the Sun from the rock giant Maug and learns from his dying father that he must return to his ancestral territory. In the process, he defends a village from the attacks of Grunwald, a warlord/ice demon and befriends the enigmatic Hilda, a lonely and beautiful girl who sings haunting songs (and who hides a terrible secret).
Kitarō, a ghost, spends his afterlife helping humans in need of his skills. He thwarts the plans of evil spirits who live to torment humanity. A retelling of episodes 5-6 from the 1968 TV anime.
Susano is the youngest son of Izanagi and Izanami, the heavenly couple that the Earth. Still a young boy, Susano is devastated by the passing away of his mother. Determined to find her despite the reprimands of his father, he embarks on a journey to find his brother and his sister for spiritual guidance.
After their father quarrels with local military men, Anju and Zushio are forced to flee, but they are captured and sold into slavery. When their mother dies, they are sold to Sansho the Bailiff, a cruel man who subjects them to hideous torments. While Anju falls into a lake and is transformed into a swan, Zushio escapes and after being adopted to a nobleman grows to a young man. He will then fight to defeat the evil Dayu and free all the slaves.
A making of documentary on the studio Ghibli film Only Yesterday
