Isao Takahata co-founded the company with animator Hayao Miyazaki, and they refused to follow Hollywood's digital path
TOKYO — Isao Takahata, co-founder of the prestigious Japanese animator Studio Ghibli that stuck to a hand-drawn « manga » look in the face of digital filmmaking, has died. He was 82.
Takahata started Ghibli with Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, hoping to create Japan’s Disney. He directed « Grave of the Fireflies, » a tragic tale about wartime childhood, and produced some of the studio’s films, including Miyazaki’s 1984 « Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, » which tells the horror of environmental disaster through a story about a princess.
Takahata died Thursday of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement Friday.
He was fully aware how the floating sumie-brush sketches of faint pastel in his works stood as a stylistic challenge to Hollywood’s computer-graphics cartoons.
In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Takahata talked about how Edo-era woodblock-print artists like Hokusai had the understanding of Western-style perspective and the use of light, but they purposely chose to depict reality with lines, and in a flat way, with minimal shading.
That, he said, was at the heart of Japanese « manga, » or comics.
« It is about the essence that’s behind the drawing, » he said at Ghibli’s picturesque office in suburban Tokyo.
