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The anime series ‘Heidi’ is probably the best-known work of Isao Takahata. The mudac design museum in Lausanne is dedicating an exhibition to the Japanese director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli.
The exhibition “Isao Takahata. Pioneer of contemporary animated film, from the post-war period to Studio Ghibli” traces the career of the filmmaker, who died in 2018. This is told using sketchbooks and storyboards, original drawings, celluloid films, film clips and audiovisual documents.
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Isao Takahata’s classics from the 1970s include 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976) and Anne of Green Gables (1979). According to the mudac museum’s press release, these are characterised by unusual solutions to depict everyday life as accurately as possible despite weekly episodes – “from clothing, eating culture and forms of living to relationships with nature”. This resulted in “deeply human, dramatically finely crafted narratives”, which Takahata and his team realised.
Western material as anime
These works include the series Heidi (1974) in particular. A previously unpublished section of the exhibition is dedicated to the relationship between Takahata and Europe and the challenge of telling Western stories in Japanese animated film. The exhibition explores the director and producer’s desire to authentically portray Western narratives.
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On location with Heidi’s Japanese (grand)fathers
Japanese culture also features in his work on several occasions. In particular in films that emerged from Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded in Japan in 1985. It was there that he made what is probably his best-known work worldwide, The Last Fireflies (1988), which tells the tragic story of two children in bombed-out Japan towards the end of the Second World War.
Isao Takahata was born in Japan in 1935 as the seventh child of a teacher. At the end of June 1945, when he was nine years old, he survived a heavy bombing raid. His memories of this had a profound influence on his later work. In 2009, the Locarno Film Festival awarded him an Honorary Leopard for his life’s work and in 2015 he was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Feature Film category for his film The Legend of Princess Kaguya.
The exhibition is open to the public from April 24 to September 27.
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The little girl who conquered the big screen
Adapted from German by AI/ac
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