Movies: Isao Takahata

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....

A documentary that chronicles the making of The Boy and the Heron, filmed with exclusive access to Studio Ghibli across an astonishing seven years....

Heidi leaves her beloved Alm and moves to Frankfurt, where she finds a new good friend in Clara. Aunt Dete wants Heidi to leave her grandfather on the mountain pasture and go with her to Frankfurt, where she is supposed to live with the Sesemann fami...

A partially-animated documentary about the preservation and restoration of the canal system in Yanagawa, Fukuoka...

For his first film in fourteen years, animation director Isao Takahata embarked on a visually sumptuous adaptation of The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter. A dream project for the director that would hopefully establish the recently formed Ghibli Studio 7, ...

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 t...

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 Su...

Yasuo Ōtsuka 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...

From July 21 through September 10th, 2007, the Museum for Contemporary Art Tokyo held an exhibition honouring Kazuo Oga, the art director and background artist for many famed works from Japan's Studio Ghibli. Over 600 works from the artist were on di...

A documentary that focuses on Hayao Miyazaki’s deep connection to nature and the environmental themes expressed through his films....

Heidi is five years old when her aunt Dete, who has raised Heidi since her parents' deaths four years earlier, takes the orphaned Heidi to live with her formidable grandfather in the Swiss Alps....

A documentary produced by NHK following the production of "The Boy & The Heron" over 7 years....

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....

This August 2010 NHK documentary explores the influence of selected children's literature on Miyazaki and Takahata's body of work and on Studio Ghibli as a whole. Also included is a conversation between Miyazaki and Japanese author and TV personality...

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 f...

A promotional film by Studio Ghibli about the work on the film "The Cat Returns" (directed by Hiroyuki Morita)...

A contemporary look at the creation and evolution of Studio Ghibli, from ‘The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun’ (1968) to ‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)....

A making of documentary on the Studio Ghibli film Only Yesterday...

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 miracle...

This documentary by Hubert Niogret looks at the revival of Japanese cinema during the 1990s....