Movies: Isao Takahata

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 ...

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 Bee...

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

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....

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....

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

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...

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, ...

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

In this documentary we travel to the Swiss Alps and to the Canadian Prince Edward Island looking at the origins of the two classic TV series - Heidi, the Girl of the Alps and Anne of Green Gables. We will also learn how the Japanese scenery found its...

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

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...

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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....

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...

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...

One day, Kandume's can boy, who happily lived with his friends in the kitchen, becomes an empty can and is discarded. Eventually, he has a dream about the history of iron and humanity. He sees how iron that melted and flowed out during a forest fire,...

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...