Roxie honors 2 giants of Japanese animation
Less-heralded Studio Ghibli partner Isao Takahata a treasure
Call me crazy, but when it comes to Studio Ghibli, Japan’s hallowed bastion of animated art, I tend to prefer Isao Takahata’s films to Hayao Miyazaki’s.
Don’t get me wrong: I love both of them. But at the end of the day, I’d rather dwell in Takahatan time than Miyazakian fantasy.
Perhaps this preference reflects my love of the underdog, the unheralded termite. When one thinks of Studio Ghibli, one immediately conjures up the face of Miyazaki. A Miyazaki creation, Totoro, adorns the studio’s iconic logo. The world treasures his creations, which is reflected in that five of the six films in an upcoming Roxie Theater festival devoted to Ghibli (“Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Castle in the Sky”) are by Miyazaki.
Less known, however, are the Ghibli films of Takahata — whose depressingly cute “Pom Poko” (1994) is the sole Takahata movie at the weekend-long Roxie fest.
Takahata has actually been the man who has most shaped Miyazaki’s sensibility, despite the latter’s wider visibility. Born in 1935 in Ise, Mie Prefecture, the young Takahata experienced horror firsthand, surviving a major U.S. air raid near the end of World War II. As he developed as an artist, part of Takahata’s heart was in France: He took up animation in 1960 after graduating with a degree in French literature from the University of Tokyo, after seeing Paul Grimault’s “The King and the Mockingbird.”
He bonded with Miyazaki during the 1960s student protests in Japan; together, the best friends helped each other out through animation triumphs (the wildly successful 1974 anime series “Heidi, Girl of the Alps”) and failures (their inability to get the ambitious anime of “Pippi Longstocking” off the ground).
Since the founding of Studio Ghibli by Miyazaki and Takahata in 1985, Takaha-
ta has directed very few projects. (According to Miyazaki, Takahata is notoriously slow and disorganized.) But of the five Ghibli movies Takahata has directed, I would unhesitatingly rank all of them — “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988), “Only Yesterday” (1991), “Pom Poko,” “My Neighbors the Yamadas” (1999) and “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” (2013) — as among the most stimulating, formally innovative works animation has to offer.
Yet, why is Takahata so obscure? It may have to do with his humble, spectacles hunning vision. Miyazaki’s visuals, which are always set to the dramatic piano and strings of Joe Hisaishi, are throat grabbingly propulsive in a way that Takahata’s are not. It was Miyazaki’s films that introduced millions to the wonders of Ghibli, including me. (I’ll never forget the night when “Spirited Away” burst onto Cartoon Network at prime time.) But the more I watched this incredible studio’s oeuvre, the more variety I saw. I soon found myself more enamored with the films of Takahata.
What distinguishes Takahata’s movies are their zigzagging motions, their meandering paths that do not call attention to their meanders. Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” my secondfavorite Ghibli, marches forward with a crisp linearity, and the moments that are breathtaking distractions (a haunting train ride with faceless ghosts) are a minor divertissement along an otherwise neat, straight path.
By contrast, Takahata’s cinema culls its strength from moments of aggressive marginality. His three ’90s films (including his best, “Only Yesterday”) have trouble organizing their haphazard trains of thought — and are all the better for it. Takahata is more invested than Miyazaki in the imperfections of memory, its muddled haze. The typical Takahata work folds its scenes on top of each other like an endless deck of randomized cards, constantly forgetting what came before, unsure what comes later.
Takahata’s two most formally radical films — “Only Yesterday” and the underappreciated “Yamadas” — posit disjointedness as the only honest way to make art. They are both centered on the lives of families, whose histories are never neat or chronological. The listless 27-year-old Taeko of “Only Yesterday” is remembering her family as it existed in the past (1966), while the Yamadas are a family that lives in the quotidian present (1999), but in both, Takahata is committed to accurately rendering a family’s temporal messiness. There are so many rich events in one’s life, but at what point do they begin to lose significance? Will I remember them all? Should I? Takahata’s films gather together too many moments to keep track of — hence their melancholy. (Takahata would reach operatic levels of tragedy with his first and last Ghibli masterpieces, “Fireflies” and “Kaguya,” which end with the violent separation of families.) With “Pom Poko,” Takahata merges his interest in fractured time with the surprisingly sad story of a group torn apart by humanity’s selfishness. It concerns the post-1960s destruction of Tama Hills, home to a roving ensemble of tanuki, shape-shifting raccoon-dogs. The tanuki do everything in their power to stop the humans: everything from ecoterrorism, to issuing desperate pleas to Japanese TV news crews, and — in a final sign of resignation — assimilating into human society, at the cost of group solidarity and cultural cohesion. A man’s dry narration makes this anime feel like a documentary; anchored in a vividly historical past, we are aware that the tanuki’s fate has been sealed since the start of modernity. The tragedy is that humanity is blind to the magical wonder of tanuki transformation; they pay attention to the miraculous only when the homes of the miracle-makers have been raped and plundered beyond salvation.
“Pom Poko” is the bizarre theory of what the greater Ghiblis practice. All Ghiblis are notable for their sprawling visuals — and “Pom Poko” delivers, with its frighteningly surreal imagery (i.e., the parade of tanuki goblins, with all of the terror and none of the wonder of the “Spirited Away” monsters). All Ghiblis work within the wild and tough territory that Walt Disney abandoned in the 1930s when he made “Snow White” (1937). The early Disney shorts — as well as the full-length “Alice in Wonderland” (1951) — were all about the stretchy, the plasmatic, the anarchic, where rules and manners sagged to irrelevance, and the artist’s mind was free to frolic with unsentimental weirdness. Takahata’s “Pom Poko,” whose heroes are a bunch of shapeshifting animals, reclaims this valiant strain of animation, now undervalued. It is free of obvious moralizing, instead aiming for something rich and rare, something that is too often seen as a paradox: serious cuteness.