As several sources have reported, Isao Takahata, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the director of five Ghibli feature films films, passed away earlier today. Takahata’s output as a creator has always been second to Miyazaki’s. Nonetheless, his work, and in particular, Grave of the Fireflies, also received a significant amount of English-language scholarly attention. And, of course, Takahata’s work has been addressed extensively throughout the more general academic writing on the work of Hayao Miyazaki on on Studio Ghibli.

Isao Takahata (1935-2018): A Bibliography of English-Language Scholarship

Books

Dominic J. Nardi & Keli Fancher (eds.). Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations: Investigating How the Japanese Animation Powerhouse Reimagines Stories. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Lindsay Coleman, Rayna Denison, & David Desser (eds.). The Many Worlds of Takahata Isao. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Michael Leader & Jake Cunningham. Ghibliotheque: The Unofficial Guide to the Movies of Studio Ghibli, Revised and Updated. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Michael Leader & Jake Cunningham. Ghibliotheque: The Unofficial Guide to the Movies of Studio Ghibli. London: Welbeck.

    Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc
    Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.
    Harpenden, UK: Kamera Books (1st ed.: 2009; Revised & Updated Ed.: 2015; 3rd ed.: 2019; 4th ed.: 2024)

    Book Chapters and Journal Articles

    2025

    • Ortabasi, Melek. Around the world in 80 years: How an Italian children’s classic went to Japan and back. The Journal of Japanese Studies, 51(2), 421-456.

      “Cuore (Heart, 1886), a children’s novel by popular and respected Italian author Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), was the first bestseller in its home country. Arriving in Japan in the late Meiji period, Cuore has appeared in partial translation and adaptation many times since then. The most famous version is the fifty-two episode anime series, Haha wo tazunete sanzenri (3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, 1976), directed by Takahata Isao. Using a translation studies approach, this paper explores how the series functioned as a transnational narrative, influencing how new audiences both in Japan and abroad reconnected with this late nineteenth century Italian children’s classic.”

    2024

    • Hara, Kunio. Authorship in music and sound design / 1: Isao Takahata and his music direction.
      In Marco Pellitteri (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation (pp. 335-361). Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore.

      “This chapter looks at the music and sound design in the tv animation series and film animations directed by the late Isao Takahata. Even though he was not trained in music, Takahata wielded control over the music and sound design of his works as a director. Additionally, Takahata was in charge of the music for a few films by Hayao Miyazaki either as a producer or as a music director. The chapter thus sheds light on the process through which this influential director shaped the music and sound design of his works in varying degrees of collaboration with the composers and other members of the staff. The chapter also examines how Takahata used music and sound design to articulate some of the major recurring themes that bind his diverse body of work including childhood, adolescence, memory, and nostalgia.”

    2021

    • Grajdian, Maria Mihaela. May the love be with you: From the joy of life to the transcendence of existence in Takahata Isao’s animation works. Synergy, 17(1), 29-44.
      *** OPEN ACCESS ***

      “From Ponpoko: The Heisei Tanuki War (1994), through My Neighbours, the Yamadas (1999),  and until The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013), the animation movies directed by the reputed animation director Takahata Isao (1935-2018) and released by Studio Ghibli since mid-1990s address the phenomenon of ‘life’ as a meaningful endeavour towards attaining higher levels of human awareness. This occurs either by living in accordance with the flow of history, or by enjoying every moment as it comes, or, respectively, by delving into cosmic rhythms of imponderability: every single entity of existence delivers significance and comprehension, as displayed on multiple layers in the three animation works analyzed in this paper. Thus, in a phenomenological approach inspired by Julia Kristeva’s monumental publication La Révolution du langage poétique (1974) which views cultural products as mirroring channels of repression (Verdrängung) and desire (Begehren), the analysis draws on an anthropological framework in which the researcher functions as a dynamic, self-reflexive interface mediating between the self-ness of the theoretical structure (here: life and the quest for its significance) and the other-ness of the representation medium (here: Japanese animated works).”

    2020

    • Yoshioka, Shiro. Road to fame: Social trajectory of Takahata Isao. Arts, 9(3), article 81.

      “This paper examines how Takahata Isao’s reputation as a filmmaker was established, focusing on the period between Horus: The Prince of the Sun (1968) and Only Yesterday (1991), using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “consecration”. Through detailed analysis of promotion strategies, popular and critical reception of his films, and his appearance in different types of media in the form of essays and interviews, I will discuss how Takahata and his films were “consecrated”, or came to be recognized as something respectable and deserve critical attention. Throughout the analysis the focus will be on the relationship between different “fields” rather than his films. I will contend that the process of his consecration is deeply related to that of the establishment of the field of anime and its fandom in the late 1970s, and its relationship with other fields with greater cultural capital, such as literature and live-action films as well as non-Japanese animations. The association of Takahata and his films with these fields was used by media, stakeholders in film productions including Studio Ghibli and publishing houses Tokuma shoten and Shinchōsha, as well as Takahata himself, to distinguish him and his films from other anime.”

    2018

    2017

    • Grajdian, Maria Mihaela. Mythical serenity prayer: Ecology, ethnic humor and the praise of conviviality in the anime movie Ponpoko: The Heisei Tanuki War (1994).
      In Maria-Luiza Dimitru Oancea & Ramona Mihaila (eds.). Myth, symbol and ritual: Elucidatory paths to the fantastic unreality (pp. 299-320). Bucharest: Editura Universitatii du Bucuresti.
    • Swale, Alistair (2017). Memory and forgetting: Examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises. Japan Forum, 29(4), 518-536.

      “Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War. Miyazaki Hayao’s (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan’s militarist past. To answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.”
    • Ortabasi, Melek Su (2013). (Re)animating folklore: Raccoon dogs, foxes, and other supernatural Japanese citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko. Marvels & Tales, 27(2), 254-275.

      “Takahata Isao’s animated film Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko (Tanuki Battle of the Heisei Era, 1994) is a unique demonstration of the affinity between the supernatural aspects of folklore and animation itself. Featuring anthropomorphized animals that possess the uncanny powers attributed to them by folklore, Pompoko mobilizes the medium to display the animals’ shape-shifting skills in their war against the humans who threaten their habitat. Pompoko’s visual extrapolation of folk belief allows these animals to become more than a nostalgic reification of stable Japanese identity. By forcing drastic encounters between the realistic and the fantastic, Takahata’s film questions whether the human anxieties embodied in fox and raccoon dog folklore are really a thing of the past. I argue that Pompoko, through the medium of anime, shows how folklore can become an effective ideological tool for questioning what it actually means to be a (post)modern Japanese.”
    • Yamamoto, Fumiko (1998). Heisei Tanuki-Gassen: Pon Poko. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 18(1), 59-67.

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