Takahata also continued to direct his own features and series, most notably the 1979 anime Anne of Green Gables, and they kept on collaborating. By 1979, he was directing his first film, The Castle of Cagliostro.
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Over the next decade, Miyazaki worked on animated films and series and also wrote and illustrated manga shows. In 1971, they left Toei Animation together and went to work at a rival studio, A-Pro, and then another studio, Zuiyō Eizō, where they collaborated on several more films and series together. But Miyazaki and Takahata now had a collaborative vision for the future. It took nearly three years for Horus to be completed, and the studio considered it a financial failure Horus played in theaters for only a few weeks. Horus received plenty of critical praise at the time and is widely seen today as an important film - but in what would become a pattern for their future work, the film’s production time ran long, mainly due to the painstaking perfectionism of its creators. Takahata and Miyazaki worked so well together on this first film that they remained collaborators for the rest of their lives. The men’s synergy of styles led to their first collaboration, with Takahata as director and Miyazaki as key animator, on 1968’s Horus, Prince of the Sun, a.k.a. While Miyazaki was strongly influenced by popular manga artists and animators, Takahata was heavily influenced by the French New Wave, a group of filmmakers who sought to deepen the artistry of cinema with experimental techniques and an emphasis on visual, kinetic storytelling. Takahata was five years older than Miyazaki, and likewise grew up during the war - he’d survived the bombing of Okayama in 1945, when he was 9. Hired to do laborious grunt work at the well-established studio Toei Animation, Miyazaki threw himself into his art and gradually moved up the ranks to become a chief animator and storyboard artist.Īt Toei, Miyazaki met Isao Takahata, an assistant director who had the chance to direct his first film just as Miyazaki was advancing as an animator. Miyazaki started out as a manga artist, learning from innovators like Osamu Tezuka ( Astro Boy, Black Jack, Kimba the White Lion), but his focus on animation drew him to the industry straight out of college. Studio Ghibli established itself as the home of Miyazaki, but all of its founders are animation giantsīorn in 1941, Hayao Miyazaki was a child of war: His father manufactured parts for war planes, and to avoid bombing, his family had to relocate to a new city not once, but twice. Just in time for the catalog’s momentous streaming launch next week, we’re bringing you a guide to the studio, as well as our list of must-see films by Hayao Miyazaki and other iconic Ghibli directors. So if you haven’t been able to catch them, either in a theater or on video/DVD while you were growing up, you might not be familiar with the enchanting Ghibli film library. A warning, however: Although it’s an undisputed masterpiece, it’s also one of the saddest films ever made.)
(The Isao Takahata-directed Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is the only Ghibli film missing from the HBO Max catalog at launch instead, you can watch it on Hulu.
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And because only a few of those films have been available online - and even then, only on digital rental marketplaces - many of its devoted fans have yet to discover the full Ghibli catalog. Co-founded in 1985 by a well-established but by no means well-known animator, Hayao Miyazaki, Ghibli’s painstaking animation process, distinctive visual style, and artistic storytelling techniques are revered in film schools the world over.īecause the studio’s decades’ worth of work took time to gain recognition outside of Japan, many people have yet to discover Ghibli films. But Ghibli - pronounced “Jib-lee,” as in Gigi or gerbil - looms large over not only the landscape of animation but also the landscape of cinema itself. This landmark might not mean much if you don’t pay attention to animation or Japanese films. Animated masterpieces like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, The Wind Rises, and many more are now available to subscribers. The newly launched service features all but one of the studio’s 22 movies. The arrival of Studio Ghibli films to HBO Max marks the first time the beloved Japanese animation studio’s legendary catalog will be available for easy streaming without having to buy or rent films individually.