Obituary: Isao Takahata
Early in the film Grave of the Fireflies, we see a young girl burst into tears. She wants to meet her mother, who is missing since an air raid hit the city. She squats and shudders with barely stifled anguish. Her brother, young and helpless, leaves her side and goes yonder, and sits with his head hung low. We watch the downcast boy and the bent girl, and we wonder, What next? Suddenly the brother, impulsively, absurdly, slips away his belongings and lunges at a horizontal bar. With some difficulty at first but smoothly later, he performs somersaults to distract the girl from her grief. Once, twice, he swings on. The background music picks up and rises to a crescendo. As we pull away from the pair, the surrounding rubble of the raging war comes into picture. The scene ends with the brother somersaulting and his crying sister crouched low. The gut punch, if one is still needed, is this: the sister never looks up.
This juxtaposition of gripping movement with glum stasis, and the exposition of pain in its purest form, was the kind of cinema Isao Takahata practised. Takahata, who passed away on Thursday at 82, was a filmmaker who, to pilfer Updike’s words, “gave mundane its beautiful due.” That he did so through the medium of animation, in a time when it thrived in the narrow niche of slam-bang action flicks, made him a revolutionary. Not as well known, and nowhere as prolific, as his Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, Takahata orchestrated his films with painstaking meticulousness and exacting standards of quality. He was a champion of hand-drawn animation and vehemently distrusted 3-D. His last film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. This film, with characters drawn by longtime collaborator Osamu Tanabe, was rendered entirely in line drawings, with each frame sketched on paper and later enlarged during animation. The effect — grainy and gorgeous — was one of heightened reality without actually seeming to aim for it. This depiction of dank yet beautiful realism in a predominantly garish world of fantasies was Takahata’s true genius.
Takahata, unlike his famed contemporaries, did not find his muse in the heroic, in the epic, in the tales of the kings, lion or human, in the sci-fi adventures and cheesy moralistic tales that were the norm of animation films. Takahata’s anime exposed the anomie in modern society. His films were for grownups that predominantly featured children in them. He found in suffering the sad music of humanity and masterfully transmuted this into his films. But that’s not all. Being human is to crawl and walk, swing and dive, roll and fly — to move, that is, with freedom physically. This too Takahata captured with an unassuming flair and grace. Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, My Neighbors the Yamadas, The Tale of Princess Kaguya — these were all films bathed in the colors of the ordinary — with a pinch of magic to flesh out the lighter and darker moods and eccentricities — and of the constant presence of pathos in life, exacerbated now and then by an onslaught of forces too numerous and daunting — like the shower of fire bombs over Kobe — for a common man to fight against, and who, in the face of it, could all but wait for it to pass. And in that waiting find life’s simplest pleasures.
Takahata was not an artist: he couldn’t draw. His frames were not elaborately detailed, the kind all too eagerly overdone in the productions of Hollywood. Often his frames were half-filled, and even while watching them on small screens (like I did) you sensed pockets of voids staring back at you, like whites of a human eye in the dark. The background art was often spare and lifeless: leaves did not flutter, boughs did not sway, garbage stayed stuck to the tarmac. The colors appeared watered down and broad-brushed. With nothing else to draw our attention, it was as if all Takahata wanted us to see and appreciate was only one thing: the human face. Ecstasy and tragedy, hunger and calls of nature, decrepitude and devastation — events, historic or every day, were reflected in the faces. Take for example this. In Fireflies, as a flurry of firebombs falls from the airplanes, we register the violence unleashed upon their impact not in the bludgeoned buildings but instead on the flush orange glow of fire on the faces of the onlooking siblings.
Takahata’s approach was not one of inundation of details. Nor did he directly seek to depict realism in all its minutiae. Perhaps he knew about the futility of such an impossible task. Just recall how often we have pinpointed goofs in animated films — a clock that doesn’t tick, a three-legged table, and the like — and laughed (and patted our backs) at the lazy oversight on the director’s part. Takahata did away with the illusion that animation, even the most scrupulous kind, could stand in for what is natural, for what is dynamic. And ironically, it was precisely this evasion of the ever-changing that gave his films an everlasting quality that others could only aspire to. This other kind of authenticity released his films from the cages of period and milieu — ephemeral both, from linguistic and cultural mores — again, limitations for any art. Freed thus from being contained to a specific time or locale, Takahata’s films, although inexplicably less popular than other Ghibli films, spoke to an ever-widening audience, and that too without ever resorting to the stock tropes of animation.
That’s not to say that Takahata was averse to the workings of the world. He might show kamikaze’s in silhouette, but he is careful to reveal, as in the final moments of Fireflies, the crumpled photograph of the siblings’ father, its edges broken and surface begrimed from surviving the demands of war. And look at the cruel irony at work, again in Fireflies, later when the brother is left to cremate his dead sister just as the war comes to end and jubilation descends upon the citizens after Japan’s unconditional surrender. The loss is incalculable, Takahata seems to say, and all of that which was human is lost forever, affecting inexpressibly those that are left behind to grieve.
In Hiroshima, John Hersey reports an instance of a woman who is mending, with a needle and thread, her torn kimono, in a park full of the dead and dying. A teeny tiny act of normalcy in a decimated city. I do not remember how many kilograms of what hellish substance was used that day to invoke such unprecedented hell on earth, but that small detail of the woman has stayed with me since the day I read it. Grave of the Fireflies, adapted by Takahata from Nosaka Akiyuki’s novel, and at least partly informed by Takahata’s own experiences as a young boy escaping war, is full of such moments — the face washed clean with water from a punctured pipe, the first self-made makeshift meal, the face screwed while tasting plum pickles, the screen-enveloping shot of a bowl of white rice. And who can forget that can of fruit drops? The accumulation, and repetition, of such montages stuck to the mind’s eye and never grew dull. Then there were the fireflies, luminous and levitating in the night air, giving light to the young ones in their time of darkness, but also reminding them of the transient nature of life on earth.
Takahata also made the fun and fantastic Pom Poko, about the rivaling bands of tanukis resisting, or learning to resist, the encroachment of their land and resources by an urban development plan. This was, like all Takahata, a melancholy tale, one of defiance and eventual failure. Orwellian in its theme and epic in scale, it was a visual and auditory treat as the in-fighting tanukis finally show enough balls to fight their true enemies — humans. In Kazuo Oga’a ageless art direction, Pomo Poko has aged well and is right up there with the best of Ghiblis.
There is, of course, My Neighbors the Yamadas, his most experimental film, and, to me, his funniest. But even funny Takahata is sort of sad: our laughs die prematurely when we realize the ideas behind the gags. The film is made up of a series of short scenes, picked from the lives of the Yamada household, and on the whole it’s a daringly realized film that holds well even today. Each member has a monologue of his own in the tight narrative that is family, and Takahata had an ear for those voices. What’s more: it has Basho’s haiku verses built-in.
Like:
Joyful laughter
breaks the silence
of an autumn eve.
And:
Fleeting dreams
an octopus , making its home in a trap
a summer moon.
Takahata’s films are remarkable for the sheer range of topics they address. Fireflies shows us war as it was, complete with worm-infested corpses. Only Yesterday is a straightforward drama of a woman looking back on her sad childhood and finding love in the unlikeliest of places. Yamadas picks and sifts through the nuances of middle-class family life. If the films do have a common denominator — beside the fact that they all feature children, often scores of them, in some capacity — it is that they are firmly rooted in the real problems of our world. Pom Poko, even with its shapeshifting, jumbo genital-ed raccoons, touched on such immediate issues as unplanned urbanization, ecological balance and man’s cruelty toward animals. Unlike Miyazaki’s fabulous creations — which are, in their own right, complex and immensely enjoyable — Takahati found his calling in the nitty-gritty of the ordinary. And, sometimes, the response of the ordinary in the face of the extraordinary. To me, this penchant for tackling the everyday and turning it into a breathtakingly beautiful tale, layered in themes and audacious in form, anchored by a deep empathy for characters who are without superpowers to bank on or call upon, the ear for those frivolities that tear apart families and world and humans and animals, was what was so commendable — so novelistic — about Takahata.
With those long stretches of lull, his films truly felt like novels. And he, the most eloquent speaker of the language of images. The images, spacious and soft-edged, were fluidly assembled, but their collation was such that they slowed down the pace and allowed us to absorb, think and fill in the gaps. Always mild on the eye, we never looked away. Such was the beauty and the power of storytelling in those simple sketches and elegant animation that even dialogues in some cases became redundant. (Watch Fireflies on mute to know what I mean.)
That a true-blue realist like Takahata should make his final film on Japan’s oldest folktale — and, in making it, turn it uncannily real — is further proof of his cinematic virtuoso. The Tale of Princess Kaguya earned an Oscar nomination and put Takahata on the global map of the greatest film directors, checking thus the box of worldwide popularity, that barometer of true success.
The film took eight years in the making. Much has been written about its plot elsewhere. And much more can be found re its high place in the cannon of Ghibli, and I’d say animated, films. I’ll leave you with two impressions that returned to me as I watched the film again yesterday. One was the pared down, bare minimum line sketching, simpler than even Yamadas, done just enough to give form to figures human and other essentials. Also look at the shadowed woods where a lone bamboo pole gleams of its ethereal contents — lonely and static except for the rays of light emerging from it. (The background art was by Kazuo Oga.) The next moment when we see Kaguya, revealed in a solitary enchanting moment of a blooming bamboo shoot, the features are fastidiously etched: Kaguya is small as a sparrow, fair and delicate, the pink of her cherubic cheeks done just right, her hair tied in a red ribbon. The smallness and delicateness contrast in the woodcutter’s gruff face and thick-fingered palms. This smallness also works as the starting point in the film, one from where, in remarkable spurts of growth, Kaguya would get visibly bigger within no time.
Another great sequence in a film full of these is Kaguya hugging her boyfriend in midair. In this joyous moment they both trundle toward earth as if in slow-motion. The background score briefly breaks off. Still joined, they turn upside down and head earthward, straight as a bullet. A single note of score accompanies their fall. Here, notice Kaguya’s hair, black and windswept. And notice the cap on the boy, impeccable and not an inch off-place. The real and the unreal— both in their rightful place. The couple arrest their fall with a perfectly elastic pullback and zip toward us, then they hover over rice fields and they free-fall in the rain, their boundless joy mingling with the strains of Joe Hisaishi’s grand score, now in full swing; they glide and dip over forests and fly in the company of birds; and in their romantic reverie they drift towards the white blaze of the moon — immediately the enchantment snaps and Kaguya squirms in the boy’s arms, hiding her face, their dream flight brought down to earth while it was on its way to heaven.
With Takahata, pathos was just around the corner, waiting to cut into the path of the leaps and bounds of youth. So were moments of rapturous movement and sudden stasis, two poles between which all of us shuttle back and forth; and although it is sad that he has now found his final resting place, he has bequeathed a legacy of films in whose flights of imagination and craft we would find his boyishly grinning face reflected forever.
So long, Isao.
