Studio Ghibli co-founder, director Isao Takahata dies at 82
TOKYO — Isao Takahata, co-founder of the prestigious Japanese animator Studio Ghibli that stuck to a hand-drawn “manga” look in the face of digital filmmaking, has died. He was 82.
Takahata started Ghibli with Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, hoping to create Japan’s Disney, and helped shape the style and voice of what became one of the world’s most respected animation studios as well as this nation’s prized cultural export.
He directed “Grave of the Fireflies,” a tragic tale about wartime childhood, and produced some of the studio’s films, including Miyazaki’s 1984 “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” which tells the horror of environmental disaster through a story about a princess.
Takahata died Thursday of lung cancer at a Tokyo hospital, according to a studio statement Friday.