Born in 1935 in Mie Prefecture, he survived the firebombing of Okayama as a nine-year-old — an experience he described flatly in later interviews and which sits somewhere underneath Grave of the Fireflies. He read French literature at the University of Tokyo, came to animation through Paul Grimault's Le Roi et l'Oiseau, and joined Toei with no drawing background whatsoever.
A director who was not an animator
This is genuinely unusual, and it shaped everything. He worked through structure, research, storyboarding conversations and relentless specificity: how a person of that age, in that region, in that year, would hold a bowl. Animators who worked with him describe exacting requests and very little sympathy for schedules.
Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), his first feature, ran massively over time and budget and did poorly on release. It also changed what people thought Japanese animation could carry. He was, in effect, demoted for it. Every later Takahata production carried the same reputational shadow: brilliant, late, expensive.
The television decade
Between 1974 and 1979 he directed Heidi, Girl of the Alps, 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother and Anne of Green Gables, with Miyazaki on scene design and layout for much of it. Americans mostly missed this run, and it is the missing piece in most English-language accounts of Ghibli.
Those series are where the studio's grammar was worked out: daily routine as drama, landscape as a character, food prepared in real time, emotion carried by posture rather than dialogue. The research trips to Europe for Heidi are the direct ancestor of every location scout Ghibli has done since.
Grave of the Fireflies
Released in 1988 alongside Totoro. It follows a teenage boy and his small sister after the firebombing of Kobe, and it does not spare you. Takahata objected, repeatedly, to it being described as an anti-war film; he framed it as a story about a boy who withdraws from a community that would have kept him and his sister alive, and about the failure that follows.
Practical advice from someone who has recommended it badly in the past: do not put it on for a child because it is a cartoon, and do not schedule anything for afterwards.
Only Yesterday and the ordinary
Only Yesterday (1991) cuts between a twenty-seven-year-old office worker on a farming holiday and her memories of fifth grade. There is no plot engine at all. There is a long, quiet argument about whether the life you built is the one you wanted.
Two technical details make it remarkable. The adult sequences use unusually specific facial animation — cheek muscles, the small movements under the eyes — drawn from filmed reference, which was almost unheard of in animation at the time. The childhood sequences are drawn lighter, with white space bleeding out at the edges of the frame, because memory has no background.
Disney reportedly hesitated over its American release for years, partly because a scene in which schoolgirls discuss menstruation was considered a problem. It did not get a proper English-language release until 2016.
Pom Poko, the Yamadas, Kaguya
Pom Poko (1994) is a documentary-shaped comedy about shape-shifting raccoon dogs losing their forest to the Tama New Town development. It is very funny, structurally strange, and ends in real defeat. It is also the film most likely to confuse an American viewer for anatomical reasons the subtitles handle with admirable calm.
My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) abandoned cels entirely for a digital watercolour look built to imitate a four-panel newspaper comic. It lost money. It also gave the studio its digital pipeline.
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) is the culmination: a thousand-year-old folk tale drawn as if the line itself were alive, with charcoal and brush strokes left visible and colour deliberately unfinished at the edges. It took roughly eight years and cost more than any other Ghibli film. There is a sequence in it — a flight through a landscape as the drawing tears itself apart — that I would put against anything in animation, anywhere.
He died in April 2018, aged 82, with a Heian-era project unmade. Miyazaki's eulogy is worth reading if you find a good translation of it; fifty-five years of argument compressed into a few paragraphs.