The Pressure That Made Miyazaki and Takahata
Plus: news.
Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back from its mid-year break, and we’re returning with a new Sunday issue:
1) A story about ‘70s television.
2) Newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – The grind
There was a time, before Studio Ghibli existed, when Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata weren’t well known. They weren’t the directors of Grave of the Fireflies or Spirited Away yet. For a while, they weren’t even successful.
During the ‘60s, Takahata oversaw Horus: Prince of the Sun at Toei Doga — and Miyazaki was on staff. The movie failed in theaters. A few years later, in 1971, the two switched studios to make a Pippi Longstocking series. When that fell apart, they landed on Lupin the 3rd, whose ratings were poor. The passion project they did afterward, Panda! Go, Panda! (1972), was no blockbuster itself.
“[T]here was a jinx among us,” Miyazaki later said. To them and their colleagues, like artists Yoichi Kotabe and Yasuo Otsuka, something was clearly wrong. “We thought first the jinx might be Paku-san,” Miyazaki added, using Takahata’s nickname.1
This group had ideas about what animation could be. And Takahata, always in the director role, was the chief theorist. A key goal was to create worlds and characters that felt real: tangible, concrete, present. Along those lines, they wanted to do work “that accurately depicted the foundations of daily living,” Miyazaki said — like cooking and cleaning. This was the basis of Pippi, from which Panda had emerged.2
The kids who actually got to see Panda were mesmerized — immersed in this world that felt believable, as if the characters really lived there day by day. The higher-ups had doubted the slower and quieter approach, but there was something here.
For the rest of the ‘70s, that something grew, and the jinx seemed to go away. Takahata and his friends started to turn their theories into hit television shows, even as the realities of the industry pushed back.
In 1973, Takahata left A Production, the studio behind Lupin, Panda and Pippi. Joining him were Miyazaki and Yoichi Kotabe. Another Tokyo company had contacted them with a proposal to turn the novel Heidi into animation for TV.3
That company was Zuiyo, led by a man named Shigehito Takahashi. He’d wanted to adapt Heidi for years — and had produced a failed pilot for it in the ‘60s.4
There were reasons to be worried about this idea. Zuiyo was doing a popular series at the time, but Takahata had heard bad things about its working conditions. Plus, Heidi lacks the fantasy in which animation specializes. It leans in a “naturalistic” direction, as he put it — and he felt that live actors would be a better fit.5
Takahata signed on after maybe three months of waffling. In the end, his Heidi would take the ideas of Pippi — life in a world that feels real — to the extreme. Kotabe said that “Takahata wanted to delve deep into [the story] and show [Heidi’s] daily life up in the mountains and all the human relationships.” Even her path to the cabin would be designed to feel concrete, a place that viewers revisited week after week. Capturing these things well, the team felt, would capture children’s imaginations.6
Drama was dialed back, and traditional filmmaking replaced the noise and flash common in TV animation back then. As Takahata explained in 1977:
I knew I was embarking on something that might not be considered TV-like, that is not specifically aimed at children, or rather something that children might not be able to follow.
To put it another way, children tended to just stare at the screen very passively, instead of actively trying to enter it. I forced the viewer to pay attention by incorporating things like full-body or wide shots with almost no dialogue, just acting — rather than relying on gimmicks like loud bangs to draw attention, where you can just look at the screen and get the gist of what’s happening. I was a bit worried about whether it would work on TV … to do that kind of thing in animation, you need a sense of reality, a sense of presence, to make the viewer feel that such things really took place, that such a world truly existed and furthermore that the characters were alive and active. In terms of the technical methods and story construction required for this, it can’t be done with the effects-driven approach. … I tried to use the same approach to TV that I would to film, in the shots and the way the story unfolded, even if it might seem to have less effect in the usual sense.7
The core goal that drove Takahata, Miyazaki and Kotabe was making something good that could enrich the people watching. “We wanted to create a work for children that wasn’t frivolous,” Miyazaki noted. Even the way they talked about their work was a bit unusual. “When we were making the TV series Heidi: Girl of the Alps, we always referred to it as a ‘film,’ ” he said.8
There were two sides to Heidi. It was a film — but it was a film in 52 parts. Zuiyo was a commercial studio entrenched in the problems of the industry, and those initial red flags were not imaginary.
Miyazaki remembered an early moment when he, Takahata and Kotabe visited the production studio. They arrived in the late morning to find an artist napping on the couch — Akiko Koyama, in charge of color checks for the animation cels. “Her eyes were bloodshot. I could tell right off that she had stayed up all night and had only gotten to sleep earlier that morning,” Miyazaki said.
He described the studio space in detail:
It was a prefab building in a parking lot, and before it became a studio it had been a wig shop. When the wig shop owner ran off leaving a pile of debts, the studio rented the space. [laughter]
Along the perimeter of the studio, the roof came down as low as my chest. We first went there in the heat of summer when the air conditioner happened to be broken, so it was about 104ºF (40ºC) inside. And in the winter, no matter how strong the heater, it was freezing cold due to all the gaps in the walls. It was truly a horrific place.
The team spent months there before moving to another building later in the year — one with its own problems.
In July 1973, Zuiyo sent Takahata, Miyazaki and Kotabe to Switzerland for research. The studio wanted to sell Heidi abroad: to avoid embarrassing mistakes that would hurt the show’s appeal in Europe, they needed to go. But it deepened the project in creative ways, too. People, landscapes and landmarks found their way into the work. Kotabe gave Heidi short hair thanks to advice he got on the trip.9
Zuiyo was hoping for a high-quality show. The team wanted to make a high-quality show. What resulted was “a year-long state of emergency,” in Miyazaki’s words.
Throughout 1974, a small crew of supervisors were jammed together at Zuiyo, handing out work to contract studios and correcting the work that came back. Many slept there — Takahata lived there for most of the year. Nearly every episode was produced, from storyboard to final product, in one week each.10
Miyazaki drew Heidi’s layouts himself — around 300, weekly. The job made him something like Takahata’s camera operator: he sketched the characters, backgrounds, compositions and camera directions for the shots. Kotabe was the sole character designer and animation director, which left him to correct every key drawing. “I was determined not to cut corners, no matter how small the shot,” he said.
According to Miyazaki, the hardest jobs belonged to Akiko Koyama and Masako Shinohara (final animation checker). Basically the whole show passed through their hands — at times, they worked in 30-hour stretches or more.11 Koyama got maybe two hours of sleep per night.
Poor conditions, even labor code violations, weren’t abnormal in Japan’s TV animation industry. At Zuiyo, the standard crunch collided with the team’s desire to make something special. Each Heidi supervisor was irreplaceable and wildly overworked; each relied on the dedication of all the others in the fight against the deadline.
Like many on the team, Kotabe was proud of Heidi and his own contributions to it. “I truly feel glad that I was able to make this,” he said years later. But the workload also, he noted, gave him a back injury that lasted the rest of his life.
Heidi was a game-changing hit. Miyazaki had expected it to fail — as had a lot of people. Its success was fuel for the team. “It was most gratifying that our own children loved the series,” he wrote. “Though limp with exhaustion, we were happy. This prodded us to complete our work.”
The group didn’t plan to keep following the Heidi path after Heidi was done. But the studio, which had transformed into Nippon Animation during production, needed to fill another slate. And Heidi’s success meant adapting more classic books into Takahata’s everyday realism — in similar working conditions.
“We realized that television required that our state of emergency become a normal condition,” Miyazaki wrote. “Our work may have been successful, but our work environment did not improve one bit.”
In 1975, Takahata began preparing a series called 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother, based on an old Italian novel. It wasn’t his pick, and he wasn’t thrilled with the material. “Regardless of our wishes, the next project was decided, and we had to do it,” he said. Kotabe and Miyazaki came along again. The latter had been offered a directing job himself, but had refused: Takahata’s Heidi ordeal terrified him.12
Main staffers on 3,000 Leagues traveled to Italy and Argentina for research — although Kotabe’s back injury kept him in Japan. Argentina was in political turmoil at the time; the show’s art director, Takamura Mukuo, briefly got arrested. The mood soured, especially when the team learned that Argentina’s landscape looked nothing like the novel’s description. There were arguments. Despair set in for a while.13
Even so, the team stayed strong. Takahata found ways to make the project interesting — pulling from Italian neorealism, and massively expanding the original story with the help of writer Kazuo Fukazawa. And Miyazaki’s layouts were better than ever.
They built on Heidi’s grounded cinematography. “Paku-san’s thinking is that a film is a continuity, a continuity of time and space,” Miyazaki once said. In cel animation, this continuity is an illusion put across by careful editing, drawing, painting and camerawork. Done in a certain way, it makes an animated world feel like it obeys the laws of space and time. It can lend a documentary vibe. In fact, Takahata once thought of treating the 52 episodes of 3,000 Leagues like raw documentary footage for a feature film.
Those 52 episodes took another year to make. Throughout 1976, Miyazaki was once again drawing 300 layouts per week, on top of his other work. But he was burnt now, and the show was even more demanding. “It was my first time experiencing such difficulty. It was unprecedented hardship,” he said in 1977. Kotabe developed a wrist condition so severe that he couldn’t hold a pencil at times: he taped it to his hand.
It was another well-regarded project, although not a smash hit. But the grind of television was changing the team, and breaking it up. Kotabe left after 3,000 Leagues — he didn’t want to repeat himself, and the work was too much.14
Even Miyazaki had a limit. He and Takahata had collaborated for more than a decade — batting around ideas, speaking constantly. Yet Miyazaki rarely got to attend the meetings for Heidi, and he offered even fewer ideas on 3,000 Leagues.15 As he said:
Heidi was entirely Paku-san’s world. … Until that time, whenever I worked together with Paku-san, without fail, we had detailed discussions about the storylines and the next steps to take, and as we laid there talking and arguing, a common idea welled up in us, and we decided to draw it. That was how it went. However, since around Heidi, just the work on screen design and layout was taking too long. I left the story all to Paku-san, and I ended up just handling the storyboards that came in. By the time we got to 3,000 Leagues, I’d already given up with Heidi, so I thought of it as an extension of that and left it all to Paku-san.
Miyazaki was an idea guy who couldn’t use his ideas anymore. The shows drifted further and further away from his own interests. Takahata felt that even Heidi had, partway through, veered from the plan to “idealize and clearly bring out the charm hidden in everyday life” that thrilled Miyazaki.
The industry was changing their relationship. And their personal tastes kept evolving as they worked and aged. Takahata came to see his own Heidi as a character too far from reality: he wanted to make things less idealized, more objective. Even his filmmaking leaned deeper into “a somewhat external, objective standpoint (like a documentary) [that] left room for the audience to judge things for themselves,” as he put it.
Miyazaki loved fantasy, or “lies.” And he needed to identify with his characters, to feel what they felt. As Takahata’s style drifted, it only increased Miyazaki’s longing for a different kind of animation: the days of cartoons, of gags and wild adventures.16
He escaped by taking a director role on Future Boy Conan (1978), a series at Nippon Animation. Miyazaki called the project a cartoon movie, or manga eiga — a willfully old-fashioned, even naive term for animated films in Japan. He made something full of his pent-up ideas and energy.17
Meanwhile, Takahata got assigned Anne of Green Gables (1979). It became his most objective and least idealized project yet.
The two of them worked a bit on each other’s shows. They’d grown apart creatively, though. Anne was very much not for Miyazaki: he asked why it couldn’t be more like Heidi. Its sheer distance from the characters, Takahata believed, drove him away.
Miyazaki had plenty of reasons to quit Anne when he did, after 15 episodes. Among other things, it was the toughest project of Takahata’s career so far, and Miyazaki was tired of research trips and recreating real places. He wasn’t available for the Anne team’s visit to Canada in 1978 — but he said that he wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway. He wanted to draw what he wanted to draw.
Anne was a big hit. Conan was modestly successful. Both were hard productions (although Anne was harder), and both were victims of the TV animation industry. Nippon Animation was, in 1978, reportedly Japan’s most prolific studio in the business. It was overseeing six episodes per week. There was no way out.18
The two shows offer snapshots of Miyazaki’s and Takahata’s interests at that moment in time. Their work in the ‘70s industry had changed them, and their tastes resided, at least right then, at opposite ends: fantasy versus naturalism. In the Panda! Go, Panda! era, they’d been closer. The vicious world of Japanese television had helped to split them apart, and the two made independent names for themselves.
Still, the boundary between them was porous. With Anne and Conan, both wanted to make great, inspiring work built on a sense of believability — physical presence, literal space and time, an eye for everyday detail. “It’s an absurd story at first glance,” Miyazaki said about Conan in 1978, “but we’ve struggled with how to make it a cheerful cartoon movie while also imbuing it with a sense of presence and some sort of credibility.”
They were always more united than they were divided. Even Miyazaki’s fantasy was portrayed realistically, with the care that had made Heidi feel so present. His style was forever tied to Takahata’s, and to those 300 layouts he’d drawn per week. Like Miyazaki said in the early ‘80s:
Takahata-san’s direction is fairly orthodox, creating a proper continuity of time and space. I’m deeply influenced by that. The rest is a matter of how much you want to lie. I’m the kind of person who wants to lie a lot, so I guess that’s all there is to it.19
2 – Newsbits
We lost animator Igor Malomud (38). See this profile by the magazine Seance for details on Malomud’s life and work, including the film Small Being’s Life.
In Canada, I Am Frankelda won a special mention from the Fantasia Festival. At its screening, the directors revealed that they’re working with Guillermo del Toro to polish the film and finalize a new cut for wide distribution later this year.
There’s a trailer for the dubbed version of Nezha 2, produced by A24 in America. It’s due to reach theaters in August.
In Poland, artist Mathias Zamęcki spent three years on a short called Duel, his first complete film. “Back in 2022, I hit a wall with social media,” he told us. He started putting time into this personal Blender project instead. It’s made to be seen vertically — he wanted “composition-wise to make the most of that frame.”
In America, PBS faced dramatic budget cuts from the government, endangering the whole animation ecosystem it supports.
The new Demon Slayer film is a hit in Japan, breaking 10 billion yen (around $67.6 million) faster than any other Japanese movie.
The American animation insider Emily Brundige (Goldie) now has a newsletter — a growing trend for the industry.
A few weeks ago, in Mexico, the animated nominees for the Ariel Awards were announced. They’re similar to the Oscars, and a few films in the running are Fulgores and Dolores, the latter by El Taller del Chucho (Pinocchio).
The Japanese stop-motion feature Junk World will make its international debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
On that note, in Canada, the Toronto Film Festival released an 80-minute lecture by Guillermo del Toro on Studio Ghibli. It took place in 2013.
Until next time!
From Starting Point 1979–1996 (“Hayao Miyazaki on His Own Works”). We also cited “On the Periphery of the Work” and “A Woman Finish Inspector” from the same book.
The quote comes from Miyazaki’s interview in the booklet for the Heidi: Girl of the Alps Memorial Box Blu-ray. The interviews with Kotabe and Takahata were also key sources.
See Takahata’s Thoughts While Making Movies II (『ハイジ』への感謝). We also referred to 「母をたずねて三千里」で目指したもの.
From the book The Day Heidi Was Born, an important source today.
Takahata defined the roots of Heidi as “naturalistic literature” in The Phantom Pippi Longstocking. He mentioned the success of that Zuiyo series, Rocky Chuck, in Thoughts While Making Movies (テレビでなければできなかったこと). We cited a few essays from the book today, including 逃がした魚は大きかったか？ and “母をたずねて三千里”取材旅行報告書及び決算報告.
As an aside, naturalism was new for Takahata. In 1975, he mentioned the “naturalistic tendencies” underlying 3,000 Leagues in his report from the show’s scouting trip. Just a few years earlier, though, he’d dismissed animated naturalism in his project outline for Pippi. As seen in The Phantom Pippi Longstocking:
It’s not animation if it remains a naturalistic portrayal of real, everyday life. While depicting the behavior of the quirky girl Pippi, it is necessary to heighten the expressions in a way that expands children’s imaginations and lets them feel the freedom of play and the joy of discovery. … Unless a lively Pippi is lively, beautiful things are beautiful to the audience, joyful things are joyful and tasty things are tasty and substantial, only the story will be able to hold the audience’s interest, especially in the case of children.
Takahata was hesitant to tackle Heidi in part for these stylistic reasons. It’s possible to imagine him developing differently as an artist (and staying away from objectivity in his work) if he hadn’t been pushed in this direction.
The quote comes from Kotabe’s interview for Iwata Asks.
See the Takahata interview in Film 1/24 (September 1, 1977), one of our critical sources today, alongside the Miyazaki interview in the same issue.
See Turning Point 1997–2008 (“I’ve Always Wanted to Create a Film About Which I Could Say, ‘I’m Just Glad I Was Born, So I Could Make This’ ”). He continued by echoing Takahata:
... we’ve always thought we were making “films” rather than cartoons. Even though we’re always looking at drawings instead of live action, after a while, in our heads it’s as though real, live humans are moving about. That’s the way we see it. And that’s certainly true for me as well. Even though we’re just looking at drawings, after a while an entire world is created. When the project is over, it seems as though that world really existed somewhere, and still exists. It transcends drawings. I often tell our staff that they’re not just creating drawings. They have to draw believing there’s a world out there; if they just try to make drawings, they’ll never get beyond that point.
Some of these details come from Yoichi Kotabe: Legendary Animator – His Animated Drawings. An important source.
The production situation was explained in Isao Takahata: A Legend in Japanese Animation, used several times.
Miyazaki described this in Animage (July 1985), used a few times.
Miyazaki shared this information in Animage (August 1985).
For details about this, see the interviews in 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother: Newtype Illustrated Collection.
Kotabe discussed his reasons for going elsewhere and turning down Anne of Green Gables in the book Manga eiga hyoryu-ki (漫画映画漂流記).
In an interview for Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue, animator Toshitsugu Saida said that Miyazaki was rarely able to attend the Heidi meetings because of his schedule. Miyazaki’s interview for the book is quoted just after this.
Takahata spoke about his regrets with Heidi’s idealization, and Miyazaki’s distaste for Anne’s objectivity, in the long interview about Anne in Thoughts While Making Movies. He further discussed their split in an essay for Animage (August 1981), used a few times.
Yasuo Otsuka made the point about Miyazaki’s purposely “naive” and old-fashioned dream of manga eiga in Animage (August 1981).
That figure comes from the profile on Nippon Animation in Animage (October 1978), used a few times. The short article about Conan from that issue gets quoted later in the piece.
From Miyazaki’s interview in Little Norse Prince Valiant Roman Album Excellent 60.
Incredible to read. Why do I feel like I've seen Heidi as a child in the 80's? Given it's based on a European story, was it ever broadcast in the UK? It just seems very familiar.
It was great to get an understanding of where Miyazaki's ideas and themes started to come from. As I'm slowly working through his film work, I notice more and more that things happen slowly, deliberately, or even just happen because that's part of the characters normal life, with no real consequence to the story. The sense of presence is now something I understand. Also loved looking at the stills and storyboards.
This was a fantastic read for me for so many reasons—including my fascination with when Miyazaki and Takahata stylistically split (to put it simplistically) and how Takahata created the Nippon Animation World Masterpiece Theatre “house style” with his three children’s lit adaptations. (Not mentioned here, but interesting is that Future Boy Conan was based on a children’s novel too, but not a reality based established classic). Though the many non Takahata WMT series that followed varied wildly in style, I remember in the 90s when I first got into anime, the then current series Romeo’s Blue Skies (one of the best of the later series) confused us fans with no info about it as to why it seemed to share so much with women’s of both Taka and Miya Studio Ghibli films…
I’m a huge Osamu Dezaki fan and it’s no secret that T and M in the 70s were at odds with his sophisticated limited animation style — Dezaki favouring extremely detailed character designs, striking camera direction providing most of the movement and often a lot of visual stylization (impressionistic colour choices, etc) whereas with Heidi etc the focus was on as fluid movement as they could afford, simple character designs that allowed that, more full frame shots with realistic backgrounds etc.
For this reason I’m especially interested in comparing Takahata’s three Nippon WMT series (even if Heidi was technically before) with Dezaki’s Nobody’s Boy Remi and Treasure Island—series that were partly commissioned to rival the success of the WMT series with family targeted serials based on Western children’s literary classics set in the past. Really exemplifies perfectly the wildly different takes the two directors (and collaborators) had towards very similar projects (and I love both styles). Both Dezaki and Takahata felt more interested in film and approaching their works as films for example—but had wildly different styles in mind (Dezaki would have no interest in Takahata’s “documentary” approach, etc)
And I’ve rambled on long enough but your wonderful article gave me a lot to think about. I will add that as a kid in Canada in the 80s who was raised English but was in French immersion school and so allowed to watch tv in the afternoon/-if it was in French, one of my biggest joys was finding the French dub of Anne (oddly no English dub was made for Canada despite the source). Of course back then I had no idea it would be my first exposure to Takahata’s work.