Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata passed away in a Tokyo hospital on Thursday at the age of 82. After his health deteriorated last summer, he had been repeatedly hospitalized. The cause of death has yet to be confirmed, with reports allegedly citing heart trouble or lung cancer as the reason.
He was best known for his first film at Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies (1988) which was the critically acclaimed. It is a tale of two children who are struggling to survive at the end of World War II. When he was 9 years old, Takahata himself had survived heavy U.S. bombing of Okayama City.
Isao Takahata first met Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki at Toei Animation after graduating from the University of Tokyo with a degree in French literature. They launched Ghibli along with Toshio Suzuki in 1985.
Isao Takahata's directorial debut The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun in 1961, was a box-office flop, which led to Takahata eventually leaving the company.
His fifth and final movie for Ghibli, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, was one of the most expensive Japanese films made with a budget of around $50 million. It was nominated for the best animated feature at the 2015 Oscars, but it failed to recoup its production budget after it was released in Japan in November 2013 (and the following year in the U.S.).
Miyazaki had also announced his retirement two months before, which led the future of filmmaking at Ghibli into doubt. He announced last year that he was coming out of retirement with his next feature, How Do You Live? slated to release in 2020.
