Road to Fame: Social Trajectory of Takahata Isao

Abstract

This paper examines how Takahata Isao’s reputation as a filmmaker was established, focusing on the period between Horus: The Prince of the Sun (1968) and Only Yesterday (1991), using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “consecration”. Through detailed analysis of promotion strategies, popular and critical reception of his films, and his appearance in different types of media in the form of essays and interviews, I will discuss how Takahata and his films were “consecrated”, or came to be recognized as something respectable and deserve critical attention. Throughout the analysis the focus will be on the relationship between different “fields” rather than his films. I will contend that the process of his consecration is deeply related to that of the establishment of the field of anime and its fandom in the late 1970s, and its relationship with other fields with greater cultural capital, such as literature and live-action films as well as non-Japanese animations. The association of Takahata and his films with these fields was used by media, stakeholders in film productions including Studio Ghibli and publishing houses Tokuma shoten and Shinchōsha, as well as Takahata himself, to distinguish him and his films from other anime.

1. Introduction

One year after the death of Takahata Isao (1935–2018),1 a special exhibition was held at The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, one of the most prestigious venues in Japan for the exhibition of modern art. Takahata was the very first, and so far the only creator of Japanese animation whose works were put on exhibition at the museum. The catalogue of the exhibition underlines the significance of his works. The introduction refers to him as “an innovator who constantly searched for contemporary themes and pursued new means of expression that suited these subjects” and “the trajectory of his creative work established a foundation for postwar Japanese animation while also exerting a tremendous influence on other artists, both in Japan and abroad” (NHK 2019, p. 5).

With the global success of anime and Studio Ghibli, and also the actual achievement of Takahata himself, it looks hardly surprising that he is now enjoying the fame and recognition as best represented by the special exhibition. After graduating from University of Tokyo, the best university in Japan, with a degree in French literature in 1959, he joined Tōei dōga, an animation studio that created the first postwar animated feature in Japan. Miyazaki Hayao, known for My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988), Princess Mononoke (Mononokehime, 1997) and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001) was one of his younger colleagues at the studio. Takahata’s early works including his first feature Horus: Prince of the Sun (Taiyō no ōji Horusu no daibōken, 1968, Horus hereafter) and TV anime series he directed in the 1970s after leaving the studio are monumental in the history of postwar Japanese animation because, as anime critic Hikawa Ryūsuke puts it in an article published shortly after Takahata’s death, they succeeded in “producing a space whose existence the audience can believe in” in animation, which became a hallmark of Japanese so-called anime (Hikawa 2018, p. 66). In the 1980s, Takahata returned to production of features, and in 1985, he co-founded Studio Ghibli with Miyazaki. After making three films, in which he relentlessly pursued realistic depiction of scenery, people and animals and their lives, in My Neighbor Yamada (Tonari no Yamada kun, 1999) he turned to a very different style of animation, employing more fuzzy drawing with pale color that looks as if drawn and painted on paper entirely by hand. In the year of release, the film joined the permanent collection at MOMA in New York City (Studio Ghibli 2015, p. 39). However, it took fourteen years before his next, and last film to be released in the form of The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Kaguyahime no monogatari, 2013), in which he perfected the technique he used for My Neighbor Yamada. In addition to his animated features and TV series, Takahata also created a documentary film Yanagawa horiwari monogatari (The Tales of the Yanagawa Canals, 1987) and wrote books on Japanese and French animation as well as traditional Japanese visual art.

However, the type of acclaim we see in the catalogue of the exhibition does not simply reflect Takahata’s achievement as such. Instead, it is also, or rather more of a culmination of a process in which he and his works were enshrined. Looking back at his career reveals that his fame was built up gradually and sometimes retrospectively at different levels and within or across different fields. This article focuses on what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “social trajectory” of Takahata. According to Bourdieu:

Social Trajectory … is defined as the set of successive movements of an agent in a structural (hierarchized) space, itself subject to displacements and distortion, or, more precisely, in the structure of the distribution of the different kinds of capital which are at stake in the field, economic capital and the specific capital of consecration (in its different kinds). These movements, which define social ageing, are of two orders. They may be limited to one sector of the field and lie along the same axis of consecration, in which case ageing is marked by a positive, zero or negative accumulation of specific capital; or they may imply a change of sector and the reconversion of one kind of specific capital into another (e.g., the case of the [French] Symbolist poets who moved into the psychological novel) or of specific capital into economic capital (in the case of shifts from poetry to the ‘novel of manners’ or the theatre or, still more clearly, to cabaret or serialized fiction).

(Bourdieu 1993, p. 276, italics in the original.)

Takahata’s career has characteristics of the second and the third cases: in the first twenty years of his career starting with Horus, he first placed himself in the field of film before moving to TV animation, then back to film. During this period, he gained recognition by those in the field of general film and anime, including critics and fans. We should note that he was also recognized by those outside these fields, but often “anonymously”; in the case of the TV series, although viewers found them of excellent quality, they, more often than not, did not pay attention to the name of the creator. After Grave of Fireflies (Hotaru no haka, 1988), however, his fame was actively converted into economic capital as a result of “commercialization” of Studio Ghibli led by its producer Suzuki Toshio. Instead of “fame”, we can use another term “symbolic capital,” which, according to Bourdieu (1993, p. 75), is “a ‘credit’ which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees ‘economic’ profits.” Interestingly, Only Yesterday (Omoide poroporo, 1991), which became the first major economic success, was met with negative critical reaction, but Takahata firmly established his position as a prominent filmmaker with a recognition of achievement by the Japanese government. Yet, after the commercial failure of My Neighbor Yamada, he mainly acted as a public intellectual, working almost exclusively on academic works as well as giving lectures and talks instead of filmmaking until The Tale of Princess Kaguya. In short, throughout his career Takahata was moving over different sectors within the field of anime (feature, TV, then feature again) as well as between different sectors belonging to separate fields (film- or animation-making and public intellectual). At the same time, he accumulated symbolic capital within the field of anime and film with his early works, which then was converted into economic capital. As I will argue toward the end of this article, with Only Yesterday the economic capital, in turn, was converted back into symbolic capital. Due to limitation of space, only the period up to this can be covered in this article. However, in the period beyond My Neighbor Yamada, the symbolic capital gained up to that point and loss of economic capital enabled (or forced) him to take the position of a public intellectual for as long as fourteen years until he created Princess Kaguya.

Throughout this article, I will employ Bourdieu’s concept of “field”. In a field, as Bourdieu (1993, p. 30) defines it, positions within it are relative to each other, and the field itself is defined in hierarchical relation to other fields (p. 47). We can apply this concept of field to different levels from microscopic (positions of individual producers within a field) to macroscopic (positions of genres or what Bourdieu calls domains within the field, and also that of the field itself vis-à-vis a broader one, for example, literary field and field of cultural production in general). And at all levels, the struggle over legitimacy is taking place because all these agents, domains and fields are in hierarchical order, with some fields and agents in them having more power than those in others.

There are two important points about field for the purpose of this particular article. One is that when it is applied to art, it takes various factors other than the creators into consideration. Field is a site of struggle for power and dominance, and the artists are not the only agents within the struggle. To compete in the struggle, the participants have to gain capital. This can take the form of economic or symbolic capital, and the artists can make a choice as to which type of capital they would pursue, or how they maneuver in the field. But artists are not the sole subjects that have agency in the field. Bourdieu (1993, p. 35) asserts that for a piece of cultural product to be recognized as something valuable, there has to be a social discourse as such. Therefore, he states, we should pay attention to “the social condition of the production of a set of objects socially constituted as work of art” (p. 37, italics in the original). To do this, we need to reflect on “the condition of production of the field of social agents (e.g., museums, galleries, academies, etc.) which help to define and produce the value of works of art” or to “consecrate” them (ibid.) This is exactly what I intend to do in this article. However, in Takahata’s career, the actual recognition of his works as “art” genuinely starts after commercialization of his works (not the content but the way the films are promoted) in the 1990s. So in this paper, instead of looking at “museums, galleries, academies”, I will focus more on critical and popular reception to examine how Takahata and his works gradually gained recognition or symbolic capital within different fields, thus becoming “consecrated”.

The process of “consecration” or recognition of Takahata and his works is unique and important because it happens not just within the field of anime but involves various different fields in hierarchical order, anime sometimes being at the lower end. The process of formation of Takahata’s reputation is marked by attempts to raise the status of anime, then segregate him and his films as well as Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki from the rest of anime to further establish their stronghold. In addition, in Takahata’s career, just like in that of Miyazaki and the history of Studio Ghibli, the commercial factor plays a significant role in determining how his films are made despite his apparent image as an auteur, as it is presented by himself and the studio, as well as perceived by critics. Bourdieu’s “field” enables us to see how Takahata’s reputation was established at different levels and within different areas throughout his career. Furthermore, it reminds us that anime, as a popular and commercial product, does not exist within the vacuum that occasionally creates some “artistic work” besides many examples of “pulp” and only the former deserves “serious” critical attention, which is often centered around textual or sociological analysis. Instead, it is situated within a complex universe of different cultural products with varying degrees of legitimacy, and some works and/or producers are “consecrated” by those who have power and authority to do that. In other words, even works and creators whose critical value looks self-evident occupy the position not simply because of their essential aesthetic or textual or artistic value. Instead, there is a mechanism called consecration, which enables them to be recognized as having such value. The special exhibition held in one of the most prestigious art museums in Japan and the positive view Takahata’s life and works enjoyed there is an example of such consecration.

Another useful point of Bourdieu’s field is its view of commercial and symbolic/artistic value and the concept of success. Bourdieu’s scheme of fields has two axes: consecration, and the type as well as size of the audience. The axis of consecration corresponds with the degree of establishment and acceptance and the one of the type and size of audience with affluence or paucity of economic capital (Bourdieu 1993, p. 49). By mapping the position of a field within another larger field (e.g., field of anime within that of film in general) or different fields within a larger field (e.g., field of anime and that of literature within the field of Japanese cultural production in general) using these two axes over a certain time period, we can see how the nature and position of a given field changed over time, focusing on the relationship between commercial success and acceptance of the field as an area that deserves recognition as “art.” This scheme is particularly useful for examining the process of Takahata’s (and that of Miyazaki as well as Ghibli’s) consecration because it is strongly connected with commercialism as well as power dynamics between/within different fields. Association of Takahata and his works with fields with more cultural capital such as live-action films or literature, although not always, is a part of promotion strategies in a bid to sell him and his films to a broad range of audiences beyond fans of anime. Commercial success also fuels further consecration by attracting more attention from fields beyond that of anime, resulting in the establishment of his reputation as a respectable filmmaker rather than a cult anime director.

We should also note that the social discourse of consecration, in the case of Takahata (and other popular cultural products and figures) takes place in media. Therefore, media should be also counted as a part of social agents. To examine the process of consecration of Takahata, instead of analyzing his films and their context, I will focus on reception and criticism of his works as well as his appearance in media (venue and content) and also promotion materials and strategies for his films. There already are studies on the significance of materials outside the film text or “paratext” (Gray 2010) and formation of image of auteur by media and the filmmaker themselves (Corrigan 1991) in general. More specifically on Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki, studies on promotion strategies (Denison 2010) and the significance of Miyazaki’s “persona” as an auteur as it is presented outside the film text (Hernánndez-Pérez 2016) already exist (but no substantial work on Takahata). This article also analyzes the career of Takahata focusing on how his films were sold and received. However, analysis of Takahata’s social trajectory with close attention to the process of consecration will have a longer reach than the existing scholarship. That is because it will not only shed a light on the process of consecration of Takahata and the production of his image as an auteur but also reveal the position of the field of anime in relation to other fields, as well as changes in the state of play within the field of anime over time.

In addition, this paper attempts to apply Bourdieu’s theory to film in an innovative way. Bourdieu is popular in film studies, but as Chris Cagle (2016, p. 36) points out, “film studies as a discipline has by now incorporated Bourdieu to address the matter of the consumption of media texts but it has been less concerned with using Bourdieu to understand the production of media”. He also asserts that when Bourdieu is used, the focus is often on the issue of taste rather than the concept of field. In this article, I intend to use Bourdieu’s “field” to analyze a process that spans across the production side as well as reception.

In the case of Takahata and anime, the field of anime—in this article defined as the field for postwar Japanese commercial animated features and TV series and the space and system in which they are consumed—belongs to another bigger field, namely film in general, alongside live-action films. (Obviously there can be more smaller fields within the field of film, but for our purpose, the tension between these two is most significant.) The field of film itself is within the field of cultural production in Japan in general, within which there are still other fields such as literature. The field of cultural production exists alongside other fields such as politics or education. The field of anime, at the same time, belongs to the field of animation in general, which includes other types of animation including art animation. Within the field of anime itself, there are different subfields such as TV anime, features, OVA (Original Video Animation, anime sold as videogram), and within these are further smaller fields depending on various different factors. Again, the categorization is not exhaustive. We can define countless fields using different standards. The creators and audience can also belong to more than one field at the same time. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on the “microscopic” level of field, namely that of Takahata, vis-à-vis the field of anime as a whole, and the more “macroscopic” relationship between the field of anime and other fields, such as live-action film and literature. By analyzing Takahata’s social trajectory, we can determine how his position was established within the field of anime and the process is inseparable from the unequal position of the fields and resulting tension among them.

By examining both production and reception using the concept of field to analyze how the position of Takahata and his works shifted within and beyond the field of anime, we can identify the significance and uniqueness of Takahata, not in terms of the artistic impact he had, but more broadly within the postwar history of Japanese animation. In addition, I will contend that as a part of the process of consecration and also what Bourdieu calls “position-taking,” namely how one strategically posits oneself within a given field for establishing a stronghold in it, Takahata as well as Ghibli skillfully built their own subfield within the field of anime, helped by, and also actively using, media and promotion.

2. The First Fifteen Years: “Saving” the Symbolic Capital

2.1. Horus: Just One of the Staff

In the first fifteen years of his career starting from Horus up to Gauche the Cellist (Serohiki no Gōshu) in 1982, works of Takahata were already often praised by critics and audiences for their technical and thematic depth. However, the attention he and his works attracted in this period is rather limited, and not always associated with his name. For example, Horus, the very first feature he directed, enjoyed favorable reviews in the national newspaper Yomiuri shinbun and film magazine Kinema junpō, although it is often said that reception “at the time bordered on the disastrous” (Clements 2013, p. 105).2 The newspaper article called the film “an ambitious work created by young staff” and commended its elaborate setting of characters as well as technical achievement. The reviewer, only signed with an initial Hei, concludes that the film made a great leap from earlier works of the studio, which, as s/he sees it, were rather childish, thanks to attention to technical details and mise-en-scène. Interestingly, despite the praise for detailed setting and quality of animation, the reviewer also complains that the complex character of Hilda, who is the sister of the king of demons but has a human mind, can be too difficult to understand for young audiences, and there should be a way to depict the drama more accessibly (Hei 1968). The comment clearly reflects the reviewer’s view of animation as being for young audiences rather than adults, therefore more like a niche genre.

Yamada Kazuo’s lavish review for Kinema junpō, one of the oldest film magazines in Japan, states that the film is “one of the greatest animation masterpieces not just in the history of Tōei dōga but all Japanese animated films” (Yamada 2018, p. 114). Yamada also praises the thematic depth and mise-en-scène. He compares dark and blood-like colored trees in the forest that appears toward the end of the film to “a net of attack on thoughts a ruler throws over people”, reflecting the explicitly Marxist connotation of the scene that even features rows of golden hammers over a voluminous background (p. 115). Yamada also acclaims the beauty of watercolor-like color, joyful music and elaborate depiction of groups of people. However, unlike the reviewer on Yomiuri, he concludes that the most commendable point about this film is that it successfully represented contemporary issues (he does not say exactly what they are) in the guise of a fantastic Nordic story, and as a result, the film not only presented children with rich dreams but it is also a moving story that appeals to audiences of all ages (ibid.) Kinema junpō continues to carry reviews and commentary on feature animation after this, providing an opportunity for consecration of the genre, which, as hinted by the review on Yomiuri, was often regarded as niche or minor compared with “proper” live-action films. Despite their positive view of the film, these reviews do not pay any special attention to the name of the director, Takahata Isao, apart from simply listing it as one of the staff.

It is almost ten years later, in 1977, that special emphasis was placed on Takahata’s name and his role in relation to Horus, although still as “one of many.” Nihon animēshon eigashi (History of Japanese animated film) by Watanabe Yasushi and Yamaguchi Katsunori, one of the earliest, and even today most comprehensive, overviews of the history of Japanese animation, refers to the film, again, as “a significant masterpiece” and although not comparable in terms of technique, the content well surpasses Disney’s The Jungle Book released a day earlier (Watanabe and Yamaguchi 1977, p. 120). The book details the production process of the film and points out its strength referring to different members of staff, namely Fukasawa Kazuo’s script that has a “very strong core and brilliant structure”, work of the team of animators led by Ōtsuka Yasuo and Mori Yasuji, backdrop by Tsuchida Isamu and Urata Mataji that “nicely depicted rough coldness of the northern country”, and Takahata Isao’s “precise and powerful mise-en-scène” (p. 122). We can say that with Horus, Takahata began to accumulate symbolic capital that enables him to be in a position of legitimate subject of criticism. However, the recognition still remained within an area closer to what Bourdieu calls “the field of limited production”, where works are produced for and appreciated by fellow artists and the chosen few. According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital does not translate into economic capital in this type of field where the dominant principle is “art for art’s sake”. What matters is not commercial success or attracting popular attention, but recognition from fellow creators within the field. Being independent of economic success as the yardstick for success, in Bourdieu’s term this type of field is “autonomous” in its nature. In this field, its occupants even see “temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise” (Bourdieu 1993, p. 40).

2.2. The TV Series: “Fantastic” but Anonymous

To be more precise, however, this does not mean that his works were not appreciated by those outside the field of limited production. It rather means that at this stage, they did not know his name, and therefore did not associate it with the works, which they found of excellent quality. This is illustrated by reception of the TV series Takahata directed in the 1970s, namely Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no shōjo Haiji, 1974), From the Apennines to The Andes (Haha o tazunete 3000ri, 1976) and Anne of Green Gables (Akage no An, 1979). Unlike Horus, there is no contemporary critical review except for a brief article on Apennines in the daily national newspaper Asahi Shimbun in 1976. The article was published just before the program started. The review, signed with an initial Tomi, comments on the first episode, mainly summarizing the plot. The reviewer views the first episode favorably, pointing out that the series is to continue for a year and therefore a lot of subplots were added to the original short story, allowing the anime adaptation to have depth beyond it. S/he concludes that the first episode depicts the life of Marco, the protagonist, with rich creativity, with the city of Genoa in the background, which very nicely reproduces the atmosphere of a seaside town. The reviewer, however, makes no references to any of the previous TV series or the name of Takahata (Tomi 1976).

The same applies to reaction by the viewers, as observable in letters from them published in national newspapers. These letters were often from housewives (shufu) in their late 20s or early 30s, possibly watching the program with their children, and praised the detailed setting and depiction of the characters including dialogue and beautiful animation in general as well as the backdrop. Such views were often shared by a number of readers. For example, Yomiuri on 14 November 1974 carried a letter from a 29-year-old housewife, who commended Heidi for its “lovely picture [of the characters] (e ga kawaii)”, moving conversation between Heidi and the aunt, and painstakingly created animation. She also wrote that she hoped there would be more programs like this (Mori 1974). The article has a note at the end saying there were four other letters to the same effect.

Anne attracted particularly positive reactions. Even from just after the start of the broadcast in January 1979, one reader of Yomiuri described the series as “like a beautiful dream” (Nakamura 1979). Toward the end of the program a year later, another letter by a housewife appeared in the paper. She praised the series for its beautiful backdrops and wrote that it was a shame that the series was to end at the end of the year (Matsumoto 1979). In addition to these housewives, a 53-year-old man teaching martial arts called the series “heart-warming” and wrote that he liked the music, which, in his view, matched perfectly with each scene, reflecting the affection of the creators for the series (Nagumo 1979). Just after the end of the program in January 1980, another reader of Yomiuri, a female middle school student, looked back on the series as “fantastic” and wrote that she was “touched” by the depiction of Anne changing from a “cheeky (namaikina)” girl into someone with “such an honest mind (sunao)”. The note at the end shows that there were no less than nineteen other letters also saying that the series was “wonderful (subarashii)” and expressing hope for a sequel or a repeat (Karasawa 1980).

These letters are so short (less than ten sentences) so it is not possible to determine whether these readers were aware that the three series were created by the same staff. However, it appears that at least some viewers had awareness that works created under the banner of the so-called World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai meisaku gekijō) starting with Heidi shared a common production background and artistic philosophy. This is represented by an article in Asahi which carries three letters on Apennine, from a 17-year-old female student and 27- and 32-year-old housewives, respectively. Of these, the student and one of the housewives suggest that they are aware of the link between Apennine and the earlier series. The student wrote that the series is the TV animation (terebi manga) she was most looking forward to watching every week at the moment, and continued by saying that thanks to the fact that it was created by the same staff as Heidi, the backdrop had a three-dimensional feel, and the characters had very clear individual personalities and their feeling was clearly conveyed. As for the other two letters, the one from the 27-year-old simply said that she was touched by the strong will of the protagonist Marco, and she found the stories between various characters during his journey touching. On the other hand, the 32-year-old reported that her three-year-old son absolutely loves watching the series and she also enjoys watching it because just like other works such as Heidi and A Dog of Flanders (Furandāsu no inu, Kuroda Yoshio, 1975), it accurately depicts the culture and scenery of foreign countries. However, she complained that Apennine should have some relaxed moments because in every single episode Marco is living so hard with suppressing his tears that adults may occasionally find it too tiring to watch, echoing criticism against Horus (Komatsu et al. 1976).

None of these article and letters mention the name of Takahata or any other staff. The anonymity itself is not surprising for TV anime series at the time because unlike films, the viewers paid little or no attention to the creators. Koyano Atsushi, in his Japanese book-length discussions of Takahata (one of two so far), writes that back in the mid-1970s, animators or anime directors were not treated as if they were “stars”. According to him, that is because at the time, successful anime based on manga such as Space Battleship Yamato (Uchūsenkan Yamato, Matsumoto Reiji, 1974) and The Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga tetsudō 999, Nishizawa Nobutaka, 1978) or a string of anime produced by Tatsunoko Production, founded by manga artist Yoshida Tatsuo, shared the artistic style of the manga creators, and people regarded these artists as the creators of the anime (Koyano 2013, pp. 12–13). Yet, as Koyano further points out, the situation changed by the early 1980s, when names of animators and directors including Takahata and Miyazaki began to have a special meaning among fans of anime. This change, as discussed below, can be associated with the establishment of anime fandom and anime magazines. However, what is significant about these reactions to Takahata’s TV series is that viewers did find these works to be of excellent quality, and that was made visible in mainstream media. Takahata and Horus’s appearance in Kinema junpō and the absence of his name in relation to the TV series in mainstream media, as well as among the audience, indicates that he was yet to have enough symbolic capital to make him worthy of critical attention outside the field of film to which animation belonged as a sub-genre. However, the popularity of the TV series, especially the fact that an older audience, including mothers watching the program with their children, viewed it positively indicates that Takahata was anonymously “saving” symbolic capital outside the field of film at this stage. The popularity is retrospectively used by himself and Studio Ghibli in the 1980s, when his films began to be sold to audiences beyond fans of anime, to establish his position as a significant creator of anime: in media and promotion materials, the name of Takahata would be linked with these TV series so that potential audiences can “discover” that the shows they watched as parents/children were directed by him. It can be also said that the position of anime within the field of Japanese cultural production in general still lacked what Bourdieu calls “bourgeois recognition”—a recognition in the “official” form such as a prize—or even a clear form vis-à-vis the field of film or other fields of cultural production. In the early 1980s, however, the field of anime began to be formed more clearly, and an attempt to define it in relation to the field of film was made.

3. Consecration of Takahata and Anime: Tokuma Shoten, Animage and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

3.1. Formation of Anime Fandom and Anime Magazines

Fandom and anime magazines that sprouted from the mid-1970s played a significant role in forming the field and consecrating Takahata within it. Anime fandom in Japan began to be formed in the mid-1970s in the form of fans regularly paying visits to anime studios, the popularity of voice actors, and production of dōjinshi or manga/pamphlets created by anime fans and the launch of Comic Market, where they were sold (Yamaguchi 2004, p. 111). The female student quoted above could be one of such early fans. In 1977, the popularity of the film version of Space Battleship Yamato enabled the existence of anime fandom consisting of teenagers and brought anime’s commercial potential to the mainstream media’s attention. An article on Yomiuri shortly before the release of the film reports that the popularity of the then two-year-old TV anime series that was cut short due to disappointing viewing figures caught on among a young audience through word of mouth. According to the article, there were more than forty fan clubs for Yamato with no less than 50,000 members at the time, seventy percent of whom were female (Yomiuri shinbun 1977).

In this climate, a number of anime magazines targeting teenage anime fans were published. The significance of these magazines, as Clements points out, is that they offered a historical framework and archive for anime fans, and thus enabled “’anime’ and anime fandom to assert a sense of itself as a culture, as a body of work with its own media of discourse, and its own sense of developing history” (Clements 2013, p. 163). As Mark Jancovich puts it in relation to fandom of cult movies, the fans are “brought together, and a sense of ‘imagined community’ is produced and maintained, thorough the media” (Jancovich 2002, p. 318, italics in the original). By presenting some works and creators as being worthy of special attention, these magazines are producing a framework within which what Sarah Thornton calls “subcultural capital” circulates. Subcultural capital, according to Thornton (1995, p. 11), “confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder” and it can be objectified and embodied “in the form of being ‘in the know’”. She also points out that “the difference between being in or out of fashion, high or low in subcultural capital, correlates in complex ways with degrees of media coverage, creation and exposure” (p. 14, italics in the original). By publishing articles and essays on and by Takahata, anime magazines presented him and his works as something fans of anime should know to be “in the know”. They formed a fandom by bringing young fans of anime together by providing them with information as well as a venue for communication in the form of sections consisting of letters from the readers.

At the same time, more significantly for our interest, they worked as gatekeepers for the newly formed field of anime fandom by selecting canonical works and significant figures, thus consecrating them, including Takahata, within the field. Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto [What I thought about as I made films], a collection of Takahata’s essays and interviews from the period between 1955 and 1991 is organized in chronological order, each chapter corresponding with one film or TV series. There are very few entries before Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, Miyazaki Hayao, 1984), of which he was the producer. For the works from the 1970s, there are one to three materials each, most of which were published later in the early to mid-1980s in anime magazines. This suggests that Takahata and his works’ position within the field of anime were established at around this period as they were presented by anime magazines as something that can be converted into subcultural capital within the newly formed anime fandom.

3.2. Animage and Consecration of Takahata

Publishing company Tokuma shoten’s anime magazine Animage was inaugurated in 1978 and Suzuki Toshio, editor of the magazine and later the producer at Studio Ghibli played a key role in the process of the consecration of Takahata. As I have detailed elsewhere (Yoshioka 2018b), Suzuki, as he was preparing for the first issue of the magazine, met three young female anime fans to ask for advice on it because he knew nothing about anime. They suggested Suzuki watch Horus, saying it was a masterpiece. Suzuki was instantly captivated by the film’s very clear reference to the Vietnam War, reminding us of the review by Yamada. He learned that the film was made by Takahata and Miyazaki and called them for an interview, only to be flatly rejected. Eventually, however, Suzuki succeeded in forging a special relationship with them, and the magazine continuously carried exclusive articles and interviews with the two directors. These articles consecrated Takahata by labelling him and his works as an important part of the postwar history of anime, and also establishing Takahata’s image as a figure who has the authority to discuss the history of anime intellectually. The first articles on Takahata began to appear in 1981, possibly because at around this period, after the initial rejection by Takahata, Suzuki was reintroduced to him by veteran animator and Takahata and Miyazaki’s senior colleague Ōtsuka Yasuo. Suzuki recalls he visited Takahata on a daily basis to question him about his latest work Chie the Brat (Jarinko Chie, 1981), and after that they continued to talk to each other almost every day, even when he was not making a film (Suzuki 2013a, pp. 100–4).

Chie is significant in Takahata’s career because it is the point of re-entry for him to feature film after producing TV series for almost ten years, and also he collaborated with former colleagues at Tōei dōga. Anime magazines published articles underlining the link between Takahata and Tōei, often suggesting its historical significance. Eiga o tsukurinagara has a roundtable with Takahata, Ōtsuka and Kotabe Yōichi, another former colleague from Tōei, in which they discuss animation technique, especially realism and cartoon-esque expression, referring to their work at Tōei (Takahata 1991, pp. 132–43). This particular article was published in the June 1981 issue of anime magazine My Anime rather than Animage. However, five months before that, Animage did carry its own article on Chie, emphasizing that it was a feature created by those who made Horus 12 years before. The article also quotes Okuyama Reiko, Kotabe’s wife and still another colleague from Tōei, explaining the origin of Takahata’s nickname “Paku san” (Animage 1981, p. 23). The August issue of the year featured Miyazaki detailing his works and career, making Animage the first anime—or even any—magazine to do so. The feature consisted of the first part that follows Miyazaki’s works up to that point since Horus and the second part with comments and letters from his former or current colleagues as well as fellow creators including Tezuka Osamu, the “God of Manga”. Takahata’s long essay on his collaboration with Miyazaki from the Tōei period onward kicked off this section. As discussed below, Takahata’s association with Miyazaki and the idea of Tōei and Horus as a legendary past are further emphasized as part of a promotion strategy first to sell Miyazaki films, then Takahata’s own later in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Another significant article on Animage in which Takahata is associated with Tōei is a roundtable (taidan/zadankai) in the December 1984 issue. In the discussion of prewar animator Masaoka Kenzō (1898–1988), known for creating the first talkie Japanese animation and also using celluloid for the first time in Japan,3 Takahata and Tōei are explicitly linked with prewar Japanese animation. The participants are Takahata, Kotabe, and Mori Yasuji, a senior colleague of the other two from Tōei. Mori watched Masaoka’s highly acclaimed The Spider and the Tulip (Kumo to chūrippu) when it was released in 1943, and eventually decided to join Masaoka’s studio Nichidō eiga, which was later bought by Tōei. He worked with Takahata from Horus to Heidi (Kanō 2004, pp. 156–76). In the roundtable, Mori mainly talked about his experience of working with Masaoka, while Takahata, as the facilitator, mainly listened to him. However, in the second half, Takahata began to lead the discussion into more direct comparison between Masaoka and Mori’s depiction of characters. He claimed that while there were similarities between them, Mori seemed to intend to make the design of the character visually more rigid so that it could be animated better although he inherited Masaoka’s principle that the characters should appear as if they have soft and warm flesh. He continued by saying that Kotabe could be regarded as being in the same linage, thus establishing a link between Masaoka/prewar Japanese animation and Tōei through Mori and Kotabe. Kotabe responded that although people often said that his animation displays influence by Mori, he did not think his work was similar to Mori’s, and if they looked similar, that was unintentional. Mori says that “there seems to be what can be called the Tōei pedigree, so probably both I and you belong to it” (Takahata 1991, p. 291). Takahata, as well as Kotabe, agrees with the remark, and Takahata continues by saying that while characters in Tezuka’s animation, being originally in manga, need to be distinguishable from other characters when they are presented as a tableau, the characters of Masaoka and Tōei stand on the principle that they, before anything else, have to be able to move and express emotions. Mori agrees, saying that Masaoka’s characters “gain life by moving” and that such is the case with Kotabe (p. 291). This part is significant in that Tōei is being established as a position within the field of anime vis-à-vis another position represented by Tezuka, and Tōei’s position is associated with the history of prewar Japanese animation.4 Furthermore, Takahata’s own position within the contemporary field of anime is being established by being presented repeatedly as part of such a lineage.

This is not the first time that Animage had placed Takahata within the history of Japanese animation. In an article published earlier in the year, the association is made for a different effect, and not in relation to Tōei. Instead of directly linking him or Tōei with prewar animation, Takahata appears as a figure with the authority to teach younger colleagues and anime fans about the history of Japanese animation as well as in general. In the June 1984 issue, Takahata and Ōtsuka discuss Seo Mitsuyo’s Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors (Momotarō umi no shinpei, 1944), which was “discovered” in 1982 and had been screened earlier in 1984, with university students and young animators. Takahata led the discussion, often acting as a teacher-figure who teaches the history of Japanese animation as well as in general to the young participants. For example, one of the participants, a young animator, points out that the animation technique in the film, despite the poor quality, seems to be in line with what he had learned in a textbook written by Masaoka. Takahata reminds them that Masaoka trained the animators for Momotarō merely in a month because experienced animators had been conscripted, and responds that in his view the ability of Masaoka and Seo as director/cinematographer (enshutsuka) is significant in creating the film. He continues by saying that the film was created after Masaoka’s The Spider and the Tulip, and claims that those who watched the film would not be surprised by mise-en-scène and technique in Momotarō. He then states that had it not been for the war, the technique found in the two films could have been further developed and present-day creators including himself could have worked using it (pp. 269–70). Here, he talks about prewar animation with authority, contextualizing it within a broader history of Japanese animation, including its (lost) link with the present.

He also reminds the participants of their ignorance about the history of wartime Japan. Toward the end of the roundtable, in response to the participants’ remark that the film did not appear to be an explicit piece of propaganda but more like a bucolic story, Takahata tells them that the film does depict the Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere from a Japanese point of view: Japanese “divine sea soldiers” liberate residents of a southern island, who are depicted as animals with Indonesian hats, from Westerners depicted in silhouette (pp. 270–71). He states that in his view, the film was created for children, encouraging them to study hard and learn how to fight so that they can later join the great project depicted in it, but now the film appears to be a simple fairytale, especially because it is an animation. Before asking Ōtsuka, who knew the period as a child, what the situation in Japan back then was like, Takahata says “because of that war, not only Asian people and Japanese who went to the war but also those who stayed in Japan suffered greatly. To prevent that from happening again, I thought it would be nice if you could think more carefully about what the Japanese military did and why they made a film like this” (p. 272). This is the first occasion where Takahata hinted to his liberal political position in relation to Japanese war responsibility, which later plays a significant role in forming his image and position as a public intellectual.

In short, Takahata, throughout this roundtable, continuously demonstrated his knowledge of Japanese animation to the students and young animators. He also is in a position to guide them and teach them how they should think about Japanese history of animation as well as in general. Once he had gained bourgeois consecration and began to appear in mainstream media, his image and position as a “teacher” would be further strengthened, but this roundtable seems to indicate that first it started within the field of anime.

We should also note that in both of these roundtables, Takahata himself is contributing to the formation of the field of anime by acting as a “gatekeeper” who decides what new participants to the field should know. And in doing so, he, naturally, talks about the field from the perspective that is centered around Tōei. In other words, as he is being consecrated by being presented as a “teacher” figure in the media, he is also establishing his position within the field by subtly presenting his own view of the field as something “legitimate”, or what Bourdieu calls his “position-taking” or a strategic move to posit himself within the field and its presentation.

The consecration of Tōei, however, is not simply “position-taking” by Takahata. Instead, commercial reasons can be at work behind the scene. Interestingly, in 1983 and 84, Animage and Tokuma shoten were very busy consecrating Tōei. In the June 1983 issue of the magazine, a new serial titled “My Memorable Animation” (Waga omoide no animēshon) started. The first instalment featured Animal Treasure Island (Dōbutsu takarajima, Ikeda Hiroshi, 1971), with a subheading reading “The Last Cartoon Movie Feature Created by Tōei Dōga”. In the article, anime critic Ikeda Kenshō claims that in addition to Horus and Puss in Boots (Nagagutsu o haita neko, Yabuki Kimio, 1969), which were already enjoying overwhelming popularity among fans of anime for the expression of theme and depiction of the characters’ mind in the former and the story packed with fun and action for the latter, Animal Treasure Island is another significant work because of its intricate depiction of the heroine Cathy and also comical animation comparable with Puss. He then claims that some fans even say that these three films are the ultimate fruition of the now lost art of Tōei’s “cartoon films.” Ikeda goes on to list members of staff involved in the production, including Kotabe, Miyazaki and Mori, and eventually claims that Cathy in the film is “a missing link in the lineage of beautiful girls” starting with Hilda in Horus and leading to Claris in Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan IIIsei Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979) via Fiolina in Apennine (Ikeda 1983, p. 81). The rest of the article focuses on the depiction of Cathy in the film using many still images emphasizing the depiction of her strength and delicate feeling. At the end is an interview with Mori, who was the chief animator of the film. There is a footnote saying a new serial by Mori would be starting next month. In August 1984, Mori’s serial was made into a book titled Mogura no uta: animētā no jiden [The Song of a Mole: autobiography of an animator], for which Takahata wrote a long essay on his experience of working with Mori (1984).

In October 1983, Takahata himself published a book titled Horusu no eizō hyōgen [Cinematographic Expression in Horus] as a part of a paperback series labelled Animage bunko (Animage paperbacks).5 In the book, he explains the mise-en-scène of key scenes of Horus as well as recollecting the production process. At the end of the book, he summarizes the significance of the film in that although the expression the staff pursued for Horus could not be materialized in the film, the experience of trial and error provided them with a precious working ground for later works. He gives some specific examples in his case: the in-depth depiction of the characters’ minds in Heidi and other Masterpiece Theater TV anime series, and continuity of time and space and also the credibility of existence of characters and space within the film in Chie (Takahata 1983, p. 196). We should note that the remark is almost identical with the point Hikawa made after Takahata’s death as his significant achievement, which I quoted in the introduction of this article. This, just like significance of Tōei, suggests that what critics now give as significance of Takahata’s work can be reflecting what he himself said in the past, although I would not say that the critical remarks are a simple reproduction of the filmmaker’s claim.

The timing of the consecration coincides with the conception and release of Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind film. According to Sutajio jiburi sakuhin kanren shiryōshū I [A Collection of Materials on Studio Ghibli’s Works Volume I], the editorial team of Animage had a meeting with senior executives of Tokuma on the film project. The book has a scanned copy of the materials distributed at the second meeting on 22 March 1983, meaning consecration of Tōei on Animage started shortly afterwards (Studio Ghibli 1996a, p. 34). Tokuyama Masaya, who was in charge of promotion of the film, recalled in 2002 that by then the name of Studio Ghibli had become a brand and Miyazaki is widely known but at the time that was not the case. Therefore, the most important mission for him was to create advertisements that convince people that “the film was not one of the cartoon films they knew but something far greater” (Studio Ghibli 2002, p. 116).

One of the promotion strategies was to emphasize the career of Miyazaki referring to his previous works, namely Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro and Future Boy Conan (Mirai shōnen Konan, 1978). At the same time, the career of Takahata, as the producer, was underlined in promotion materials. A pamphlet given to the media when production of the film was announced has such information as synopsis, characters and other “selling points” of the film. Among them is information on the staff. There is a section on the animators, who are touted as “the best animators we can think of now” and another one on Takahata and Miyazaki. The section starts by saying it is widely recognized that the two are “the greatest duo in the history of Japanese anime”. The remark is also used as the heading of the section. The paragraph details their career, dating back to Horus and their respective works up to the point, and states that the sheer popularity of their works proves how much talent the duo has (Studio Ghibli 1996a, p. 9).

Horus itself was also used as a part of the promotion campaign. A dossier prepared by Meijā, an advertising agency specializing in film promotion and presided by Tokuyama, details promotion strategies for the film. Among the campaign leading up to the release was a charity screening of Horus in Tokyo where the film was shown together with a trailer of Nausicaä and Sherlock Hound (Meitantei Hōmuzu), which was to be shown as a double bill because Miyazaki directed some of its episodes when it was originally produced as a TV series. The admission fee was 10 yen, and all funds raised were to be donated to a charity (ibid., p. 44). The event was announced within a large advertisement in the evening issue of Yomiuri on 16 February 1984 (Yomiuri shinbun 1984). The text states that the new film was written and directed by Miyazaki, famed for Cagliostro, and produced by Takahata, known for Heidi. After calling them “the greatest pair in the world of anime” it continues by saying that Horus, which is famous as their representative work would be screened to celebrate release of the new film (the screening was on 3 March 1984, a week before the release).

There is no evidence that the frequent appearance of Takahata in Animage as well as the consecration of Tōei and the publication of Horusu no eizō hyōgen are directly related to the promotion of Nausicaä. However, at least they stand on the same plane in that in both cases Takahata and Miyazaki’s link with Tōei and the image of Horus as a masterpiece of historical importance played a central role in raising the profile of Takahata, especially beyond the field of anime, by presenting these details to “mainstream” media and its readers to bring them to cinemas. As detailed above, originally his name was not strongly associated with Horus or Heidi nor were these works explicitly labelled as masterpieces, especially in “mainstream” media, but with the establishment of the field of anime and discourse of its history, his position within it was established, and now it was being used to attract popular attention beyond the field.

3.3. Consecration of Anime and Establishment of Takahata’s Position

In Animage, we can see the beginning of an attempt to establish the field of anime not simply through a discourse of the history of Japanese animation, but also presenting it vis-à-vis film (i.e., live-action films). In the attempt, Takahata was elected to represent the anime side. The January 1982 issue of Animage has a feature article on anime films to be released in the year (Animage 1982). What is peculiar about this article is its clear intention to contextualize anime within Japanese film. The feature covers six anime films, giving information such as plot, staff and current state of production. In addition, for each film there is a short blurb by the director or producer titled “Position of anime within Japanese films” (Nihon eiga ni okeru anime no ichi). At the end of the feature is a long roundtable with Takahata and Yamada Yōji, a veteran film director best known for the It’s Tough to Be a Man (Otoko wa tsuraiyo) series started in 1968, and Satō Tadao, one of the most prominent Japanese film critics. The context for this feature is that to follow the suit of success of the Yamato films written and directed by an established live-action film director Masuda Toshio, four out of six features mentioned in the article were directed by live-action film directors including Yamada.6

The blurbs by the directors are interesting in that they show different views of the position held by creators in the two different fields. The anime creators such as Tomino Yoshiyuki, whose film Mobile Suite Gundam (Kidō senshi Gandamu) is covered at length at the beginning of the article, and Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, also involved in Gundam as designer of the characters and director of animation, explicitly place anime over live action. Tomino states that production of anime requires more pursuit of logic, namely precise planning of plot and flow of overall narrative than live action, and without it, the creator would not be able to get the message across. He continues by saying that anime made by live-action directors often fails despite them adapting mise-en-scène similar to that used by their anime counterparts because they do not understand this, and he wants them to watch his Gundam so that they can learn, which would be helpful for improving Japanese films (p. 20). Yasuhiko even more bluntly dismisses live action saying, “if top-of-the-top live action director and top anime director create identical anime features, the latter will be definitely better. Production of anime is that peculiar. Attempting to get live action directors to create anime feature despite that means producers [of anime features] have so little idea [about such peculiarity]” (p. 22). On the other hand, live-action director Akehi Masayuki, who was to direct Millennial Queen (1000 nen joō), originally a manga by Matsumoto Reiji, the author of the original manga of Yamato, makes very little distinction between the two genres/formats. He says that being a live-action director he does not see any difference between it and anime, although he admits that the technique for shooting (satsuei gijutsu) is peculiar and the cameraman in anime is more like a painter (p. 26). Ironically, the remark seems to bolster Tomino and Yasuhiko’s claim because he is applying the concept of live-action films to the production of animation in which there is no “shooting” or cameraman as such, and instead the film is practically complete by the time it is actually “shot” with a camera.

In the roundtable, on the other hand, Takahata, who represents anime creators, does not claim superiority of anime over live action. Instead, when Yamada and Satō ask questions on production or mise-en-scène in anime, Takahata explains them referring to his own experience, especially his most recent Chie and Gauche, as well as his view on theory of animation in comparison with live action in areas such as acting. In doing so, often following cues given by Satō, he mentions weaknesses or pitfalls of animation. For example, Satō, following on from Yamada’s remark that more often than not the audience focuses on one particular point on the screen although the creators pay attention to every part of the frame, says that usually the point of focus is on something that is moving such as people or animals. He then criticizes animation saying that such a moving part in the frame is usually abstract and simplified, which he finds “annoying”. Takahata responds that that is what he truly hates about animation, although he is making all efforts to avoid it (p. 31). Takahata’s attitude toward animation and live action that acknowledges differences between the two and the pitfalls of animation, often backed up by very detailed explanation of the technique of animation as he sees it, gives him a sense of objectiveness compared with other anime creators in the article who insist on the superiority of anime, and this separates him from them.

In addition, in the roundtable the two film figures are highly favorable about his works, especially Gauche. As they discuss acting in live action and animation, Takahata makes a lengthy remark on his view of acting in animation, concluding that it cannot be further from acting by humans in live-action films because the body is simply lacking in animation, and as such, all movements have to be separated from each other and then analyzed before being put together to be in the film. He continues that creators of animation accept such a nature of animation as something inevitable, and as a result, animation cannot completely replicate certain aspects of acting. Satō responds that “among so many animations that exist today, [depiction of] acting in yours was truly intricate.” Yamada agrees, saying, “Indeed, absolutely wonderful” (p. 30). Satō also says, immediately after Takahata admits the weakness of animation in simplifying moving parts, “But Gauche is very unusual because it didn’t give me that awkward feeling [which I have just mentioned]” (p. 31). In this roundtable, Takahata thus gains “approval” from significant figures in the field of film and he, as well as the field of anime, is consecrated as a result. More significantly, while he represents the field of anime, Takahata also establishes his position vis-à-vis other anime creators who see anime as being superior to live action.

4. Becoming a “Respectable Filmmaker”: Grave of Fireflies

4.1. Establishing a Link with Literature

Takahata’s consecration further progressed with Grave of Fireflies (1988) to reach a new level. Although the film was anything but a commercial success, its content and positive critical responses, as well as its general promotion strategy, established an image of his work as a “respectable” film that can be associated with a field of “higher” level beyond that of anime, namely literature and state education. The process of consecration at this stage, especially the way the film and Takahata came to be associated with literature, is deeply related to rather peculiar circumstances of production. The film was set to be shown as a double-bill with Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, and besides Tokuma, which at the time owned Studio Ghibli, another publishing house Shinchōsha joined the production. Shinchōsha is the publisher of the novel of the same title by Nosaka Akiyuki, on which the film was based. For the novel Nosaka was awarded with the Naoki Prize, the most prestigious prize given to popular novels in Japan. The company had a long tradition as a publisher of literature since before the Second World War. Its list of authors includes big literary names such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Ibuse Masuji, Mishima Yukio and Endō Shūsaku.

Being totally different kinds of film (a fantasy clearly targeting children and an extremely realistic depiction of suffering of a brother and sister during the Second World War), promotion of the films, not surprisingly, was very hard to organize. Shinchōsha did not have association with anime up to the point, and establishing such a link was a major motive for the company to take part in the project (Murase 2013, p. 136). However, according to plans for promotion found in Sutajio jiburi sakuhin kanren shiryōshū II, Tokuma mainly advertised Totoro for anime fans in Animage and anime-themed radio program they sponsored, while Shinchōsha focused on Grave, primarily targeting readers of their magazines and paperbacks. Shinchōsha’s advertisements appeared in different types of magazines they published, ranging from Focus, a weekly magazine notorious for paparazzi-style photos and articles on scandals of politicians and celebrities, and Shūkan Shinchō, a so-called “general weekly magazine” (sōgō shūkanshi) featuring a range of topics from politics to entertainment but with a tabloid-style gossipy tone, to art and literary magazines Geijutsu Shinchō and Shōsetsu Shinchō (Studio Ghibli 1996b, p. 101).

As a whole, the film was intended to be sold to audiences who are not particularly fans of anime but rather readers of literary works. That is observable in the theater program of the film. Its introduction overviews Takahata’s career, referring to works he has directed such as Horus and Gauche and his role as the producer for two Miyazaki films before proceeding to Heidi. The text claims that his direction of the TV series is still remembered as being truly excellent. (Again, the anonymously saved symbolic capital is now “withdrawn” and tagged.) It also states that his latest documentary film The Tales of the Yanagawa Canals (1987) earned him further reputation for his skills as a director, and finally says that “Not only those in the field of animation (animēshon kai) but those in the field of Japanese film (nihon eiga kai) have been eagerly waiting for his new work” (Theater program of Grave of Fireflies, 1988). Here, we can very clearly see another attempt to place Takahata within a broader field of Japanese film while emphasizing his career as a director of anime. By doing so, the film is being marketed as something more than “mere anime” either for children or teenage fans, thus being “low” in the hierarchical order of cultural products within the field compared with literature or live-action films. This, at the same time, could be seen as an attempt to segregate Takahata (and Miyazaki) from the rest of anime, which seems to be what the directors were keen about as observable in Takahata’s attitude toward animation in the roundtable with Yamada and Satō. The segregation establishes the position of Takahata (and Studio Ghibli) within both the field of anime and that of cultural production in general as something distinctive. We can even say that they began to form a subfield of their own within the field of anime. And this subfield is strategically associated with a field with more cultural capital or at a “higher level”, in this particular case, literature, thus further separating it from the rest of anime within the field.

4.2. Anime No Sekai: Anime/Takahata Placed within the History of World Animation

Shinchōsha itself made a similar move in one of its publications. Besides the advertisements, the company published a book on the history of animation in general titled Anime no sekai [The World of Anime] as a part of its Tonbo no hon [Book of Dragonfly] range in March 1988. According to the publisher’s website, the series is “a collection of books with rich visual materials (bijuaru bukku)” covering such topics as “arts, crafts, architecture, photography, literature, lifestyle, and travel” first published in 1983 (Shinchosha n.d.). Titles published earlier include A Journey Visiting Munch (Munku e no tabi, April 1984), En’nosuke [kabuki actor Ichikawa En’nosuke]’s Introduction to Kabuki (En’nosuke no kabuki kōza, May 1984), Manchuria: Yesterday and Today (Manshū kinō kyō, May 1985), and How to Recognize Buddhist Statues (Butsuzō no miwakekata, September 1987). Titles after Anime no sekai continue to focus on similar topics as before, making it a rather unusual choice for the series. The subjects of other books in the series indicate that these are aimed at adult audiences who are interested in art, history and travel.

The content of Anime no sekai reflects that. One notable feature of the book is its clear interest in contextualizing Japanese animation (not just anime but as a whole) within that of the world, or, to be more precise, the West. The book consists of four main sections, all written by anime critic and historian Okada Emiko. The first two sections provide an encyclopedic overview of key characters and works of Japan and the West. Both sections include Disney films and characters, those by other American and European studios and animators such as Fleischer Studios and Paul Grimault, and Japanese ones including Tezuka Osamu, Masaoka and Tōei. Among the Japanese creators and characters were Takahata and Miyazaki and their works and characters such as Horus and its heroine Hilda, Heidi (the character), Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaä (the film and the character). The second half of the book overviews the history of Western and Japanese animation chronologically, commenting on key works and creators. Thus, Western and Japanese animation are placed on the same plane, making the latter comparable with the former.

In the Japanese section, references are made not only to prewar/wartime features such as Spider and Momotarō, postwar features by Tōei and TV anime series, but also independent animators based at Sōgetsu Hall in the 1960s and puppet animations by Kawamoto Kihachirō, making the section a comprehensive overview of Japanese animation since the early stage up to that point. This is significant because the broadness enables commercial animated features and TV series or anime—as it is defined for this article—which can be regarded as “lesser” compared to more “artistic” animation to be treated as on a par with them. And within this overview of the history of Japanese animation, Okada mentions Takahata and Miyazaki, giving them a special position. In her discussion of TV anime, she asserts that in 1974, Yamato and Heidi established two significant strands of TV anime. The tone of her comment on the former is critical. She is adamant that it, as well as some other series created at around the same time such as The Star of Giants (Kyojin no hoshi, Nagahama Tadao et al. 1968–71) and Brave Raideen (Yūsha Raidīn, Nagahama Tadao, Tomino Yoshiyuki, 1975–76) introduced the old-fashioned storytelling of Japanese popular theatre to anime. Namely, both of them feature beautiful-looking male characters, especially the enemies, fighting gallantly. More often than not, they have twisted minds due to various personal issues such as the relationship with their family but keep it to themselves. She calls them “neo-popular theater anime” and further points out that these anime adapted a particular style of mise-en-scène and narrative structure that rightly appeals to “the ‘taste’ and ‘memory’” of Japanese audiences (Okada 1988, p. 121). She laments, saying the popularity of such anime among young audiences, who do not know the original popular theater, indicates that “the essence of the Japanese psyche has never changed” (p. 121).

On the other hand, her comment on Takahata and Miyazaki is more positive. For example, according to her, for Heidi “[Takahata and the production team] conducted a research trip, which was unusual for production of anime at the time, and beautifully reproduced Swiss culture and nature. [Heidi] quietly speaks to [the viewers] about the real happiness of people” (pp. 120–21). She then continues, contrasting them with “neo-popular theater anime” and Japanese live-action films:

[Heidi is] the very first drama of calmness in the history of TV anime. Takahata Isao, who once created Horus: Prince of the Sun, a drama of fierce passion, depicted constantly changing feeling and growth of cute (kawaii) young boys and girls, designed by Mori Yasuji […] in detail, persuasively, and far more refreshingly than humdrum acting by live-action actors [could do].

(p. 121)

Here, Okada clearly segregates Takahata from other contemporary anime and even live-action films to give him a special position within the history of Japanese animation. In addition, Takahata’s TV series, which, when it was broadcast, remained anonymous despite the viewers’ favorable reaction to its quality and content, was labelled explicitly with his name and situated within the history of TV anime as well as the broader history of Japanese and global animation. As mentioned earlier, the viewers of the TV series included mothers and even older men, who are more likely readers of Tonobo no hon. If the readers indeed watched Heidi or other TV series directed by Takahata, they “discover” that he was the creator of the TV series. As a result, the anonymously “saved” symbolic capital of Takahata can be now explicitly attributed to Takahata.

In this book, Takahata and his works are presented as being special within the history of Western and Japanese animation. The association with Western animation is significant because later in his career after the 1990s, Takahata established a position within the field of anime through his connection with foreign animation and creators. He wrote essays and books on Yuri Norstein (Takahata 1984; 1991, pp. 225–50; 1999a, pp. 183–85), Frédéric Back (Takahata 1990; 2018, pp. 192–95), and Paul Grimault (Takahata 2007). He met Norstein and Back in person both in Japan and in their own countries. Takahata’s link with these creators dates back to 1982, 1988 and 1955, respectively (Namiki 2015, p. 24; Takahata 2013a, p. 337; 2007, p. 3). Yet, Anime no sekai is important in that it, for the first time, placed Takahata on the same plane as these Western animators, contextualizing him within the history of Japanese and global animation, thus gaining their cultural capital. And it is also significant that this book was published by Shinchōsha with an aim to present Takahata and his work, and anime, for that matter, in such a way to suit the taste of readers of Tonbo no hon, who like literature or art, and invite them to buy a ticket. It was not a one-sided matter of Takahata or anime gaining more cultural capital when they were “discovered” by a field “above” anime, but it was part of a commercial strategy planned by a stakeholder of the film production. In other words, commercial needs were propelling the consecration.

4.3. The First Step as a Public Intellectual

Despite the campaign, as I have detailed elsewhere (Yoshioka 2018b), Grave (and Totoro) was anything but a commercial success. However, the film gained Takahata a position as a liberal, anti-war filmmaker. The June 1987 issue of Ushio, a monthly magazine for middle-aged men published by Ushio shuppansha, a company owned by a Japanese “new religion” Sōka gakkai, has an essay by Takahata titled ““Morotofu no pan kago” no nazo” [A Mystery of “Molotov’s Bread Basket”]. In the essay, Takahata angrily writes about his experience during the production of Grave. He starts the essay by recollecting his childhood experience of an air raid in Okayama. In his memory, the incendiary bombs dropped from the B29 bombers fell in flames before hitting the ground, and he began to research the technical details of the bombs to reproduce the sight in Grave. He asked an assistant director to go to the Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF), thinking they should have materials on the issue. However, the assistant later came back to him saying that according to JSDF, what Takahata saw could not have been true. Takahata angrily told him, “That must be wrong. That’s ridiculous. I was definitely under the rain of fire. Many others are saying the same thing, and there are photos” (Takahata 1991, p. 435). In response, the assistant told him what he had heard in more detail. A researcher of JSDF explained to him, showing burnt pieces of actual bomb preserved in the laboratory, and emphasized that because of the structure of the bomb, it never catches fire in the air. Takahata bitterly continues:

Right. So, that is so-called “scientific” attitude. They deny the possibility of mid-air explosion simply based on remains of a bomb that lacks a hatch at its rear, which is thought to have a device to detonate the bomb, and a linen ribbon soaked with oil. The JSDF has really great scientists. And Mr. S [the assistant] is quite pathetic to say “I was somehow persuaded by that [explanation]…” At this rate, now that more than sixty percent of [Japanese] population were born after the war, even the fact that so many people were killed in air raid can be dismissed as incorrect due to fault in statistics. I am sorry to say this because the expert kindly spent his time to meet [the assistant], but I was totally appalled by the whole event, and could not hold my anger.

(ibid.)

This was the first occasion that Takahata expressed his political stance outside anime-related media such as the roundtable on Momotarō in Animage. Other articles in the issue of Ushio include those on Japanese history (“Aizu vs Chōshū: the Wound Is Yet to Be Healed”), politics (“The Soviet Ambassador to Japan Talks about Perestroika”) and business (“The Americans Cannot Phase Out Toshiba”), and the essay by Takahata is one of five short ones on various different topics by novelists and a political scientist. He is clearly placed in the position of bunkajin which literally means “man of culture” or public intellectual who can discuss “serious” issues intellectually but accessibly. While Takahata’s political stance was already observable in the roundtables on the prewar animation in Animage, after Grave he continuously expressed it in mainstream media, gaining further recognition as a public intellectual.

This was the case later in his career, especially toward its end. After the turn of the century Takahata even more actively expressed his concern about the political climate in Japan, especially the movement to change article nine of the constitution that prohibits Japan from making war as a means to resolve international conflict and possession of armed forces. He, as well as Yamada, became a member of 9-jō no kai (The League of Article 9), a society founded in 2004 by a group of academics, critics, creators, and artists who are against the movement to change Article 9. The July 2013 issue of Neppū, a monthly magazine published by Studio Ghibli, carried essays by Takahata, Miyazaki and Suzuki in which they very clearly and strongly opposed proposed changes to the constitution by the Liberal Democratic Party led by the PM Abe Shinzō (Miyazaki 2013; Suzuki 2013b; Takahata 2013b). Takahata also gave talks on the Second World War including his own experience. For example, in a lecture given at the event commemorating the foundation of a subdivision of 9-jō no kai by those involved in filmmaking, he talked about Japanese animation’s war contribution using Momotarō as the main example. He also mentioned the roundtable on the film. He states that he decided to have the discussion because the reaction of the young audience—laughing unthinkingly at comical scenes—made him suspect that they did not understand the historical context of the film, which turned out to be correct, as we have seen above. He subtly expresses his concern saying those young participants are now forty-something, hinting that there can be many others who know nothing about the wartime history of Japan, even what the Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere is (Takahata 2013a, pp. 209–10). In 2015, he gave a public lecture in his native city of Okayama at a ceremony in memory of the war dead, talking extensively about his own experience of the air raid of the city and also postwar democratic education. In the lecture, Takahata refers to the anecdote on “Molotov” (Takahata 2015, p. 13).

In short, the political views he expressed in the 1980s, first in anime magazines and then mainstream media, remained unchanged throughout his career, and eventually it was expressed as the voice of the studio. Although this tends to be overlooked, how the studio and its significant figures presented their political position is a topic that needs further investigation. That is because even when that is not directly connected with films they created, the very fact that the studio associates itself with a certain political view, which is rare in Japan, especially in relation to anime, itself enables them to separate themselves from other anime and creators. In other words, expression of political views can be a part of their “position-taking” in order to establish their position within the field (and also a strategy to appeal to sponsors and audiences with a certain taste).

Despite the clear ideology he expressed in media after release of the film, Takahata insisted that the main point of the film was not so much about being anti-war as it was a criticism against contemporary young people’s lifestyle. The December 1988 issue of Tokyo, a magazine issued by Tokyo jichi mondai kenkyūjo (Tokyo Research Institute for Issues on Local Governance) has a transcript of Takahata’s talk on Grave and Yanagawa given to its members. In the speech, Takahata makes the claim and says, with his tongue in his cheek, he believes that contemporary young Japanese people may well feel that they can live on their own because they have their own rooms and gadgets that enable them to spend time on their own and do not like to endure difficulties (Takahata 1991, p. 442).7

Interestingly, critics at the time often saw the film outside the particular context of the actual war, focusing on the death of the children. For example, Ikezawa Takeshige writes in the Early June 1988 issue of Kinema junpō that “Despite so many and brutal deaths in this film, what speaks to us is the irreplaceability and preciousness of life, which is beyond simple message such as anti-war or no-war” (Ikezawa 1988, p. 166). In weekly magazine Shūkan jiji, Shirai Yoshio analyzes that the film depicts the deaths of the young brother and sister as a “heartbreaking drama”, and in doing so, the film, unlike conventional similar works, does not rely on “tense agitation” or “exaggerated expression of cruelty of war that appeals to the instinct of the spectators”. Instead, he continues, the film is more intent on preserving details of daily life during the war in the form of a film (Shirai 1988, p. 97). In her review for Nami, a monthly literary magazine published by Shinchōsha, author Mure Yōko hardly refers to the historical context of the film, but focuses on how much she was moved by the film and cried by remembering her own childhood experience of drinking water out of tins of candies as Setsuko in the film did. She states that actually the water tasted horrible and she spat it out after having just one sip, but Setsuko in the film drinks it as if that is something really delicious, making her clearly understand the situation the children are in. After watching the film, every night she “soaked the pillow” by thinking about her own childhood and her brother, and the “innocent brother and sister so easily killed by the adults” (Mure 2013, p. 154).

Later in 1999, Takahata expressed his disdain of “fantasy” for its tendency to be used as a refuge from or replacement of reality, and said that in Grave he aimed at making a documentary. He then expresses his regret saying the whole event Seita and his sister go through in the film is too horrible, to the degree of making the film a kind of fantasy (Takahata 1999, p. 25). He also points out that the audience can be more critical of Seita’s decisions. As seen in the examples above, critics often saw the film sentimentally. There is not one specific answer to why that is, but one reasonable possibility is, as Kanō Seiji puts it, the animation and characters were so realistic that the audience emotionally identified with the brothers too strongly (Kanō 1999, p. 34). In any case, what is significant here is that despite Takahata’s very clear ideological position, the critics did not associate it with the film, meaning that it was not known among them at this point. In other words, his visibility beyond the field of anime was growing but not to the degree of his political belief being widely known.

While critics did not necessarily associate the film with anti-war or political ideology on wartime Japan, when the film made its way into classrooms, it was more closely associated with war, or the war. Yomiuri on December 16, 1988 reports that the film is particularly popular among anime and live-action films used as teaching materials for so-called “peace studies” (heiwa gakushū) at elementary schools. The article reports about classes at two elementary schools in Osaka where the film was shown to children. At Matsubara Elementary School in Takatsuki city, in May 1988, the children wrote a reaction paper after watching the film. The pupils then created a dossier titled “Anti-war newspaper” (Hansen shinbun) consisting of a record of their interview with their grandparents about their experience of the war and cutouts of newspaper articles on air raids and atomic bombing, which they used to prepare for their school trip to Hiroshima. Pupils at Suita Minami Elementary School in the city of Suita watched the film in fall 1988 and had a discussion on the film and war (Studio Ghibli 1996b, p. 119). Takahata also received letters from a class of elementary school children in Ōbu, Aichi, who watched Grave together with two other unidentified films on the war. Takahata wrote a reply to the class, which was given to the children. In the letter, Takahata commends the children for their excellent writing and then mentions his experience of air raids and also democracy after the end of the war, echoing his political stance (Takahata 1991, pp. 432–33). What is significant is that the film and Takahata made their way into school education, further cementing their position as a “respectable” work and creator. Indeed, the film won bourgeois consecration in the form of a number of film awards home and abroad, such as the special award for the Blue Ribbon Award, an annual film award given by film reviewers for Japanese newspapers, mainly tabloids, and the Grand-prix for The Moscow International Film Festival for Children and Young People. Thus, the subfield Takahata belongs to came to be associated with other fields at a “higher level” such as education and politics, and he and his works began to be recognized by those outside the field of anime as such.

5. Takahata as a “Master” of Anime: Only Yesterday

5.1. Commercialisation of Ghibli: The Need to Sell “Ordinary People”

I contended elsewhere that for Miyazaki the process of his consecration (although I did not use this concept) that he went through in the 1990s was deeply related to commercial aspects of his films, namely the all-out commercial campaign developed by Suzuki and the resultant commercial success (Yoshioka 2018a). Takahata’s career followed a similar path, and did so earlier than Miyazaki’s. Before Grave, Takahata was in a position closer to what Bourdieu calls the “field of limited production”, which does not yield much commercial profit due to lack of popular or bourgeois recognition but is rich in recognition from those in the same field, such as fellow creators. Grave gained him bourgeois recognition, and his next film, Only Yesterday (1991), marked a significant point of change in his career: for the first time, Takahata enjoyed a massive commercial success, and the success itself, as well as promotion leading to it, firmly established his position as a prominent director.

For Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyūbin, 1989) Suzuki developed a method of promotion that involves a number of media including TV, magazines and newspapers, and also tie-in promotion. In the case of Kiki, the tie-in was for Japanese logistics giant Yamato un’yu, who sponsored the film from the very beginning of the production (Yoshioka 2018b). For Only Yesterday, on the other hand, Brother, a company producing sewing machines, and Kagome, a food company known especially for tomato ketchup, joined after the production started. The intended target audience of the film given in an internal document provided at a meeting for discussing promotion strategies—women of the age between middle school and young professionals or “OL” (Office Lady, female office workers)—explains the rationale for the choice of partners (Studio Ghibli 1996c, p. 110). These companies produced materials and advertisements featuring the characters, however, without explicitly referring to the story or even the film itself. For example, Brother sold a card with a computer program for their sewing machine that enables the owner to easily create embroidery of characters from Only Yesterday and Kiki. Kagome’s leaflet features a recipe of omelet with their tomato ketchup explained by young Taeko, the protagonist of Only Yesterday. The leaflet, on its back cover, very briefly explains who she is, saying, “Taeko is the protagonist of Only Yesterday, an animated feature produced by Miyazaki Hayao and directed by Takahata Isao, to be released this summer” (ibid., pp. 68–69).

There are two significant points in the promotion strategies. One is that the film, as with Grave, is clearly intended for an audience who are not necessarily fans of anime, and the other is the emphasis placed on Miyazaki as much as, or even more than Takahata. The document on promotion strategies makes no reference to fans of anime. Instead, as one of the selling points of the film, it emphasizes that the film “can be watched not so much as an anime but a live action film” (ibid., p. 110). In other words, Takahata and his new film are now clearly marketed for audiences beyond those in the fields who are familiar with them, with an aim to make the film a commercial success rather than a “respectable” but not commercially successful work like Grave. The strategy has not so much to do with Takahata’s position as such that is associated with live-action films. Instead, it is rather due to the success of Kiki, as well as fundamental changes to the structure of the studio: after Kiki, Miyazaki made a decision to employ production staff as full-time employees rather than commissioning just for the period of production. According to Suzuki, the salary of the staff was doubled and so was the budget for the film compared with Kiki (Suzuki 2014, p. 50). As a result, it was mandatory for the studio to make the project a success so that it could survive (Studio Ghibli 2014, p. 33).

The pressure was also on the distributor Tōhō as well as Meijā, who were responsible for preparing actual materials for promotion, mainly because of the success of Kiki, which was distributed by another company Tōei. Significantly, Tokuyama recalls that in designing advertisements, he tried to emphasize that the film was produced by Studio Ghibli and tried to show who Takahata is because, at the time, Takahata had directed only one film (Grave) for Ghibli and therefore was not so widely known compared with Miyazaki. He gives one example in which the copy says “The Exciting Latest Film by Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao! The Warmth of My Neighbor Totoro, the Joy of Kiki’s Delivery Service and the Moving Story of Grave of Fireflies Came Together” (Studio Ghibli 2002, p. 220). In one of the newspaper advertisements, Tokuyama went even further in a bid to appeal to a broad range of people. The advertisement in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on 17 July 1991 features an endorsement by Yamada Taichi, a screen playwright also known for writing a number of TV dramas that often reflect on postwar Japanese society as well as the so-called “trendy drama” depicting the life of young people living in Tokyo, and one from a popular standup comedian duo Ucchan Nanchan. The former, reminding of Takahata’s earlier link with the film figures, praises the film that it is “excellent” and he was “thrilled by the cuteness of young Taeko and how realistic movement of characters is integrated into fantastic setting”. The latter, on the other hand, says “Even we boys dropped tears (poroporo shita, a pun on Japanese title of the film Omoide poroporo) so girls definitely shed more” (ibid., p. 234). According to Tokuyama, by having the comedians, who happened to be relatives of one of his employees, and the writer, both of whom are very famous but had nothing to do with anime, in the ad, he could emphasize that “this is not just an ordinary anime” (ibid., p. 224).

What was happening in the promotion of Only Yesterday was an attempt to gain Takahata popular recognition beyond that by fans of anime and critics within the field of anime and live-action film. While he began to gain bourgeois recognition with Grave, the film was anything but a commercial success, and also as Tokuyama’s remark indicates, Takahata’s name was yet to have “commercial value” that attracts the audience. With Only Yesterday, as part of the business strategy of Ghibli as a whole, Takahata and his films started to be commercialized.

5.2. Commercial Success, Critical Backlash and Bourgeois Consecration

We should note that commercialization or popularization of Takahata (and Ghibli) was accomplished using symbolic capital the director and the studio had already gained up to that point. In this process, he is often consecrated in mainstream media as a significant figure within the field and associated with the historical past of postwar anime as well as the field of live-action film. In the process of the consecration for commercialization, the success and fame of Miyazaki were very useful. In a number of articles reporting the production of the film, it was often Miyazaki who was center-stage. An article in the tabloid newspaper Supōtsu Nippon, the earliest report on the film, reads, “Only Yesterday Animated by Miyazaki Hayao” (Supōtsu Nippon 1990). The focus, however, is not so much on the film but on the choice of Miyako Harumi, a female singer known for enka, a music genre popular among older men, for its theme song, reflecting readership of the newspaper (middle-aged to older male). The only reference to Takahata in the article is that he is the director of Grave, in which he “showed a unique creative spirit”. Another tabloid Nikkan gendai on 3 August 1991 has an article on the film. The article appeared after the release and success of the film, but it is almost exclusively about Miyazaki with his picture. The article introduces him as the producer of Only Yesterday, which is in cinemas and earning no less than 1.1 billion yen. The subheadings tout him by saying he is “at the Top of the Field of Japanese Anime” (“nihon anime kai no chōten ni tatsu”) and “A Man Who Can Create Anime that Appeals to the World Better than Tezuka Osamu” (Studio Ghibli 1996c, p. 114). Still another tabloid article on Tokyo Chūnichi Supōtsu reporting release of the film on 21 July 1991 introduces the film as being produced by “Miyazaki Hayao, who created the highly successful Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro” (ibid., p. 115). These articles indicate how well-known Miyazaki already was at the time, and at the same time, how little Takahata was known among readers of these tabloids, who were some of the least likely audience of anime.

In broadsheets and mainstream magazines, on the other hand, Takahata appears more properly, but again very often with Miyazaki. Shortly before release of the film on 20 July 1991, articles on the film appeared in various different kinds of print media including national newspapers and magazines for readers ranging from young men (weekly magazine Shūkan Pureibōi) to Japan Communist Party’s monthly magazine. The JCP magazine’s article introduces the film as a “‘Women’s film’ more delicate and purer than average (namajino) live action films” produced and directed by the duo “well-known for My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of Fireflies” (Gurafu konnichiwa nihon kyōsantō desu 1991, p. 30). Pureibōi’s article interviews both Takahata and Miyazaki, talking about their works from the Tōei period. An article in the August 1991 issue of Next, a monthly magazine for middle-aged male professionals has a section titled “Trend” with keywords and products that are of interest, mainly because of their potential commercial value. Together with “oral contraceptive” and “SPI” (Service Price Index, a new price index for business introduced by the Bank of Japan), Only Yesterday is mentioned at the very top of the list. Again, the focus is on the fact that it was a “Miyazaki and Takahata” film, and the duo’s works include Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky (Tenkū no shiro Rapyuta, Miyazaki Hayao, 1986), Totoro, Grave and Kiki. It is also noted that Kiki earned 2.17 billion yen in 1989 before summarizing that these films are “masterpieces in the history of Japanese films” (Next 1991, p. 112). These references indicate the recognition Miyazaki had already gained and a subfield of their own is being successfully formed within and beyond the field of anime.

Another longer article in a weekly magazine Friday, a gossip magazine similar to Shinchōsha’s Focus, unlike these examples, places Takahata center-stage with a very clear tone of consecration. This is observable in the title of the article: “Can Takahata Isao, ‘Master of Anime (anime no kyoshō)’ Known for Heidi and Grave of Fireflies, Continue to Realize the ‘Myth’ with Only Yesterday?” The article points out that “anime directed by Miyazaki Hayao such as Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, Totoro and Kiki are now extremely famous, but Takahata Isao is something like a teacher (shishō) for him” (Friday 1991, p. 94). The article details Takahata’s career starting from Tōei, referring to Horus as being said to be “the greatest work of Tōei dōga” (ibid.). Towards the end, the unsigned article quotes film critic Tayama Rikiya. He says that he watched Grave because he had been told that he should not call himself a film critic without watching the film, and was captivated by it. He then refers to Yanagawa, calling it an excellent documentary film, and asserts that Takahata should be able to create live-action films successfully because he “understands human minds” (p. 95). The article ends, again echoing his association with live-action film figures presented earlier in Animage, making an unsupported claim that Takahata is an acquaintance to prominent directors such as Kurosawa Akira and Suzuki Seijun, and, therefore, his latest film will surely be in the top-ten list of the season (ibid.). Besides the reference to live-action film figures and the quote from a film critic, this article emphasizes that Takahata has a long career in creating animation, including Horus and the TV series in the 1970s, and Miyazaki developed his skills as he worked together with Takahata for these (p. 94). The article presents Takahata as a significant figure within the field of anime, not solely for his proximity to a larger field of film in general, but also within the field of anime itself, hence the label of “master of anime”. We should also note that just like in Anime no sekai, the TV series is associated with Takahata in tandem with Horus, again enabling him to “withdraw” the saved symbolic capital.

The article on Pureibōi is even more explicit in consecrating Takahata within the field of anime. The title even calls Takahata and Miyazaki “the Gods of Anime” and within the text they are called “masters in the field of animation (animēshon kai no kyoshō)” (Shūkan pureibōi 1991, p. 220). Very significantly, in the interview, Takahata and Miyazaki clearly present themselves as being in a unique position within the field. Looking back on earlier days in their career, Miyazaki says that they were more like an “opposition party” because they tried to create animations that were different from existing ones, and Takahata agrees, saying, “That is right. Indeed we were like an opposition party. There were so many rules and restrictions enforced on us within the industry of animation. We, before we realized, came to where we are now as we tried to break through them” (p. 220). Miyazaki continues by saying that people may regard them as a ruling and majority party of the anime industry, just like the Liberal Democratic Party, which, at the time, had been in power for more than three decades, but they still want to think that they are an opposition party (pp. 220–21). It is mainly Miyazaki who speaks, and the interviewer asks only about Horus as the starting point of their collaboration without making any references to later TV series. Yet, a footnote states that Horus, again, is “a legendary great masterpiece in the history of anime (anime shijō fukyū no daikessaku)” (p. 221). Although the focus is more on Miyazaki and Takahata than in the article on Friday, the interview also presents them as figures in a special position within the field of anime, and the duo also present themselves as such.

Despite the massive campaign Suzuki organized including special TV programs and a tour by Takahata and Miyazaki to different cities where they promoted Only Yesterday (Studio Ghibli 2014, p. 35), advance tickets did not sell well, and the atmosphere within its distributor Tōhō was also somewhat lukewarm (Studio Ghibli 2002, p. 224). However, once released, the film turned out to be a success with a revenue of 8.88 billion yen, making it the most successful Japanese film of the year (Studio Ghibli 2014, p. 36). But critical reaction was not as positive as it had been for Grave. While the quality of its depiction of landscape based on real locations was acclaimed, many criticized its romanticized view of countryside and the ending where the protagonist, a 27-year old woman working at an office in Tokyo, decides to marry a young farmer in a remote rural village after living there for merely ten days.

The criticism was particularly severe among those who had experience of living in these farming villages. Author Yoshida Tsukasa, writing for the weekly magazine AERA, praised the film’s depiction of the city of Yamagata, which is his home town, as “nothing but brilliant” because of its extremely realistic depiction of the landscape and atmosphere, to which “even live action documentaries are out of question for comparison”. However, he harshly condemned the film for “toying” with a rural area to cater to the selfish desire of urbanites. In his view, earlier in the postwar period they destroyed it for economic growth, and now they were talking about organic farming and the richness of nature and humane lifestyle, topics that are actually mentioned within the dialogues in the film (Yoshida 1991, p. 74). In an article in the Osaka edition of the Yomiuri newspaper written in a letter format to Taeko the protagonist, Nakaya Tadao notes:

On the day before you returned to Tokyo, you said you liked the countryside. And then the granny asked you to marry Toshio [the young famer]. I was brought up in a rural area, and the back pain from weeding rice paddies is too familiar. Work and natural environment in rural area as “enjoyment” for a few days and as “daily life” are two things that cannot be more different. (Nakaya 1991)

A review in the Mainichi shinbun newspaper by Matsushima Toshiyuki makes a similar point, but from a different perspective. He states that in terms of mise-en-scène and animation technique, especially depiction of the faces of the characters that realistically reproduces movement of muscles, the film seems to be aiming at being “a film that is animation but not allowing people to categorise it as such” or a reproduction of live action in the form of animation. Despite the realistic depiction, however, in his opinion, the apparently realistic landscape of the village in the film was on the same terrain as “the ‘garden-like’ ground where Bambi jumped around and Snow White stood”. According to him, the motives of Taeko’s action were unclear and the sweet ending is far from being persuasive. As a result, the animated landscape in the film “is yet to have the mud-covered labour and the colour of the earth” on it (Matsushima 1991, p. 26).

Matsushima is not the only reviewer troubled by the “live action-like” realism in the film and its “mismatching” with the film form of animation. Okada Emiko, who was so passionate about consecrating Takahata and Miyazaki before, expressed her disappointment with the film in her review for manga and anime magazine Comic Box. While she praises the overall realism and also shows understanding of the rationale for adapting the style in animation, she, as others, finds the depiction of Taeko not persuasive. Furthermore, she wonders whether this is a film the fans (of anime/Ghibli films) wanted to see, after two years of waiting for another exciting film since Kiki. She, then, quoting Takahata’s own words in an essay he wrote for Anime no sekai, says that there are two kinds of realism in animation: “the power to depict something that cannot happen in reality with such persuasiveness to the extent of making people believe it can really happen” and “the power to redefine and anchor what people know very well [into their mind] by giving it a clear shape”. And she concludes that while Only Yesterday was highly successful in the second sense of the word, those who were looking forward to the first type of realism were disappointed, and expresses her hope that the next film by the studio would have more of it (Okada 1991, p. 23). The disappointment of Okada and also the fact that the review was published in an anime and manga magazine can indicate that now Takahata (and Miyazaki and Ghibli, potentially) had moved away from the position he used to occupy within the anime fandom, and also the field of anime as a whole, exactly in line with the aim of the promotion campaign.

The irony is, on a discursive level, that the affinity with live action was actively used to establish Takahata’s position within the field of anime as well as in film in general and also cultural products, but when it comes to the actual film, the issue of the nature of animation vis-à-vis live-action films worked against him. More importantly, we should also note that for this film, the relationship between the critical reaction and commercial success is opposite to his earlier works. We can say that at this point, Takahata’s position shifted away from the pole of limited production toward that of mass production, the other end of the spectrum of Bourdieu’s concept, where commercial success has a greater value than artistic success.

We need to note that the much-criticized ending was not what Takahata had originally intended. As Kani details, originally the film was to end with Taeko’s return to Tokyo. But Suzuki demanded it be changed saying that being a film, the ending should be more touching. This went against Takahata’s intention. He accepted to direct the film on the understanding that the only way for him to direct it is making it a “non-film“ that lacks a coherent dramatic structure (Kani 2018, p. 310). Suzuki even discloses that the character of Toshio itself was added after he told Takahata that as an entertainment, Taeko, a young woman travelling on her own, should meet a young man. That is why the character has the same name as Suzuki (2014, pp. 41–42). It is significant that Suzuki started to intervene with the production of the film for the purpose of making the film an “entertainment” and therefore attractive for many audiences. While the image of the studio’s directors as “masters” and auteurs was being built in media, partially following the lead by Suzuki as a part of a massive promotion campaign, in reality, production of their films was heavily influenced by commercial factors, and Suzuki championed the process.

In the case of Takahata or Ghibli in general, the relationship between commercial and artistic value is peculiar in that the latter was not lost for the sake of the former or the vice versa. Instead, artistic success is deeply intertwined with commercialism. Despite the negative critical reaction, the film gained him further recognition in the form of geijutsu senshō, an annual award in recognition of notable achievement in art including theatre, literature, music and visual art presented by the Japanese government. Takahata, along with 14 others from different areas, was awarded with the Education Minister’s award for Only Yesterday, one year after Miyazaki received the same award for Kiki. At this point, Takahata had firmly established his position with bourgeois consecration in Bourdieu’s terms, namely critical recognition of his earlier works as being significant in the history of anime, and also association with general film rather than just anime, attention from mainstream media, and actual commercial success of film that further secures critical and popular attention. We should note that actually the bourgeois consecration at this stage was achieved regardless of the negative critical reaction to Only Yesterday. We can say that the achievement is owed not so much to the actual content of the film as to recognition of Takahata’s symbolic capital by those outside the field of anime, for which the promotion campaign for the film played a major role by presenting him as a significant figure as well as presenting (Takahata and Miyazaki’s) anime as something special. It can even be argued that for the achievement, commercial success of the film can be equally or potentially more significant than the critical reaction: as we can see in newspaper and magazine articles published after the release of Only Yesterday, its commercial success adds another index to the significance of the film that enables the name of Takahata to reach those who had little to do with anime but occupy important positions in business and politics, namely middle-aged or older males.

An article in the 17 January 1992 issue of the weekly magazine Asahi gurafu shows the position of Takahata at the time very clearly. The article introduces him as “a revolutionary in the world of craftsmanship” and details his career, starting with the influence of Paul Grimault on him. The article refers to Horus, claiming that it later came to be acclaimed for “changing the course of history of animation” before detailing Takahata’s approach to anime making, saying he is still continuing with the “transformation of animation” (Miyamoto 1992, pp. 69–70). The article then questions what exactly is the difference between live-action filmmakers and an “auteur of animation (animēshon sakka)”, the title under which Takahata is introduced on the first page. Takahata is quoted repeating what he said in the roundtable with the film figures in Animage back in 1982, focusing on acting, emphasizing the difference between the two film formats. He says creators of animation require “craftsmanship” because unlike in live action, they cannot repeat shooting even if they do not like the acting in a particular shot so they have to plan the precise movement of the character in advance. The author of the article summarizes that in animation, the director decides on everything—the speed, timing and direction of a character’s movement as well as framing, background, weather and camerawork—as if a live-action filmmaker also assuming roles that are usually occupied by another person. Unlike in the 1982 roundtable, the explanation is intended for a general audience rather than fans of anime, and can have an opposite effect. Instead of associating anime with live-action film, which was regarded as being superior to anime, and trying to place them on the same plane, here the difference between the two film forms is contrasted and the animation making is associated with "craftsmanship”, which is represented by Takahata, not in relation to just his latest work but the whole career up to the point. In other words, the position of anime is established as a field that deserves a different kind of respect to live-action films. The article, interestingly, features a photograph of Takahata receiving the Yamaji Fumiko film award, the first film award to be announced in Japan in a given year. The caption explains that Takahata had received the award for Only Yesterday, and adds that among other winners was Kurosawa Akira, a master of live-action film. The comparison suggests that Kuroswa and live-action film is a yardstick against which the significance of Takahata and his animation is measured: Takahata and animation are regarded as belonging to a field of their own and therefore demand a different type of category to praise its quality, and as such, for uninitiated readers a yardstick is needed to gauge the significance of Takahata and his works. But at the same time, the very fact that the comparison is thought to be valid and useful indicates that they are now viewed as “proper” films on a par with Kurosawa films.

6. Conclusions

To summarize, up to Only Yesterday, the first commercial success among his features, Takahata went through a process of bourgeois consecration, which enabled him to gain symbolic capital and for his works to be regarded as “respectable” and comparable with live-action films, including those by very prominent filmmakers. During the process, the relationship between different fields played a significant role. At the beginning of his career, he belonged to a marginal area of field of films because animation in Japan at the time was regarded as less significant than live action. However, once the field of anime began to be formed in the mid- to late 1970s, he was first consecrated within the field. During the process, he was often associated with live-action film figures, and unlike his peers, he was open to admitting the weakness of animation vis-à-vis live action, and was also keen to adapt live-action style realism to animation. The relationship worked to raise the status of the field of anime by both associating it to and distinguishing it from a larger and well-established field of film in general. One thing we need to note, however, is that this first round of consecration often took place retrospectively. Although he was an active animation director, he was frequently associated with his past at Tōei. The tendency continued even after he began to enjoy bourgeois consecration in the late 1980s, and in a way even after his death, as observable in the exhibition. Actually such retrospective “discovery” of Takahata as director of the Masterpiece Theater TV series as well as mythologisation of Horus as a classic masterpiece, which started within the field of anime, played a key role in the process of consecration. During this second phase of consecration at around the time of release of Only Yesterday in 1991, Takahata, as well as Miyazaki and Ghibli, was separated from other anime and their creators by the critics and also by themselves. As evident in the interview with Takahata and Miyazaki on the film, they clearly attempted to establish their position by emphasizing the differences between them and the rest of the actors within the field of anime. Suzuki and others involved in promotion employed the same strategy to attract a broad range of audience to Only Yesterday after they succeeded to do so in Kiki. Thus, it can be concluded that the highly complex inter-relation between different fields and their status, although it has been rarely studied in detail, is a very significant factor for Takahata to gain the fame he enjoyed.