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| Eli & Ana Jones with Harry and Vicky |
The Jones are in the Land of the Rising Sun. This morning, they have continued their English lessons before visiting the Imperial Palace. The family have revised the Past Simple (Regular Verbs), the Syntactic Order and All/Both/Neither and Nor.
More information: Past Simple
After reading a new chapter of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the family has been talking about surgery and its effects on people, especially famous artists.
Cinema and TV are always good memories from childhood and the family has remembered four of their favourite cartoons, all of them Japanese. They have been talking about Heidi, Marco, Maya Bee and Vicky The Viking.
More information: Syntactic Order
Finally, The Grandma has talked about some aspects of the recent Japanese history and how tradition and last technology live together creating an incredible atmosphere in this Asian country.
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| Paqui & Michelle Jones with Heidi |
Moreover, she has explained how important is the Japanese economy and how it affects the global one, including the European Union, cradle of all the family, and how economy is the main responsible of the great historic events.
The Grandma is always paying attention to new chances of investment because she must take care of her big fortune. This is the main reason because she has bought new houses in Inverness, Chinon, Paris and Venice (Blue Banana) and also in l'Alghero and Aix-Les-Bains (Golden Banana).
Predict the future is important to choose a good investment and in the world of economy coincidences don't exist.
More information: Central Intelligence Agency
Isao Takahata (1935-2018) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter and producer. In 1985, he co-founded Studio Ghibli with his long-time collaborative partner Hayao Miyazaki and Miyazaki's collaborators Toshio Suzuki and Yasuyoshi Tokuma.
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| Isao Takahata with Marco and Heidi |
Takahata earned critical international acclaim for his work as a director of anime films, among them Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), The dog of Flanders (1992), Pom Poko (1994), and My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999).
His last film as director was The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), which was nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Animated Feature Film at the 87th Academy Awards.
Takahata was born in Ujiyamada, now Ise, Mie prefecture on October 29, 1935, as the youngest of seven siblings and third son in the family. His father, Asajiro Takahata was a junior high school principal, who became the education chief of Okayama prefecture after the war.
More information: The Atlantic
On June 29, 1945, when Takahata was nine years old, he and his family survived a major United States air raid on Okayama City.
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| Silvia & Joaquín Jones with Maya the Bee |
Takahata graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1959 with a degree in French literature. During this time at the school, he had seen the French film Le Roi et l'Oiseau, The King and the Mockingbird, which led him to become interested in animation.
Takahata was more interested in animation as a medium, and wanted to write and direct for animated works rather than create animations himself. A friend suggested he apply for a directing job at Toei Animation; Takahata passed their entrance exam, and was hired as an assistant director for several of Toei's animated television shows and films, including Wolf Boy Ken, on which he was mentored by Yasuo Ōtsuka.
Ōtsuka eventually asked Takahata to direct an animated feature film of his own; his directorial debut was The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968).
More information: Japan Times
Ōtsuka served as Animation Director on the film, while another Toei employee, Hayao Miyazaki, served as key animator. Though it would later be recognized as one of the first defining works of modern Japanese animation,the film was a commercial failure, and Takahata was demoted.
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| Víctor & Claudia Jones with Marco |
Unable to further improve his standing at Toei, Takahata left the studio in 1971, along with Miyazaki and Yōichi Kotabe. Takahata and Miyazaki came up with the idea of creating an animated feature film based on the stories of Pippi Longstocking.
They developed the idea along with A Production, an animated studio formed by another former Toei animator, Daikichiro Kusube, the company became Shin-Ei Animation.
Takahata and Miyazaki had developed a number of storyboards and had flown out to Sweden for location shots, to meet with the books' author, Astrid Lindgren, and secure the rights for the character. However they could not reach an agreement with the rightsholders, and were forced to drop the project.
Takahata and Miyazaki remained collaborators in several other animation projects through the 1970s, including taking over production of the anime series Lupin the Third Part I at Ōtsuka's request, due to its poor ratings. Takahata, Kotabe, and Miyazaki were approached by the studio Zuiyo Enterprise to create an animated series based on the novel Heidi, which resulted in Heidi, Girl of the Alps, this incorporated some of their work from the Pippi Longstocking concept.
The animation production section of Zuiyo was established as a subsidiary company named Zuiyo Eizo, later becoming Nippon Animation, which Takahata and Miyazaki joined.
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| The Tale of the Princess Kaguya |
Takahata continued to work at Nippon for about a decade; his work there included an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables in 1979, another project which had thematic similarities with the Pippi Longstocking concept.
Around 1981, Takahata left Nippon to join Telecom Animation Film Co., Ltd., known today as Tokyo Movie Shinsha or TMS Entertainment, where he led production of an animated feature based on the magna Jarinko Chie, and a subsequent television spinoff.
Around 1982, Telecom came up with the idea of an animated feature film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland which adapted the Little Nemo comic, which was to feature joint direction between Japanese and American animation techniques. While both Takahata and Miyazaki were originally involved, they opted to leave the project and Telecom itself due to discord between the Japanese and American project directions.
Like it or not, a caterpillar must first live as a chrysalis
before becoming a butterfly. Maybe I remember those days
because I am going through a chrysalis stage.
Isao Takahata
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