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With the series "Heidi", director Isao Takahata has staged Johanna Spyri's story. In its exhibition, the mudac design museum in Lausanne also explores Takahata's relationship to Western stories and their adaptation to film.
Keystone
The anime series "Heidi" is probably director Isao Takahata's best-known work. The mudac design museum in Lausanne is dedicating an exhibition to the Japanese director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli.
The show "Isao Takahata. Pioneer of contemporary animated film, from the post-war period to Studio Ghibli" traces the career of the filmmaker, who died in 2018. This is told using sketchbooks and storyboards, original drawings, celluloid films, film clips and audiovisual documents.
Isao Takahata's classics from the 1970s include "3000 Leagues in Search of Mother" (1976) and "Anne of Green Gables" (1979). According to the mudac museum's press documents, these are characterized by unusual solutions in order to depict everyday life as accurately as possible despite weekly episodes - "from clothing, eating culture and living arrangements to relationships with nature." This resulted in "deeply human, dramatically finely crafted narratives", which Takahata and his team realized.
These works include the series "Heidi" (1974) in particular. A previously unpublished section of the exhibition is dedicated to Isao Takahata's relationship with Europe and the challenge of telling Western stories in Japanese animated films. The exhibition explores the director and producer's desire to authentically portray Western narratives.
Japanese culture also features in his work several times. In particular in films that emerged from Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded in Japan in 1985. It was there that he made what is probably his best-known work worldwide, "The Last Fireflies" (1988), which tells the tragic story of two children in bombed-out Japan towards the end of the Second World War.
Isao Takahata was born in Japan in 1935 as the seventh child of a teacher. At the end of June 1945, when he was nine years old, he survived a heavy bombing raid. His memories of this had a profound influence on his later work. In 2009, the Locarno Film Festival awarded him the Honorary Leopard for his life's work and in 2015 he was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Feature Film category for his film "The Legend of Princess Kaguya".
The exhibition in the Lausanne art quarter "Plateforme 10" can be visited from Friday (April 24) and runs until September 27.
22.04.2026, 15:07
22.04.2026, 15:09
