Studio Ghibli Thoughts: My Neighbors the Yamadas
“ Que sera, sera ” and “Don’t overdo it” were some of the most memorable lines in Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbors the Yamadas , even being used in much of the advertising. Knowing the studio’s reputation for perfection and excellence, it is clear that the entirety of this movie’s production is an elaborate rebellious message by the director, Isao Takahata, on both the culture of the studio and Japan as a whole. Of course, this short rebellion and “Encouragement of Unseriousness” was never fully embraced by either the studio or Takahata himself, even in this movie itself, which was as expensive to produce as the epic Princess Mononoke . Based on a newspaper comic strip by, not unlike Snoopy or Garfield , the movies focused on the everyday lives of the Yamada family. Consisting of a salaryman and his housewife, along with a son, an adorable daughter, and a live-in grandmother, this family represented the typical post-war living arrangement in Japan. Like the comic strip it was based on, the...