Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is all about Pippi Longstocking — as interpreted by Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki and Yoichi Kotabe.
That’s quite a lineup. In the ‘80s, Takahata and Miyazaki built Studio Ghibli into a creative powerhouse, and Yoichi Kotabe joined Nintendo — defining the designs for Mario, Bowser and more. The trio’s work got known around the world.
Before the fame, though, there was the Pippi series.
Interest and rumors have surrounded Pippi for decades. Back in 1971, Takahata took charge of this project, trying to turn European children’s literature into a Japanese TV cartoon. Writing, art and even animation tests were done. But author Astrid Lindgren rejected the pitch for unknown reasons. The series fell apart.
Even then, Pippi lived on. Elements of it reappeared in the team’s later projects — from Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974) to Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). In fact, its whole ethos stayed in their work. The surviving art, documents and memories from Pippi Longstocking offer a glimpse at the roots of Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s filmmaking.
Today, we’re looking through these materials to discover what Pippi could’ve been, and what it can still reveal. Here we go!
Summing up the animated Pippi isn’t hard. Isao Takahata did it often — in interviews and in his writing for the show. The point of Pippi was to “liberate the minds of children.”
The books about Pippi Longstocking portray her as “the strongest girl in the world” — she can lift a horse with one hand. She also has her own home and a suitcase full of gold, so she’s totally independent. As Takahata wrote in his planning documents, Pippi has all the power of an adult (and then some) without having experienced the trials of growing up. To her, the world is a playground where anything is possible.
Animating the Pippi stories meant bringing this energy to the children watching TV. But making it for kids didn’t mean making it halfheartedly. Like the children’s films that Ghibli did later, this series was given intense thought and effort. The idea of working on Pippi grabbed Hayao Miyazaki because it seemed like a chance to make something good. “I thought there might be hope,” he recalled.
That said, at the time, Miyazaki wasn’t the visionary director he grew to be. Pippi wasn’t his project, and the books didn’t necessarily attract him on their own. It came down to Takahata — or “Paku-san,” as his friends knew him.
“I assumed Paku-san would make the content interesting,” Miyazaki said, “so I just wanted to create a proper stage or world for this work.”
For Isao Takahata himself, Pippi was more than a promising idea. It was a chance to revive his career. A few years before, he’d hit a dead end.
Things had started well enough. Takahata joined Tokyo’s main animation studio, Toei Doga, in 1959. Although he couldn’t really draw, he could really direct, and he took assistant director roles on films like The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963). Eventually, he solo-directed Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), a landmark feature.
Horus changed the life of Yoichi Kotabe, its character designer. The film made him realize, “With animation, you can create a world you can grasp with your hands.”
Takahata and his team, which included Miyazaki as a core artist, crafted a tangible world. It’s full of details that make it seem like it could actually exist. As Kotabe said:
Until then I’d been taking it relatively easy. But Horus: Prince of the Sun was Mr. Takahata’s first piece as director, so he gave it all he had. He put a lot of thought into what was expected of it, what he wanted to express and the underlying psychological characterization. […] And while I was trying to keep up with him, I started to get my own guts.
Yet Horus went overbudget and overschedule, and flopped when it finally came out. Takahata’s reputation with management was poisoned — he was banned from directing at Toei Doga. Even Miyazaki later called it understandable, given everything.
A few frustrating years passed. “Then came the most appealing invitation to create Pippi Longstocking,” Takahata remembered.
An outside studio, A Production, got in touch with him. It’d made a Moomin TV series in the late ‘60s that Toei workers watched with jealousy — its starting point was children’s literature rather than comics. “That in itself was a remarkable thing for us,” Miyazaki said. It seemed like a chance to do deeper, richer TV animation. A Production gave Takahata an offer to direct a show based on the Pippi books.
The decision wasn’t easy. Takahata was a key creative voice and union member at Toei Doga. He needed to drag trusted artist friends away with him, too — after all, he couldn’t draw. But he chose to leave and persuaded Miyazaki and Kotabe to join him. (“I felt that, to do meaningful work, I had to be with him,” Miyazaki later said.)
They quit together to make Pippi in 1971 — in a haze of ill will, uncertainty and excitement.
It was the three of them on Pippi Longstocking. The project didn’t get far enough to expand to a full team. “Our preproduction period was short,” Miyazaki said, “but very meaningful for us.”
They worked quickly, each one sticking to their specialties.
Takahata laid out Pippi’s characters and worldview. He also wrote a “letter storyboard” (jikonte) — a sort of heavily detailed script. Miyazaki worked from Takahata’s ideas to draw the world, sketching moments and locations in his “image boards,” a type of concept art he’d started doing on Horus.
Kotabe designed the cast and made animation tests. His drawings influenced Miyazaki’s, and vice versa.
What Takahata was making was in some ways an extension of the Horus philosophy, that tangibility. But it differed from Horus’s dark tone. When he outlined the Pippi series in 1971, Takahata wrote this:
… the most important thing is that protagonist Pippi asserts her existence in a way that is concrete, real, vibrant and alive — never the creators’ own self-righteousness or snideness — while spreading cheerful laughter, dreams and fantastic discoveries in abundance. It will liberate children from the oppression of reality and brightly illuminate their lives. That is the goal.
In order to do this, the two key things that will undergird the Pippi series will be devising and expressing Pippi’s everyday life, including quirky and fun kaji (housekeeping) activities that double as forms of play; and devising and composing the group of people who represent adult common sense and logic in various ways and form the anti-Pippi forces.
In 2014, Takahata said that the idea behind Pippi was “everyday magic.” It was a fantastical story, but based
