My Neighbors the Yamadas
Takahata’s minimalist aesthetic is taken to nearly avant-garde lengths in this cheery, radically drawn adaptation of a popular newspaper comic strip. The Yamada family isn’t quite the model of material success; frumpy, and a bit too disorganized to lead their lives the “correct” way, these charming failures are rendered by Takahata as a becalmed answer to The Simpsons. He presents their misadventures as a series of vignettes designed to tweak—not destroy—notions of family. Humorously juxtaposed against the poetry of the seventeenth-century writer Basho, whose minimalist stanzas set the nostalgic tone, the animation technique itself is a kind of visual haiku.
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