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The following photos are from the memorial service honoring the late Isao Takahata at the Ghibli Museum on May 15. The event was attended by 1,200 people including many prominent filmmakers, producers and actors, as well as family and friends. Thanks to Huffington Post Japan for posting these photographs online.

Today, friends, family and colleagues paid tribute to Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata at a public memorial service at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan. The event was open to the public and featured many prominent artists and filmmakers whose lives intersected with the beloved director over the past 60 years. The museum displayed a wonderful floral display in the main hall, and also included a large montage of photographs featuring Paku-san over the years, as well as a collection of his many published books. Animators and filmmakers in attendance included many alumni from Toei Doga, where Takahata began his career in 1958 after graduating from Tokyo University (he was courted by the movie studio while still a student. Yasuo Otsuka and Yoichi Kotabe were present along with the rest of the old gang. Dutch animator Michael Dudok De Wit, director of the 2016 Academy Award-nominated animated feature The Red Turtle (produced by Studio Ghibli under the personal supervision of Takahata

I had completely forgotten that we had passed our Ghibli Blog birthday on March. I kept thinking it was May. Whoops. In any case, here's a cake. Yay! Ghibli Blog (Conversations on Ghibli) was started on March 2006 and aside from the occasional hiatus has continued ever since. I am still nowhere near my original goal of writing everything there is to know about the Studio Ghibli movies, which is a very pleasant surprise, but I am getting closer than ever. Meanwhile, the enormous pile of essays and possible directions for my never-ending Ghibli book project just grows higher and higher. I just tell myself to continue writing about all of these great films and television series until all the essentials are covered. Maybe I should write a book like Mi Vecino Miyazaki, which is really solid and looks terrific. Or maybe write a couple volumes of written essays. Or maybe just dump the blog onto print in a massive encyclopedia stack. Or maybe I should just do something simple and with lots

This scene in Porco Rosso shows Marco's true face for a quick moment. Teenage Fio is shocked at the sight, but when he realizes he is being watched, Porco's pig face returns. It's a great moment that gets at the heart of the hero's identity and the movie's themes of being bound to the past and the romance of nostalgia. Western audiences can never understand why Porco Rosso has a pig's head, and this insistence on literal "realism" in animation is slightly depressing. Nothing about this medium is real. You are looking at pencil drawings and paintings, not actors on a soundstage. You are looking at something that is itself a product of the imagination, and that fact carries a certain surrealism and symbolism in its very bones. Miyazaki portrays Marco as a pig because it represents his disgust with humanity as a result of his experiences fighting the Great War. He feels disconnected from the outside world, not only those who never had to fight, but those

Studio Ghibli gives itself a rare cameo in Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso, as seen here on the airplane engine. We also see the name "Ghibli" on a passing bus in Kiki's Delivery Service in a quick shot. And didn't Mimi/Whisper also have the studio's name etched onto a grandfather clock? This was definitely a recurring thing for a time, but why it was begun and later abandoned is anybody's guess. They just did it for fun, I suppose.

Ghibli Fest 2018, the annual Studio Ghibli movie festival presented by GKIDS and Fathom Events, continues its series of theatrical screenings with Porco Rosso , Hayao Miyazaki's 1992 animated adventure.  The movie will be shown on May 20 (dubbed), May 21 (subtitled) and May 23 (dubbed) . As always, both Japanese and English language soundtracks will be available for the benefit of all fans. Porco Rosso is a nostalgic romance in the style of classic Hollywood cinema. If you're a fan of Humphrey Bogart, then you'll love this picture. It tells the tale of daring airline pilots and pirates who fly the seas of the Adriatic in the days before the rise of fascism and war, and focuses on a cynical pilot named Marco who has turned his back on humanity, a hotel owner named Gina who is Marco's lifelong friend and love interest, and a young airplane engineer named Fio. Thrown into this mix is a brash American pilot named Curtis who sees himself as Marco/Porco's rival in the ski