Isao Takahata, the Japanese filmmaker and co-founder of the great animation house Studio Ghibli, has died at the age of 82. For anyone who has followed his extraordinary career this is desperately sad news, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. His last film – a free-flowing, hand-crafted masterwork called The Tale of the Princess Kaguya – paints death as nothing more than the point of transition from one world to the next, as its young heroine is borne off on a cloud by a band of heavenly retainers.

The film is based on a traditional Japanese folk story and opens with a nursery rhyme whose lyrics run as follows: “Flower, bear fruit and die; be born, grow up, and die. Still the wind blows, the rain falls,...