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-Papa Takashi, Mama Matsuko, Grandma Shige, and little Nonoko and Noburo-aren't quite the models of material success. Poor, 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. Leaving the majority of the frame empty, sometimes presenting only etchings or sketches, Takahata captures the aura of a particular moment, the feeling of a childhood memory.