Background
Hata was born in Fukuoka Prefecture and graduated from the Faculty of Biology at Tokyo University in 1958, and went onto complete a masters" degree in 1959.
畑 正憲
Hata was born in Fukuoka Prefecture and graduated from the Faculty of Biology at Tokyo University in 1958, and went onto complete a masters" degree in 1959.
University of Tokyo.
He is perhaps best known in the West as the director and screenwriter of the 1989 film The Adventures of Milo and Otis. Trained as a zoologist, he worked as a documentary filmmaker producing nature films. He moved to the eastern coast of Hokkaidō to establish the Mutsugorō Animal Kingdom nature preserve, where he and his family live with over 300 wild and domestic animals.
The resulting film, about the adventures of an orange tabby cat and a fawn pug, was released by Toho in 1986 as Koneko Monogatari (子猫物語, A Kitten"s Story) and was the highest grossing film of the year in Japan, taking in about $36 million.
lieutenant was shown that year at the Cannes Film Festival as The Adventures of Chatran. Foreign United States distribution by Columbia Pictures, it was cut down from 90 to 76 minutes and narration in English by Dudley Moore was added.
lieutenant was released in 1989 as The Adventures of Milo and Otis.