Only Yesterday is a Studio Ghibli film likely unfamiliar to many anime fans. It’s based on a manga showcasing incidents from a girl’s life, but Ghibli director Isao Takahata added a parallel timeline so that now the film follows both 10-year-old Taeko, in 1966, and 27-year-old Taeko, who is remembering those incidents. The movie shares some distinctive Studio Ghibli hallmarks: the Japanese countryside, the balance of humanity and nature, looking back at the past, a focus on girls with strong feelings.
Adult Taeko is finding her way just as child Taeko did seventeen years earlier. As she says, this too may be a time of chrysalis, her life changing into something else. It isn’t simply that she’s past the age society says she should be married—or at least this causes her to look more broadly at her life to wonder if what she has is what she wants.
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Adult Taeko likes to present her stories of childhood as funny, but nearly all of them center around disappointment. There’s a lot to laugh at in the pineapple sequence, for one, but it’s still about something she looked forward to that turned out badly.
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Ghibli films tend to be firmly rooted in Japanese locations and culture, and Only Yesterday is intensely rooted there. This is a wonderful, engaging film, but if it’s your first glimpse of Japanese life you may be lost. And since half of the story is set in the 1960s, you need to be aware that families then were even more traditional (including unquestionably patriarchal) than they are now. The other half of the story, featuring adult Taeko, takes place at a time when women choosing to work instead of getting married still seemed odd to a lot of people and it was generally assumed that office women were just biding their time at work until they could acquire a husband.
One particular scene needs special attention. Plenty of people in the U.S. have a general idea that in Japan you take off your shoes when you enter a home. But the reverse could also be true: in a proper Japanese family you did NOT go outside with no shoes on. I don’t know all the standards for when it was fine to be shoeless (for instance, swimming), but as I understand it, leaving the house in socks but no shoes was considered indecent. It was not a question of whether your socks got dirty; in U.S. culture a parallel might be standing on your front lawn in your panties or perhaps wearing swim trunks to a fancy wedding.
At the same time, children always change shoes when they arrive at school, and no one is bothered by the exposure of sock feet for the few seconds it takes to do so, as we would be if a sixth-grader changed pants in the school lobby.
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Only Yesterday includes no spaceships, explosions, yokai, sword fights, or named attacks, and a common reaction is that there’s not a lot here that couldn’t be done in live action: a couple of minor special-effects shots, really, or you could just drop those elements. And yet without anything dynamic or flashy, the animation helps us understand the constant shifting back and forth of the timelines—this shot is back then; this shot is now. What’s more, the animation makes it seem okay that those are children from back then scurrying around in the event happening now, in a way I don’t think live action could manage very well. And the brief flashes of a pose (like Taeko strutting with a childish purse) or a sudden visual metaphor (like the baseball hitting the glove) are definitely the language of anime.
The film deserves a wider audience. It has tenderness between people getting to know each other and tenderness between a person and her younger self. It has someone talking about memories and finding out, from another person’s response, that maybe she misinterpreted that thing that happened seventeen years ago. It shows adults bonding over a TV show they loved as kids. It underscores the distinction between loving a place and knowing it, and notes that working at something on vacation is not the same as making it part of your life.
From lovingly depicted saffron fields to a wild shriek over a younger sister’s math score to a moment of first-love floating to a gentle, slowly developing relationship, Only Yesterday has a lot to offer anyone not in a hurry and willing to appreciate the less explosive events that shape us.