Original title: Omoide Poro Poro
While Hayao Miyazaki sailed an increasingly fantastical journey with his films for Studio Ghibli, the company’s other founder and main director Isao Takahata favoured more down to earth themes. After the harrowing Grave of the Fireflies (1988), he made the altogether gentler but no less impressive Only Yesterday, a poignant and multi-layered tale of memory, coming to terms with childhood traumas and the place of women in Japanese society. Where Miyazaki’s films were largely aimed at younger or family audiences, Takahata’s film is very much aimed at a more adult, and particularly female, audience, a demographic rarely catered for in anime at the time.
Only Yesterday is based on a graphic novel (Omoide Poro Poro, which roughly translates as Memories Come Tumbling Down) by writer Hotaru Okamoto and artist Yuko Tone which was inspired by Okamoto’s own experiences. In 1982 Tokyo, Taeko Okajima (Miki Imai in the original Japanese, Daisy Ridley in the Disney version) is facing a crisis – she’s 27 years old, stuck in an office job she doesn’t really care that much about and facing pressure from friends and family to marry and settle down (“What’s wrong with settling down instead of doing all these wacky things?”). She decides to get away from it all by returning to family in the countryside that she visited as a child, to help with the safflower harvest and to come to terms with the rush of childhood memories that have started to intrude on her daily life. She becomes increasingly nostalgic during her visit, dealing not only with happy memories but also a few childhood traumas along the way. She meets and befriends her brother-in-law’s second cousin Toshio (Toshiro Yanagiba/Dev Patel), a friendship that grows to suggests a very different possible future, one that will satisfy her need for a simpler and more rewarding life.
Though Takahata’s work shares some the visual similarities with Miyazaki’s work, Only Yesterday adopts a more experimental approach. The modern day sequences feature charterers with more realistic facial and body proportions than usual (the dialogue for these scenes were recorded first, the animators working to match the lip sync, while the 1960s scenes were shot the traditional anime way – animated first, voices added later) and Takahata employs a clever device to help with the kaleidoscopic narrative. To ease us through the often over-lapping transitions between the present and the past, he had his team render the 1980s scenes with the expected gorgeous attention to detail, the backgrounds as richly textured and beautifully drawn as always. But for the 1960s scenes, the backgrounds are sparser, less detailed, the colours more muted, just as memories often appear to be – fuzzier, less distinct.
Taeko’s memories emerge in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope, snippets of memory overlapping with recollections of her childhood. The memories are often of mundane, everyday things that are somehow transformed into something compelling and even magical by Takahata. Even the discovery of how to cut and eat a pineapple is turned into something that’s by turns spellbinding, touching and very funny.
Only Yesterday is a film that celebrates self-reflection and analysis. It deals with topics you won’t find anywhere else in animation (the young Taeko’s fascination with a apprehension about puberty and the bullying the menstruating girls are subjected to). Fantasy is in short supply but it’s there. A gloriously relatable moment sees Taeko and her first childhood crush meet for the first time in an agonisingly awkward encounter, the couple fumbling their way through their first inconsequential conversation wishing that the ground would open up and swallow them – in the aftermath of which am ecstatic, love struck Taeko literally soars through the air in joy.
At times the ghosts of Taeko’s past literally materialise in her present, most affectingly when Abe, a young boy cast out and bullied by his schoolmates simply for being poor and who refused to shake Taeko’s hand when he moved to another school appears to her during a brilliantly animated thunderstorm. It’s an encounter that leads to a beautiful and moving interlude wherein Taeko struggles with her feelings of guilt. And then make sure you stick with the end credits where we seen the younger Taeko and her school friends visiting her older self in 1982, unseen, willing her on to make the right decision about her future.
To a degree, Takahata shares Miyazaki’s concerns for nature. Taeko comes to realise that her nostalgia stems from a connection to nature that she had never really acknowledged, a yearning for a return to a simple, more rural lifestyle that she glimpsed briefly as a child. We get slightly unwieldy lectures on the benefits and difficulties of organic farming and the damage done to Japanese rural economies by industrialisation.
To match the haunting visuals, Katz Hoshi provides a beautiful score that opens with a wistful piano piece but it’s in the unexpected inclusion of songs from far beyond Japan that surprises and impresses the most. Traditional folk songs from Italy and Israel are featured but it’s the traditional music from Hungary and Bulgaria that leave the most lasting impression, a lovely and haunting touch.
Only Yesterday remains one of Studio Ghibli’s most under-rated films though at the time it was a huge hit – the biggest film at the Japanese box office in 1991 in fact. It took an age for the film to get a decent release in the west, perhaps due to the fact that it was a relatively hard sell – today it’s one of the most accessible examples of just how diverse anime can be but its lack of male-oriented action or family-friendly fantasy gave distributors pause for thought. When Disney acquired the Ghibli catalogue, it was the last film they gave the blu-ray treatment, perhaps because it simply didn’t fit into western views of what anime was (Grave of the Fireflies, thanks to a complicated rights issue, wasn’t part of the Disney deal). It’s an arthouse film in anime form – if the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, famed for his studies of family and marriage, had made anime it might have ended up looking like Only Yesterday.
Ultimately it’s a film about not having regrets, about the importance of memory, about confidence and self-belief, about moving on (“next time I won’t bring along my fifth grade self,” Taeko tells her adopted family as she prepares to return to Tokyo though that last minute intrusion into the present by her younger self suggests that she’ll never really be able to give her up) and about finding our place in both the natural world and in society and as such it’s a film with universal appeal. In recent years, thanks to a belated but sensitive and sympathetic new dub from Disney, the film has started to find the wider audience it so thoroughly deserves.
The EOFFTV Review 