Only Yesterday

jpn Omoide Poro Poro. 1991. Movie. 119 min. Drama. org Hotaru Okamoto and Yuuko Tone (manga). dir Isao Takahata. scr Isao Takahata. des Yoshifumi Kondo, Kazuo Oga. -bc

A Tokyo career girl’s summer of discovery on a rural farm is handled with sensitivity, delicacy, and an artistic flourish that never overwhelms the characters at the heart of this compelling drama. An unsung Studio Ghibli masterpiece.

Taeko Okajima is a twenty-seven-year-old career girl in 1982 Tokyo who embarks on a vacation in a distant farming town in Yamagata Prefecture to stay with her sister’s husband’s family and spend the summer picking and processing safflowers. She is met at the train station by a cousin of the family named Toshio who has partnered with a friend on an organic farming venture and he becomes Taeko’s guide and occasional date during the summer.

Through it all, Taeko is accompanied by memories of her ten-year-old self back in 1966 and lengthy flashbacks to her home and school life that year, including troubles passing math, awkward encounters with boys at school, a role in a school play, and temper tantrums at home. She also recalls a popular TV puppet show that was on back then, a memory that Toshio also fondly recalls. It seems to Taeko that her ten-year-old self has messages for her now.

Taeko finds herself adapting well to life on a farm and she gets involved in as many aspects of safflower farming as possible. She even helps Toshio out on his farm, executing a variety of chores and learning new things along the way. Eventually, on the night before her scheduled return to Tokyo, the family grandmother suggests to Taeko that she stay and marry Toshio. Taeko is suddenly confronted with feelings she hasn’t articulated and suffers a crisis of confidence. . . .

Animation director Katsuya Kondo began work at Studio Ghibli as an animator on Castle in the Sky (1986) and is considered a key member of the studio’s core creative team. He was a character designer and animation director for both Kiki’s Delivery Service and Ocean Waves and has worked on most other Ghibli titles of the last 20 years. His work on the film Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (1990) led many fans to mistake it for a Ghibli production on the basis of its familiar character design.

Youko Honna is the voice actress who plays the ten-year-old Taeko in Only Yesterday. Four years later, she would play the fourteen-year-old Shizuku in Whisper of the Heart.

Only Yesterday is a human drama done in animation rather than live-action. It is doubtful that a live-action filmmaker could have invested this story with as much feeling, artistry, and creative fire as director Isao Takahata has. The contemporary (1982) scenes are rendered with an extraordinary attention to detail that make its scenes of Yamagata and life on the farm as vivid and evocative as any film technique would have done. The shots of the safflower plants and the steps by which they are processed for commercial sale are as intricately laid out as if they were part of a documentary. The flashback scenes to 1966 offer a distinct shift in style, boasting a lighter, softer quality, with slightly washed-out whites, pastel colors, and blurring around the edges of scenes, although they are no less evocative in bringing to life a specific time and place.

The adult characters in the contemporary scenes are very realistically drawn and look unmistakably Japanese. One can easily visualize their real-life counterparts. The girls in the fifth-grade flashbacks have a distinct Studio Ghibli look to them (think Kiki, Satsuki from Totoro, and Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart) and are slightly stylized, with round eyes that are large enough to be infinitely expressive, while not overwhelming the faces. Streaks of red and other shading are frequently used to express embarrassment. The children have a light, graceful, fluid movement that seems unburdened by the worldly cares the adults have in the contemporary scenes. Young Taeko even floats up and swims in the air in a metaphorical moment of youthful ecstasy after a boy who likes her has made his first approach.

While there have been numerous Japanese animated human-interest dramas over the years, the best all seem to be made by Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday) or others at Studio Ghibli (Ocean Waves, Whisper of the Heart), and all manage to achieve the kind of emotional honesty and authenticity usually undercut by the melodramatic excesses of the animated format. Of this select group, Only Yesterday is the only one to focus on adult characters, although flashbacks to childhood play an important role. As such, it stands out as one of the very few films of its type in Japanese animation. One can point to Satoshi Kon’s works as comparable, most notably Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers, but there are deliberately stylized elements in each that mark them as significantly different from a straightforward drama like Only Yesterday, which focuses on one character and her journey of discovery far away from her home in Tokyo. The decision to animate Only Yesterday reveals the true extent of the cinematic resourcefulness and artistic versatility of the animation medium as practiced in Japan.

The film invests a great deal in the character of Taeko and asks us to stick with her through the very end, when a life-changing decision begs to be made. Perhaps Takahata is a tad guilty of manipulating the audience by putting so much emphasis on the childhood flashbacks and the feisty, endearing, emotionally complicated preadolescent who commands our attention and reminds us of the universal mix of pleasure and pain found in even the most moderately comfortable childhoods, but there isn’t a false moment in any of it. One can argue that the fifth-grade Taeko was on a more far-reaching journey of discovery with far more twists and turns (and possibilities) than that undertaken by the grown-up Taeko, who, by virtue of being stuck in an office job in Tokyo and remaining single, has far fewer options open to her than she did at the age of ten. Only by reconnecting to her childhood self can Taeko regain that sense of possibility and open her eyes to the marvelous options that she really does have.

There is much to marvel at in the film, including detailed scenes of fifth-grade politics in a middle-class elementary public school in 1966 Tokyo. In one revealing classroom session the class officers conduct a meeting, with no teachers present, about class rules, and debate the fine points of punishing such offenses as running in the hallways and not eating all of one’s lunch. A later scene illustrates how animation can make a seemingly ordinary encounter between two people exciting and illuminating. It’s essentially a real-time drive at dawn from the train station in Yamagata, where Toshio picks up Taeko, to the farm in the countryside where she will go right to work without even unpacking. Driving an old Subaru with a capricious motor, Toshio describes his work on an organic farm and gently reminds Taeko that they’d met the previous summer when he had brought some friends to a family barbecue so they could check out the “girl from Tokyo.” He plays cassettes of a Hungarian folk band and shows her the view as they drive up into lush, hilly farm country and the sun gradually emerges. The whole sequence is eight minutes, and creates a bond between the two that will continue to strengthen as the summer passes.

In one of the flashbacks, Taeko recalls her moment of stage fame, when she had one line in a school play, “Behold, the crows fly home. First one . . .” The actual performance is re-created, revealing a remarkably stage-savvy little child who milks the line with a calculated pause and gesture that takes everyone aback and steals the show. A subsequent acting offer is squelched by Taeko’s father, thus ending a promising show-biz career.

In another flashback, a trio of girls from another fifth-grade class marches into Taeko’s classroom to announce that Hirota, a boy in their class, likes her. They then march back and tell Hirota what they’ve done, leaving two very embarrassed ten-year-olds in their wake. The trio then breaks into a mocking little love song, with accompanying dance moves, in front of everybody. It wasn’t a nice thing to do at all, but they’re so cute about it, it’s hard not to forgive them. Later, Taeko has to watch Hirota pitch a winning baseball game against her class and be warned by her classmates not to cheer him.

Viewers are advised that the movie is not over when the end credits begin. Important action continues as the credits roll and the song plays. Turning it off before the credits are over means missing the actual ending.

Other than a few film festival showings (including the Museum of Modern Art’s Ghibli retrospective in 1999), Only Yesterday was virtually unseen in the United States until January 26, 2006, when the cable network, Turner Classic Movies, ran it in subtitled form.

Regional accents in anime set in Japan usually fly over the heads of non-Japanese speaking Western viewers, but here, country boy Toshio speaks with a very noticeable accent.

The flashbacks to 1966 include a reference to the Beatles and their concert in Japan that year (the only one they held there).

The popular pirate-themed Japanese puppet show, Hyokkori Hyoutanjima, is glimpsed in clips (re-created in animated form) in one of the 1966 flashbacks. In the following scene, as the show’s original theme song is heard on the soundtrack, little Taeko defiantly struts down the street and sings along. In 2003, all-girl J-pop group Morning Musume had a hit with their version of the Hyokkori Hyoutanjima theme song and a music video with the girls dressed up as pirates.

The Hungarian folk music heard on the cassettes Toshio plays in his car is performed by Márta Sebestyén with Muzsikás. Pan flute virtuoso Zamfir is also heard on the soundtrack.

Harumi Miyako sings a Japanese-language version of Bette Midler’s “The Rose” over the end credits.

advisory There’s a fifth-grade flashback scene involving a girls-only Health Education class de­voted to menstruation and the scandal that erupts when one of the girls tells a boy about periods, and the boy tells the other boys, who, in typical ten-year-old-boy fashion, use that knowledge to torment the girls.