Taeko, an office worker in a Tokyo skyscraper, tells her supervisor that she’s taking her vacation in the country. The scene shifts to past tense—memories of childhood when she begged her mother for a chance to spend summer vacation in the village where distant relatives live. The animated feature Only Yesterday moves just like that: The events of Taeko’s life now trigger recall of events that happened then.
“Now” is the 1980s in the elegiac film by writer-director Isao Takahata from Japan’s esteemed Studio Ghibli; “then” is the 1960s. In the now, Taeko is 27 and brushing off pressure from her family to marry and “settle down”; then, as a school child, she was already skipping to a different drumbeat than her sisters and classmates. While talking with one of her sisters on the phone in the present, memories of the past fill the screen. Only Yesterday is structured like the human consciousness with the past informing the present and always liable to flood the mind’s eye.
In some frames, what is omitted is as significant as what is included in an evocative style indebted to Japan’s woodblock print tradition. There is nothing flashy here. The faces of the characters are expressive sketches—big-eyed and filled with emotion despite their limited features and details.
Unlike many anime films familiar to American audiences, Only Yesterday makes no allusion to steam punk, Shinto nature spirits or any self-referencing mythology. Instead, Only Yesterday is an elegantly told and visualized story of one woman in search of a meaningful life, inside and outside the expectations of her society.
Opens Friday, March 11 at the Oriental Theatre.
Only Yesterday
3 and a half stars
Directed by Isao Takahata
Rated PG
