Review of Only Yesterday (1991)
Takahata Isao (director), Suzuki Toshio (producer).
At 27 years old, Taeko remembers the aspirations and adventures of her childhood. She’s taking a vacation from her Tokyo office. She doesn’t hate the work, but has she been doing it because others expect it? With her 10-year-old self from 1966 tagging along, she takes the train for a second visit to a village in the countryside, to help bring in a crop of organic safflower.
The many scenes from the protagonist’s sladdbarn childhood are loaded with nostalgia for the 1960s, and some of that nostalgia is culturally specific, because the movie wasn’t overproduced for export. Only Yesterday is a wonderful example of low-concept filmmaking. Like a lot of the director’s work, it is extremely carefully crafted, very effective, and unique in its conception, but innocuosly so. This sort of thing is hard to pitch to funders, even if you have Takahata’s proven track record and the simple artist-driven philosophy of the recently founded Studio Ghibli.
That’s not to say that it’s high art for a chosen few. You can think of Only Yesterday as a romance movie, and it does follow a common pattern in contemporary US romance novels and romcoms: A woman with a conventional lifestyle and limited personality has a “meet cute” with a less conventional man who turns out to be considerate, kind, and passionate. Here, the man has recently become a farmer, which falls perfectly in line with the romance genre’s pastoral conservatism, but Takahata’s farmer is strangely realistic. He knows the difference between nature and the cultural landscape where he works, and he talks about it. His organic farming methods include the use of chemicals, and he talks about that too, not as an info dump but because it’s important to him and to the theme. He’s not a caricature, not a Rudolf Steiner airhead or a mere object of romantic fantasy. He’s a rounded character in a world of believable people. The result is an introspective romance where a man and a woman get to know one another well and fall in love as people sometimes do in real life. Superficially, nothing happens. It’s not understated, just stated. The director’s feminism is present throughout, but subtle. It’s well researched, it’s emotionally powerful, but it’s not a spectacle. It’s that rare beast, the substantive romcom.
It helps that the film is beautifully drawn and painted. There are two scenes that would have looked odd in a live-action version in 1991, but thirty lears later, CGI would have taken care of that. The hand-crafted animation makes it look more interesting though. The unreal lighting and colour design in Taeko’s meeting with Hirota is fantastic. Often, it’s the simplicity of those solutions that give them weight. The loaded silences on the soundtrack are haunting. Curiously, the character designs are unusually realistic. The adult Taeko has dimples. That in itself is a rare feature in anime, but the right feature. It’s the kind of artistry that makes me think the cultural mainstream should have been replaced, with this.
References here: Ghibli movie titles, “Ghiblies” (2000), Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (2001/2005), The Consolidated Design of the Creating Process for Mini Pato (2003).