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Only Yesterday review – an utterly beguiling classic

Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel contribute voice work to this rerelease of Studio Ghibli’s 1991 animation about an office worker lost in childhood memories

H ere is a wonderful rerelease from Studio Ghibli : Isao Takahata’s 1991 movie is back on the big screen with English dubbed voices from Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel. This is an utterly beguiling classic: delicate, charming and tender, an animation that draws on the “family movie” tradition of Japan’s classic live-action cinema. Taeko (Ridley) is a single woman in her late 20s who works in a Tokyo office, with family and co-workers making impertinent comments about her unmarried status. She takes a holiday in the country that reminds her of her childhood, and with utterly confident directness Takahata takes us back to her 11-year-old world, interleaving these intense and almost ecstatically ordinary memories with her current, bittersweet life, in which there could be romance with local farmer Toshio (Patel). The frankness with which Takahata evokes Taeko’s puberty, her loneliness, her yearnings, and how these mesh with her adult practicality and cheerful resourcefulness, is wonderfully managed. There is real artistry here: it is a must.

• Animation in film
• Daisy Ridley
• Studio Ghibli

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Only Yesterday is an intensely relatable blast from Studio Ghibli's past

25 years after its original debut, the lesser-known feature is still timeless.

By Sam Byford

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Only Yesterday couldn't be more appropriately named. The intimate, spare drama from Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli first premiered in Japan in 1991, and in the 25 years since has somehow never seen an American release until now. But its familiar tale of finding your place in a fast-moving world feels like it could have been written last week, and together with forward-thinking direction from Isao Takahata ( Grave of the Fireflies, The Tale of Princess Kaguya ), Only Yesterday remains a poignant classic in the 21st century.

Only Yesterday follows a woman called Taeko across two different timelines. In 1982, she's in her late 20s and working an office job in Tokyo, and escapes to the countryside for a break from the incessant demands to settle down and marry. In 1966, she's 10 years old and dealing with the universal troubles of school and family life. Though the 1982 setting is the primary storyline of Only Yesterday , Taeko's memories of 1966 often break through to the present and inform her adult psyche, sometimes in the middle of a thought or sentence.

It's hard to watch without memories of your own childhood flooding back

This is more seamless than it might have been in other hands, thanks to the gorgeous, stylistically purposeful art from Takahata's animation team. The 1982 scenes are awash in vivid color and detail, from the real-life branding on office equipment to the actual Japanese magazines in Taeko's apartment. Takahata's characters' faces are drawn with more lines than you tend to find in anime, allowing for more nuanced expression. Contrasting with that style are Taeko's memories of 1966, which are rendered in washed-out colors with simpler, more typical anime-style faces and minimalist, unfinished backgrounds.

Much of the movie's running time is devoted to these flashback sequences, and although they're visually less complex, Takahata's sharp screenplay infuses them with psychological nuance. The depictions of seemingly trivial childhood occurrences, like munching your way through a disappointing meal or getting caught in a whirlwind of schoolyard gossip, are so keenly observed that it's hard to watch Only Yesterday without memories of your own flooding back. Taeko in 1982 gets the feeling that her 10-year-old self has come along for the ride on her trip to the country, and the way she learns from the past to arrive at a point of self-discovery in the present is both touching and relatable.

Anyone who's ever considered giving up their city lifestyle will relate

Firmly grounded in reality, Only Yesterday might not have the moving castles, no-faced ghosts, or flying warrior princesses that mark much of Ghibli's best-known work, but it shares many thematic elements with a lot of the studio's output. The most obvious one is a preoccupation with ecology; characters frequently go on esoteric tangents about the benefits of organic farming or the economic inequality inherent in historical safflower-rouge production. Another persistent topic throughout the film is the tension and conflict between the different ways of life in the city and the country; anyone who's ever considered giving up their city lifestyle for a more peaceful and naturalistic existence will relate to Taeko's dilemma.

For the US release, Taeko's adult self is voiced by Daisy Ridley, now internationally famous for her role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens . But you won't hear Rey every time Taeko opens her mouth — Ridley adopts an American accent here, turning in a multilayered performance of wistfulness and warmth. The leading male role of Toshio, a family friend in the country, is handled by Dev Patel ( The Newsroom , Slumdog Millionaire ) with an air of laid-back eccentricism. Even the best dubbed versions of Ghibli movies can be jarring at times, and Toshio inexplicably being the only character with a British accent doesn't help. But despite an occasionally awkward translation, the performances in Only Yesterday are excellent overall, and the beautifully produced release is nothing less than the movie deserves after so long in the wilderness.

It looks like there might not be any new Studio Ghibli movies for the foreseeable future; the company has nothing on its plate for now, and there have been rumors for years about its feature animation division closing down, particularly since Hayao Miyazaki retired . For the US audience, then, the resurrection of a long-lost classic from the Ghibli vaults is more than welcome. It might have come out in Japan in 1991, but you could think of it as a new film — Only Yesterday is truly timeless.

Only Yesterday opens in wide release this Friday, February 26th.

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Only Yesterday review: You couldn’t legally watch this amazing Japanese film in the US — until now

This anime classic has taken 25 years to make it to our shores.

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The Japanese film Only Yesterday , released in 1991, has been called a masterpiece. It's made lists of the greatest animated films — or just the greatest films — ever made. It's largely hailed as a landmark in the development of anime.

And until now, you couldn't see in the United States (not legally, anyway).

The film aired once, in 2006, on Turner Classic Movies, and has been screened a couple of times elsewhere since then. But by and large, it has been unavailable to Americans. However, it's in theaters now, thanks to animation distributor GKIDS , and you should see it.

Only Yesterday brings a dreamlike quality to real life

Only Yesterday centers on the life of a young woman named Taeko across two very different time periods. When the film begins, Taeko is 27 years old and living in 1980s Tokyo. But an upcoming trip to the countryside leaves her thinking back to her childhood, reminiscing on her experience as a fifth-grader in the 1960s and thinking about all the ways that version of herself is the same as and different from her adult self.

That's it. Taeko travels to the country and gets a taste of the farming life, while her younger self has the usual sort of coming-of-age adventures we might expect, from sex ed classes to a first crush to frustrations with schoolwork. But Only Yesterday is not a story high on incident. It's about a young girl growing up, and a young woman wondering if she's lost track of her most essential self.

The film is reminiscent of the work of American director Richard Linklater , who's most famous for movies like Dazed and Confused , the Before Sunrise trilogy, and Boyhood . Like much of Linklater's work, Only Yesterday meanders and takes its time with its storytelling. At times, you'll wonder if it has anything more to offer than pleasant incidents. And when you reach the end, you'll feel emotionally overwhelmed by how it knits together all of these incidents into a larger story about what it means to be a human being.

Only Yesterday was directed by Isao Takahata , who is occasionally (and unfairly) labeled as the "other" great director who worked at Japan's Stubio Ghibli , one of the most important animation houses in the world.

Takahata's co-worker Hayao Miyazaki (he of My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away ) has rightly been acclaimed as a masterful director the world over. But Takahata is too often discussed in Miyazaki's shadow (at least in the West), when he should be standing proudly on his own.

Only Yesterday , his follow-up to the devastating World War II film Grave of the Fireflies (1988), encapsulates what Takahata does so very well. If Miyazaki imbues dreams with some of the emotional reality of real life, then Takahata imbues some of the most mundane events of real life — characters sampling a pineapple, say — with the feeling of a dream.

Yes, Only Yesterday is a simple coming-of-age tale, but it's also very smart about the way our younger selves haunt us well into adulthood, always asking why we're not the people we thought we would be. The film's animation is spare but lyrical; it feels as if past might blend into present, or the reverse.

Only Yesterday explores the gap between someone's past and present

The childhood portions of Only Yesterday are based on a popular Japanese manga, but the sections following Taeko to the farm are Takahata's invention. And they sometimes feel a bit cloying, honestly, because they employ such shopworn clichés as the city girl who learns more about life from visiting the country (and from the young man she meets there).

But every time Only Yesterday begins to drift off course, Takahata shifts back toward his central notion of a woman reflecting on her life with some melancholy, but also some joy. Taeko isn't just bittersweet about the differences between her fifth-grade self and her 27-year-old self. She also finds some joy in getting reacquainted with the person she was, who's been living alongside her all along.

In particular, Takahata's approach crystallizes during a moment late in the film, when Taeko tells Toshio (the young man from the country who is also her love interest) a story from her childhood that particularly haunts her. In this scene, the director captures the way our memories catch on certain, specific details, or how they might spin out into entire remembrances rooted in a simple look back at a misspoken word or a particularly vivid color. But he also captures the way our memories can make us realize how little we've changed, if we know where to look.

Animation fans have been whispering about Only Yesterday for years, passing around bootlegs, but they're only just now enjoying easy access to it. Disney, which bought international rights to many Ghibli films in the 1990s (though GKIDS holds those rights now), didn't seem to know what to do with this one, perhaps because its plot resists easy description even more than most of the studio's catalog (and also, perhaps, because a significant portion of the film deals with young girls learning about their menstrual cycles).

At its core, Only Yesterday is about the inner emotional journey of a young woman, a subject Hollywood film has too often struggled to depict (though one that Ghibli has always been uniquely good at). There's no obvious marketing hook, no scene to stick in the trailer to intrigue people. Just a woman thinking about her past and trying to understand her future.

Even now, it's only arriving in theaters with the all-star voices of freshly minted Star Wars star Daisy Ridley and  Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel in the cast of its English dub. It's not hard to see why audiences might reject the film, or why GKIDS would want to stack the deck in its favor.

But here's hoping viewers will find this lovely little tale. Only Yesterday can test your patience, especially in the early going, but I wouldn't change a second of the way it unfolds. It's like taking a journey to some remote corner of the globe, the better to get away from yourself, only to realize you're both the best and most constant traveling companion you could have.

Only Yesterday is playing in New York and Los Angeles. It will expand to theaters throughout the country in the weeks to come.

Correction: This article originally stated John C. Reilly is in the voice cast of the English dub. He is not. It has been corrected.

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Only yesterday, common sense media reviewers.

Classic Studio Ghibli drama focuses on Japanese girlhood.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You don't need to be married by a certain age to b

Taeko is bright, curious, and talented. She's a go

The realistic drama affirms a young girl's dreams

Taeko's dad slaps her hard across the face.

Boys try to look up girls' skirts to see if they h

Boys tease girls about being on their periods, buy

One reference to Puma sneakers.

Adult men smoke cigarettes in several scenes.

Parents need to know that Only Yesterday was originally released in 1991 and re-released in 2016 with an English voice cast that includes Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel. The movie chronicles a single 27-year-old woman named Taeko's (voiced by Miki Imai and Ridley) nostalgia-filled vacation to the Japanese…

Positive Messages

You don't need to be married by a certain age to be happy, and a woman's sole role in society isn't to get married or have babies. Taeko's joy helping on the farm contrasts with how sad her own mother seems doing all the household chores at Taeko's father's command. Remembering childhood dreams reminds adults about the importance of curiosity and perseverance.

Positive Role Models

Taeko is bright, curious, and talented. She's a good, kind friend and daughter, and she acknowledges when she's made a mistake. She works hard, perseveres, and spends her vacation helping others. Toshio is sweet, hardworking, and encouraging. He likes Taeko, but he doesn't push her to stay with him in their village. Taeko's sisters are smart and resourceful, even if they treat her like a typical pesky little sister.

Diverse Representations

The realistic drama affirms a young girl's dreams and a woman's independence. The story presents a nuanced portrayal of everyday life in Japan and thoughtfully explores aspects of Japanese culture. In the English dub, British Asian actor Dev Patel voices the character of Toshio.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Boys try to look up girls' skirts to see if they have special "period" underwear; girls call boys "pervs" for doing so. Fifth graders tease one another about liking particular boys or girls. Crushes, romance.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Boys tease girls about being on their periods, buying special underwear, and skipping P.E. because they may (or may not) have their periods. They yell "period girls!" to girls. Also use of insults like "slow-poke," "smelly," "goody-two-shoes," "pest," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Only Yesterday was originally released in 1991 and re-released in 2016 with an English voice cast that includes Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel . The movie chronicles a single 27-year-old woman named Taeko's (voiced by Miki Imai and Ridley) nostalgia-filled vacation to the Japanese countryside. Since the movie takes place in 1966 and 1982, adult characters smoke cigarettes in several scenes. In scenes that take place whenr 10-year-old Taeko (Yōko Honna/ Alison Fernandez ) is in the fifth grade, there are several references to menstruation, some of which would now be considered outdated (a school nurse encourages female students to purchase special underwear, girls are excused from P.E. because of their periods, etc.) or inappropriate (boys go around making fun of girls because of their periods and try to sneak peeks at the special underwear to see if they're on their periods). There's also some teasing about crushes in the flashbacks and mild romance in the main plot line. In one surprising scene, young Taeko's father (Masahiro Itō/Matthew Yang King) slaps her hard across the face for what many viewers would consider a confusingly minor offense, highlighting a generational and cultural rift. The film celebrates curiosity and perseverance . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 3 parent reviews

A stunner of a film!

Really good, what's the story.

ONLY YESTERDAY is Studio Ghibli's groundbreaking fifth feature film, which was originally released in 1991. It follows the story of Taeko (voiced by Miki Imai in the original version and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ' Daisy Ridley in the English dub), a single working woman in 1982 Tokyo. She's taking a 10-day vacation to the Japanese countryside to help her sister's husband's family with their safflower harvest. On the train ride there, Taeko reflects on fifth grade, when she (Yōko Honna/ Alison Fernandez ) first felt a strong desire to leave Tokyo for a vacation somewhere new. As 1982-Taeko arrives at her brother-in-law's village, she meets his cousin Toshio (Toshirō Yanagiba/ Dev Patel ), a handsome organic farmer who's intrigued by her interest in country living. Through extended flashbacks, Taeko reminisces and ruminates on how her childhood hopes and disappointments have impacted her adult self.

Is It Any Good?

There might not be a better promoter of girl empowerment than this classic 1991 film. Only Yesterday is a lovely tribute to how girlhood dreams and disappointments impact a woman's life. Taeko's flashbacks are in many ways more exciting than her present life, which consists of going to her brother-in-law's family farm and helping with the harvest. Her fifth-grade self experiences the tumult and humiliation of early puberty: crushes, friendship, and school issues; struggles with math; sibling rivalry; and out-sized daily dramas. She practices for hours to say one line ("villager number one") in her school play, and she's crushed when her father (Masahiro Itō/Matthew Yang King) icily forbids her to accept a role she's subsequently offered in a university production.

The animation is lovely and realistic. Tiny details like the cross-hatches and colors that appear on faces when they're ashamed or blushing are brilliantly evocative. Too much nostalgia can be tiresome in a story, but in Only Yesterday the reflection is a perfect vehicle to propel Taeko on to her future. As an adult, Taeko seems happy but is quietly still dealing with the hurts of her past. It's in the countryside that she shines. The movie sensitively explores how difficult it could be for a single Japanese woman in the early '80s (and early '90s) to find her own way -- an issue that will still resonate with many viewers today -- but it's also about how love and happiness can bloom in the most unexpected ways.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether Studio Ghibli movies like Only Yesterday are more accessible when dubbed in English or if they're more authentic in their native Japanese with English subtitles. Which do you prefer, and why?

How are the roles of girls and women depicted in Only Yesterday ? Do they change over the course of Taeko's life? How about between 1966, 1982, and now?

Why do you think the face of Taeko's father is hidden so often? Would you expect a father to have the ultimate say-so in a movie made about a family today?

What do you think about the way early adolescence is portrayed in the story? Do boys still tease girls about their bodies and periods? Do girls make fun of boys for being dirty, smelly, and "pervs"? What are some current issues related to gender and body image that kids face?

How do the characters in Only Yesterday demonstrate curiosity and perseverance ? Why are these important character strengths ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 20, 1991
• On DVD or streaming : January 23, 2018
• Cast : Daisy Ridley , Dev Patel , Alison Fernandez
• Director : Isao Takahata
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Indian/South Asian actors
• Studio : GKIDS
• Genre : Anime
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , Great Girl Role Models
• Character Strengths : Curiosity , Perseverance
• Run time : 119 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : thematic elements, some rude behavior and smoking
• Last updated : April 19, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Review: ‘Only Yesterday,’ Isao Takahata’s Time-Jumping Anime

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By Nicolas Rapold

• Dec. 31, 2015

Isao Takahata, an Academy Award nominee and one of the twin pillars of the anime giant Studio Ghibli, brings the cleareyed grace of his animation to the lovely memoiristic story of a 27-year-old woman in “ Only Yesterday .” As the woman, Taeko, goes on a vacation in the country that brings back grade-school memories, Mr. Takahata finds a poignancy in milestones and ordinary moments alike, showing her sense of self deepening over time.

The action shifts between 1982, when Taeko stays at a farm and befriends her host family (including a handsome son, Toshio), and the 1960s, when she’s a fifth grader in Tokyo grappling with family and school. (“Only Yesterday” is making its own jump in time: Originally released in Japan in 1991, the film is having a freshly voiced United States release for its 25th anniversary, one year after Mr. Takahata’s “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya .”)

Taeko (voiced by the newly minted “Star Wars” phenomenon Daisy Ridley) faces pressure to marry, but Mr. Takahata anchors the film in her open-ended introspection, spun off from her sense that her fifth-grade self has joined her on the trip. Her reflections are interwoven with childhood flashbacks wrought with heart-catching immediacy: a formative school play, a first crush, a bittersweet meal of pineapple, her relationship with her caring but old-school father.

Mr. Takahata’s psychologically acute film, which was based on a manga, seems to grow in impact, too, as the adult Taeko comes to a richer understanding of what she wants and how she wants to live.

A film review on Friday about the animated movie “Only Yesterday” misstated the main character’s name. She is Taeko, not Takao.

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Only Yesterday

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

What we have here is an animation miracle so subtle that it doesn’t fully hit you till you take it home and into your dreams. Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, from Studio Ghibli — the company founded by Takahata’s partner in virtuosity Hayao Miyazaki — created a box-office sensation in Japan on its release there in 1991. Americas have had to wait 25 years to see it. No sense in complaining. Just sit back and behold.

The lead character, Taeko, is voiced by new Star Wars sensation  Daisy Ridley. (And if that heats up the box office, hallelujah.) Only Yesterday represents the kind of artistry that crosses borders of language and culture. But like many foreign imports with reduced funds for promotion, it can fall between the cracks. Don’t let it.

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Like much of Takahata’s work, Only Yesterday deals with adult themes, in this case the role of women in society. Taeko, 27, is a  Tokyo office worker about to take a trip to the country. On a train, she recalls scenes from her childhood — a strict father, the terror of her first period, the mean girls who dissed her. Takahata contrasts and blends past and present with a poet’s eye for the way form defines content. He enters the mind and memories of one woman and her 10-year-old self with supreme delicacy. And though Taeko does form a relationship with the goofy Toshio (voiced by Dev Patel), the romance is far from the center of the story of its reason for being. It’s just another step in Taeko’s development.

Ridley’s vocal finesse is exemplary. It’s true that Pixar’s Oscar darling Inside Out also concerns a young girl whose head is full of conflicting emotions. It’s a modern classic. Only Yesterday comes from a quieter, less demonstrative place. As he did in his most recent and reportedly final film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Takahata has built Only Yesterday to go gently and to last. Mission accomplished.

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Review: ‘Only Yesterday,’ a classic in Japanese animation, is a delicate beauty

Kenneth Turan reviews ‘Only Yesterday,’ a 25-year-old animated Japanese movie newly dubbed into English.

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Intimate and somehow magical, “Only Yesterday” is a classic of Japanese animation, made 25 years ago but never before released in this country. To see it now is to understand the reason for the delay and why the wait has been very much worth it.

Certainly, “Only Yesterday’s” pedigree couldn’t be more impressive. Its director, Isao Takahata, is one of Japan’s great animators, most recently responsible for 2013’s Oscar-nominated “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.”

In 1985, Takahata joined with Japan’s fantasy animation master Hayao Miyazaki (“My Neighbor Totoro,” “Spirited Away”) to co-found the legendary Studio Ghibli. Both men share a preference for intrepid girls as protagonists but, in this film at least, Takahata finds the emotional complications of the everyday more alluring than any fantasy world.

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The story of a young woman who moves back and forth between childhood memories and the dilemmas of her current life, “Only Yesterday” is a realistic, personal story made universal in a delicate way.

Although it might have baffled American audiences back in 1991, when Disney’s considerably more rousing “Beauty and the Beast” ruled the roost, “Only Yesterday’s” ability to find the beauty and allure in ordinary experience could well strike a chord today.

Screening in subtitled and dubbed versions, “Only Yesterday” is based on a Japanese graphic novel and, especially in its childhood scenes, has very much the flavor of remembered experience. It begins in the Tokyo of 1982, where a 27-year-old office worker is about to begin a vacation. No, she tells her supervisor, she’s not going abroad, she’s going to spend time on a farm in the country.

This would be Taeko (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens’” Daisy Ridley in the dubbed version, Miki Imai in the original). Unmarried and having just turned down a suitor, she feels a bit at loose ends and has always wished she lived in the country.

So Taeko makes arrangements to visit the farm of her brother-in-law’s family where she’s worked before, this time to pick safflowers, plants whose vivid red petals are traditionally used to make rouge.

Because yearning for the countryside connects Taeko with her childhood, first thinking about the trip and then actually riding on the train to her destination trigger recollections of what life was like for her 10-year-old, fifth-grade self. (Voiced by Alison Fernandez in the English dub, Youko Honna in the original.)

The youngest person in a household that includes a somber father, a worried mother, two older sisters and a distant grandmother, Taeko has all kinds of memories of her childhood, from the first pineapple the family tried (they can’t figure out how to eat it) to a pitched battle with a sister over a coveted enamel purse.

Even more intense emotions come into play at school, where Taeko has to cope with boys who relentlessly tease the girls about menstruation as well as her first serious, almost wordless crush on a popular, baseball-playing classmate.

When the two manage to successfully exchange a few words, Taeko’s emotions soar and the film, which has more of a watercolor look in these sequences than in the more vivid present day, wonderfully captures that feeling by showing her literally floating on air.

Frustrated as well as warmed by these memories (“It’s like traveling with a 10-year-old” she grouses to herself) the adult Taeko, with a job she neither loves nor hates, starts to wonder if she has been true to her more adventurous younger self.

Complicating these thoughts is the presence of a handsome young organic farmer named Toshio (“Slumdog Millionaire’s” Dev Patel and Toshio Yanagiba), whose enthusiasm for his work acts as a tonic. “It’s fascinating to raise living things,” he tells her. “If you take care of them, they’ll do the best for us.” He also shrewdly observes that when city people say they love nature, they are invariably talking about landscapes that have been created by man.

A film with a mind of its own, “Only Yesterday” finds time to go into detail about the history and harvesting of safflower plants, but mostly it focuses on Taeko’s emotions as she struggles to make peace between her childhood and her current situation.

Considered a landmark in Japanese animation for the realism of its drama, “Only Yesterday’s” emphasis on the rhythms and events of the everyday means its style takes a bit of getting used to. But once you get on this film’s wavelength, it has you for the duration.

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‘Only Yesterday’

No MPAA rating

Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes

Playing: Landmark’s Nuart, West Los Angeles

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'Only Yesterday': EW review

Devan Coggan (rhymes with seven slogan) is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. Most of her personality is just John Mulaney quotes and Lord of the Rings references.

The iconic Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli may be best known for Hayao Miyazaki’s work, but some of the studio’s most beloved movies came from his co-founder, Isao Takahata. Takahata is responsible for acclaimed animated films like The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which earned a 2014 Oscar nomination for best animated film, and Grave of the Fireflies, the heartbreaking 1988 tale about two young siblings struggling to survive in post-World War II Japan. Most of Studio Ghibli’s films — including Takahata’s work — have made their way to the States, but there’s one that never saw a U.S. release . (It aired once on Turner Classic Movies, and that’s it.) Now, 25 years after it first hit theaters overseas, Takahata’s forgotten masterpiece Only Yesterday is finally making its stateside debut. And it’s long overdue.

The English-dubbed version recruits Daisy Ridley (of recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens fame, adopting an American accent) to voice its adult heroine, the 27-year-old Taeko Okajima. Unmarried and working an office job in Tokyo in 1982, she decides to leave big city life behind to visit her relatives in the country. As she travels by train, she’s struck by vivid flashbacks to her fifth-grade self in the 1960s, reflecting on burgeoning crushes, first periods, and struggles with fractions. The rest of the film alternates between Taeko’s time in the countryside — where she meets the young farmer Toshio (voiced by Dev Patel) — and her memories, as she starts to wonder what it means to grow up.

Takahata frequently experimented with animation style — compare the sparse design of the 1999 comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas with the lush detail of Grave of the Fireflies — and Only Yesterday is no exception. The 1982 country landscapes are intricate and gorgeous, while the minimalist flashback scenes use pastels and extensive white space, like a memory that’s a bit fuzzy around the edges.

But as gorgeous and creative as Only Yesterday is, it isn’t hard to figure out why it had such a long path to American distribution. The narrative is largely plotless, and it functions more as a melancholy meditation on coming of age. Only Yesterday is hardly the only adult-oriented animated film, but its subject matter can be startlingly mature: Disney distributed many of Studio Ghibli’s greatest hits, but Only Yesterday has some decidedly un-Disney moments, as Taeko recalls being slapped by her father and learning about menstruation for the first time. (GKIDS is distributing Only Yesterday .) But it’s that refusal to shy away from big themes that makes this such a rare and powerful film. Only Yesterday may have been released in 1991 and take place in 1982 and 1966, but Taeko’s reflection on girlhood is truly timeless. A

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Only Yesterday Review

04 Sep 1991

118 minutes

Only Yesterday

Proving that there’s more to Studio Ghibli than Hayao Miyazaki, this Isao Takahata-directed movie is a gorgeous paean to both childhood and the quiet, rural life. It follows Taeko, a 27 year-old office worker on her way to the country to enjoy a holiday in the fields, and also her ten year-old self as she negotiates the academic and personal minefield of fifth grade, from bad grades to first crushes.

It’s stunningly beautiful, and provides one of the most realistic ten year-olds in any form of literature, perfectly capturing the insecurities, hopes and enthusiasms of the age. While the 27 year-old sections aren’t quite as effective, they’re still realistic enough to keep you watching.

Be sure to keep watching as the credits roll for a magical, satisfying ending.

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Film critic, Ithaca College graduate, University of St Andrews masters…

There’s a scene toward the end of Only Yesterday that sings. Studio Ghibli rode to success on the backs of fantasies and epics, forest spirits and mystical bathhouses, fire-bombings, and world wars. Only Yesterday has none of those things, yet its climax is just as profound as the studio’s most beloved films: Two people in love, sitting in a car in the middle of the night, chat about a boy the woman used to know in school. Rain falls softly on the roof, and the windshield wipers keep the rhythm. There’s a subtle vibrance to the scene and a real, tangible elegance to the dialogue. It’s one of the most magical moments in Studio Ghibli’s entire oeuvre.

Released July 20, 1991, Only Yesterday was the highest-grossing Japanese picture of its year. But from the same studio that produced one larger-than-life fantasy after another, the film is a masterpiece buried on Ghibli’s B-side, known only to die-hard fans of the studio. Only Yesterday is half a coming-of-age story and half a drama about the role of women in Japanese society — which is to say, it’s not their most accessible work. Thirty years on, Only Yesterday stands out as a mature, sophisticated gem among Studio Ghibli’s catalog, a poignant, thoughtful film about growing up, getting old, and the heavy burden of memory. It’s a film unlike any other animated project before or since.

Little Muncher

Only Yesterday marks writer-director Isao Takahata’s second outing with Studio Ghibli, after Grave of the Fireflies three years earlier. Despite co-founding the studio with producer Toshio Suzuki and director Hayao Miyazaki, Takahata doesn’t get nearly the same recognition or acclaim. He only made five movies with the studio, with his final film being The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. (For his slow pace, Miyazaki nicknamed him “Paku-san,” meaning “little muncher.”) Takahata died in 2018.

Every time the studio turned a major profit, Takahata was there to ground it, to say, “Well, that’s nice, let me put this money toward an extremely niche film that will be impossible to market internationally.” That’s how we got raccoons with enormous magical testicles in Pom Poko and a laboriously animated, super-expensive comic strip adaptation in My Neighbors the Yamadas. His films are often more experimental and realistic than Miyazaki’s, eschewing his fellow filmmaker’s broader fantasy elements in favor of naturalistic character pieces. Where Miyazaki comes from an animator’s background, Takahata comes from a writer’s (he studied French literature in college). The most popular Miyazaki films have global appeal, while Takahata’s are quintessentially Japanese. Perhaps that’s why many of his films are deeper cuts that haven’t enjoyed the same kind of international releases and plaudits as Miyazaki’s.

That goes double for Only Yesterday. The film was released in 1991, the pre– Spirited Away days, when most of the studio’s films took years, sometimes decades, to reach international audiences. Only Yesterday wasn’t released to the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany until 2006, and a fully dubbed version didn’t debut in the United States until 2016.

Pineapples, Safflower, And Baseball

In Japanese, the title of Only Yesterday actually translates to something like “Memories, Plip-Plop.” It’s a coming-of-age tale about a fifth-grade girl, Taeko, growing up in 1966. Takahata found it difficult to wrestle the episodic source manga into a film structure, so he invented a frame narrative for the story — an older Taeko, in 1982, has secured a cushy job, but she hasn’t let go of a dream from her youth of living a quiet agrarian life in the countryside. While she takes a train out to Yamagata Prefecture to pick safflower with some distant family members and friends, her mind wanders back to her fifth-grade self, who is still fresh in her mind. (Yoko Honna voices the young Taeko, Miki Imai the elder.)

In this way, the story takes on a To Kill a Mockingbird dimension — every event from her youth is delivered through a lens that’s sometimes tragic, sometimes fondly reminiscing. Longing for her older sister’s handbag, dealing with a first crush, trying pineapple for the first time — these small vignettes take on emotionally complex, often ironic dimensions from the twentysomething Taeko’s mature perspective.

That emphasis on memory and nostalgia carries over into the animation. In the 1960s scenes, the animation is simple, with lines not quite reaching the edges of frames and white space dominating the compositions. It looks like a prototype version of My Neighbors the Yamadas or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. The style creates the effect that what we’re seeing isn’t fully formed, or perhaps it’s fading. That’s something that only animation can do: Use the medium to isolate memories like clouds in the sky, hazy and soft, vividly remembered yet unfolding in that grand white infinite of the past.

Even before we see the characters, right from the beginning of Only Yesterday, you know something’s different. The opening credits play out over a piece of textile or cloth, a technique Yasujiro Ozu liked to use. Like Ozu’s work, Only Yesterday focuses intensely on the social rhythms of Japanese society — here, it’s among schoolchildren and farmers — as well as on family dynamics, budding romances, melodrama, and life’s quieter moments.

For about 15 minutes when Taeko arrives in Yamagata, the film changes completely into almost a documentary on agriculture. Taeko tells us all about safflower farming and the tribulations of turning it into rouge — and the shocking thing is, this stuff shouldn’t work. Safflower harvesting should make for neither compelling animation nor drama, and yet, Only Yesterday ’s safflower sequence is a gorgeous piece of filmmaking. Not only do Ghibli’s gentle pastoral vibes shine through here, but the visual rhythm moves the sequence along beautifully, and the uniquely subtle score from Katsu Hoshi elevates its silent moments. Safflower farming has never been so compelling.

Where the rouge-making scene offers calm and serenity — Taeko finding herself in hard labor and achieving some measure of transcendence through her work — the 1966 scenes provide the film with its levity. Young Taeko can be bratty, obstinate, and easily overwhelmed. During a summer vacation to some hot spring baths, the immensity of one of the baths causes her to faint. After the girls at school get the menstruation talk, she freaks out when the boys learn about periods. And when she’s faced with her first crush — a pitcher for the class baseball team — she’s so overjoyed that she imagines climbing the air and flying through the clouds. In some scenes, the temporal boundaries between them crumble, and fifth-grade Taeko runs around while adult Taeko sleeps.

Familiar Faces And Hot Farmers

Only Yesterday is not just a showcase for Takahata’s talents as a writer and director, but it also features several Ghibli regulars doing top-tier work. Yoshifumi Kondô designed the characters and would go on to direct Whisper of the Heart , while animation director Katsuya Kondô would later design characters for The Wind Rises and Earwig and the Witch . The character animation on display in Only Yesterday may be some of Ghibli’s most fluent. When we first meet Toshio (Toshirō Yanagiba), Taeko’s hot farmer friend, his hand gestures are captured with such precision and grace that you’d swear they just rotoscoped them in.

This also was the first Ghibli film for Masashi Ando, who would work on Paprika, Weathering With You, and Your Name., and cinematographer Hisao Shirai would later join Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion as director of photography.

While the faces behind the film may be familiar, what we’re seeing on-screen was brand-new for Ghibli. For one, the facial animations for the 1980s timeline were more complicated and realistic than any of the studio’s films before then. And the settings differ as well: The Mount Zaō ski hill, stratovolcanoes and crater lakes have never been seen before in Ghibli, and the abundance of slow, quiet scenes ensures that we have time to soak these settings up. In one scene, the farmers stop to watch the sunrise in real-time. In another, Taeko and her friends run along a hill at sunset; in the foreground, a lonely stick poking out of the dirt is silhouetted exactly like the ōdachi in the burial mound at the end of Seven Samurai.

Takahata wanted the flashback scenes to carry the weightlessness and joy of anime. To achieve this, Only Yesterday was animated in two different styles: For 1966, the scenes were drawn first, then dubbed over later; for 1982, the voice actors recorded their lines first, and the artists then matched the animations to their words. This way, the grade-school memories feel more detached and fragmented, like they’re overly idealized or perhaps happening in a dream.

Unfortunately, this means Only Yesterday is impossible to dub properly. Some of the best concepts and lines that don’t survive the translation, either — Taeko’s trademark “At last I can say this in the right setting” line, which she recites from her role in the school play, got altered to something so un-poetic that I don’t remember it. Daisy Ridley, of Star Wars fame, puts on a fine American accent to play Taeko, and Dev Patel’s perfectly charming as Toshio, but there are also subtleties in the regional dialects that Takahata uses to illustrate his characters in the subbed version that are lost on the dubbed.

Conclusion: Only Yesterday

A few dips into magical realism aside, Only Yesterday feels more like a down-to-earth arthouse drama. Takahata conjures a moving, delightful, and often hilarious image of a woman’s life, at once capturing the innocence of childhood and the reality of women’s roles in 1980s Japanese society. Taeko’s found the thing that’s supposed to make her happy, but she can’t help but shake the fifth-grade girl in the back of her mind telling her this isn’t what she wanted.

The characters make a big deal out of Taeko’s being unmarried, but rather than rush toward a romantic union and a marriage, Taeko’s arc is about reconciling her past self with her current one and whether she can twist her life into something more fulfilling. She’s the agent of her own change rather than a supporting character in a man’s story. And this freedom to choose her own destiny takes root earlier still, in the 1960s — Taeko, in voiceover, tells us about how the girls always seemed to play and work harder than the boys. In a society that didn’t encourage women to express themselves or shape their own lives, this was their only chance to have some freedom.

Only Yesterday is everything you can want from a movie: discussions of menstrual cycles, intimate sequences of organic safflower farming, Hungarian folk music, and a hot farmer. It ends with a Japanese cover of Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” and you’re guaranteed to cry your eyes out at least once. This is also perhaps the only Ghibli movie to reference The Beatles. Maybe all of these elements together push Only Yesterday into obscurity, forever consigned to the “completionists only” side of the Ghibli vault, but I think these disparate parts make the film great. It’s the only animated film of its kind — definitely aimed at sad adults rather than sugar-happy kids — and 30 years later, I hope Takahata’s forgotten masterpiece finally finds the love it deserves.

What do you think of Only Yesterday ? Comment below and let us know.

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articles In Praise Of

Only Yesterday is a masterful reflection on youth’s impermanence

With the release of Studio Ghibli’s back catalogue on Netflix, we look back at one of their unsung greats.

Kambole Campbell

@kambolecampbell

T he cherished oeuvre of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli is making its way to streaming services for the first time ever this weekend. With all of Hayao Miyazaki’s work available, it’s a chance to introduce others to childhood staples like Spirited Away or Kiki’s Delivery Service . But it’s also a great opportunity to dig deeper into the Ghibli canon.

Among the studio’s earliest releases is co-founder Isao Takahata’s humanist masterpiece, Only Yesterday. Takahata always operated as the left brain to Miyazaki’s right, having brought the studio down to earth in 1988 with the devastating anti-war film Grave of the Fireflies, which first screened in a double bill with My Neighbour Totoro. Similarly, Only Yesterday deals with the real world through simple observations, favouring small moment of human drama over fantasy elements.

Following 27-year-old Taeko Okajima as she takes a holiday to the rural part of Yamagata Prefecture, away from her office job in Tokyo, the film is essentially a story of memory. Taeko recalls her time in fifth grade, attempting to solve a crisis of identity experienced during a formative period of her life. The divide between the idealism of her childhood and her more anxious adulthood bleeds into the very texture of the film, as Takahata paints the past with a faded backgrounds and washed out pastel tones – an ‘incomplete’ look compared to the vivid colour and detail of the present.

In this sense, Only Yesterday is a trip into another world, but it’s the inner world of the main character that Takahata is interested in, rather than realms of spirits or folklore. With music by Katz Hoshi and a deliberate contrast between cartoonishness and meticulous realism, the film looks and sounds remarkably different to the work of Miyazaki.

As a 10-year-old, Taeko’s expressions are broader, more traditionally anime, like how her eyes can sparkle and widen to impossible size. Her memories of fifth grade are filled with literal flights of fancy, abstract backdrops and expressionistic storyboarding. By contrast, the reality of the present is a rich canvas; faces are drawn with more lines than usual for Ghibli and, in another rare touch, the voice performances were recorded first so that the animation could be done around them.

As an adult, we observe the dimples that form on Taeko’s face when she smiles, the way her brow creases and her eyes wrinkle up when she laughs; Takahata and his team of animators emphasise the way the muscles in the human face contort to create expression.

An extended portion of the flashback to Taeko’s childhood is dedicated to her learning about periods and the stigma that comes with it (Taeko is devastated when an idiot boy yells during class, “the girls are buying underpants in the infirmary!”), while learning to adjust thanks to a calmer, more mature friend. Takahata clearly has great affection for his characters and there’s a sense of wonder about the way even the most mundane aspects of life are rendered, such as when Taeko’s family buys and eats a pineapple for the first time, or when Taeko struggles with maths, or how to articulate herself to her crush.

As Taeko reflects on her life, the faded background slowly fills out, the colours becoming brighter and more vivid; the change her moment of self-reflection brings about bleeds into the film’s aesthetic. As Taeko becomes more resolute in deciding what she wants to do with the rest of her life, and realises what she has learned from her childhood, the past literally becomes more clear.

Only Yesterday does not hit the dramatic highs of Miyazaki’s work, but that’s partly the point. It’s less concerned with presenting a grand thesis about the nature of being human than it is navigating the heartbreaks, triumphs and regrets that make us. But it’s still comforting for a film about the relentless march of time, the title even invoking both the speed with which childhood can pass us by and how close those memories stay with us.

It’s immensely relatable in how it evokes these little tragedies: the feeling of being a fraud; of missing out’ of wondering if you’ve left your childhood self behind; idealism; dreams and all. It asks us not to mourn what might or might not have happened, but to keep those memories close, and use them to move forward. That Only Yesterday makes this feel as wondrous as a castle in the sky or a land of spirits is nothing short of miraculous, and why it ranks among Ghibli’s best.

Published 1 Feb 2020

Tags: Anime Hayao Miyazaki Isao Takahata Japanese cinema Studio Ghibli

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Only Yesterday

A twenty-seven-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood in Tokyo. A twenty-seven-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood in Tokyo. A twenty-seven-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood in Tokyo.

• Isao Takahata
• Hotaru Okamoto
• David Freedman
• Toshirô Yanagiba
• 141 User reviews
• 73 Critic reviews
• 90 Metascore
• 1 win & 8 nominations

• Taeko (Child)

• (as Mayumi Iizuka)
• Shuji Hirota

• (English version)
• Grandmother
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• Trivia The Walt Disney Company acquired the US distribution rights from Studio Ghibli-Tokuma as part of a more comprehensive rights agreement. Disney decided it would not release Only Yesterday in the US due to references to menstruation in the film. A clause in Studio Ghibli's distribution contract prohibited Disney from altering the scene to remove the references. GKIDS has since acquired the rights from Disney and Ghibli, and released an English dubbed version that was distributed by Universal Pictures, making this the first Studio Ghibli film to be dubbed into English by Universal Pictures.

Hirota : Rainy days, cloudy days, sunny days... which do you like?

Taeko : ...cloudy days.

Hirota : Oh, then we're alike.

• Connections Featured in JesuOtaku Anime Reviews: Only Yesterday (2012)
• Soundtracks Cantec de nunta Written by Gheorghe Zamfir (uncredited) Performed by Gheorghe Zamfir and Ansamblul Ciocarlia Courtesy of Electrecord Romania

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• May 12, 2005
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• February 26, 2016 (United States)
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• Nippon Television Network (NTV)
• Polyphony Digital Animation
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• Jan 3, 2016

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 59 minutes
• Dolby Stereo

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Only Yesterday Reviews

This beautiful picture is probably the finest women's story that will reach the screen this year.

Full Review | Apr 23, 2024

The picture introduces to the screen Margaret Sullavan, who plays the Southern girl so finely that she gives promise of stepping into the front ranks, immediately, of the Hollywood elect.

It's a darned good picture, but it's not a knockout, as Back Street was.

The plot is skillfully presented, though details are overemphasized, and at times the picture drags considerably. But it offers a sensitively told story, and one that will reach many hearts.

The picture is not very good, but its protagonist never loses her appeal to the public, and I have not the slightest doubt that Only Yesterday will be as popular here as it has been in America. See it for Miss Sullavan's performance.

Such trash should wreck a talkie, but Margaret Sullavan would make any film, and she is the girl in the film... In a picture which is manufactured to run that well-worn gamut of emotions, she convinces us that each one is personal and real.

Universal gives us an artistic gem with this drama, with a new artist, Margaret Sullavan, in the most romantic role that could ever be conceived. [Full review in Spanish]

'Tis seldom one runs across a picture that is so human and pathetic that even the most hardened need not be ashamed of a tear.

Miss Sullavan, here playing her initial starring role, offers a portrayal which for its restraint, its intelligence and general appeal would be difficult to match.

Boles is at his best as the man. Reginald Denny acquits himself excellently ln the comedy part. To the youngster, Jimmy Butler, go some flowery compliments.

The cast -- a long one -- is very competent. Boles does what strikes us as his best work. But nobody in the picture approximates Miss Sullavan's performance for understanding and emotional depth.

The result ta a photodramatic entertainment which, If not exactly brilliant, is at least distinguished.

It will not be forgotten soon.

It has been filmed with great tact and beauty, and Miss Sullavan plays it for all It is worth.

Only Yesterday is strictly Miss Sullavan's triumph. What it might have been without her cannot be truthfully estimated. With her, however, it is a vivid, arresting romantic tragedy, and it sparkles with the brilliance of a brilliant new star.

The plot, while not entirely new, appears fresh in the capable hands with which it is entrusted. Margaret Sullavan, the newcomer recruited from the New York stage, handles the leading feminine role with finesse.

Last Tuesday, all by myself in a projection room, I saw the picture, and rarely, indeed, have I sat In on anything so completely beguiling. It has a haunting wistfulness, a lavendery exquisiteness, and is, withal, so warmly, passionately alive!

It makes splendid cinematic material and is efficiently told by means of the flashback.

Women in particular will be moved by this quiet story of a girl whose love and devotion were equaled only by her strength of character and singleness of purpose.

Margaret Sullavan gives a superb performance.

Summary It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her relatives in the countryside, and as the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys. At the ... Read More

Directed By : Isao Takahata

Written By : Hotaru Okamoto, Yuuko Tone, David Freedman, Isao Takahata

Only Yesterday (1991)

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Toshirô Yanagiba

Taeko (child), mayumi izuka, mei oshitani, megumi komine, yukiyo takizawa, masashi ishikawa, yuuki masuda, shuji hirota, michie terada, masahiro ito, yorie yamashita, yuki minowa, chie kitagawa, grandmother, sachiko ishikawa, masako watanabe, hirozumi sato.

Daisy Ridley

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Studio Ghibli's Most Powerful Film Is Its Least Whimsical

Only Yesterday may lack magical flourishes, but it makes up for it with poignant themes, making it one of Studio Ghibli's most powerful films.

While many Studio Ghibli films capture audiences' wild imagination with their whimsical characters and magical locations, the movies are most remembered for the poignant way they touch the soul. One of Studio Ghibli's most underrated gems , 1991's  Only Yesterday  is one such realist drama that is a powerful ode to nostalgia and reconnecting to life's deeper meanings.

Only Yesterday , directed by Isao Takahata, is a realistic story of Taeko, a 27-year-old woman living a humdrum life in Tokyo. Upon feeling intense wanderlust, she takes a long holiday to visit some distant family members in the countryside to help with their safflower harvest. During her trip, Taeko recalls various childhood memories of family dysfunction, puberty and first crushes. Her time in the countryside is a transformative experience that connects her to her younger self, leaving her to wonder if she has built a life her childhood self would be proud of.

RELATED: Why Isn't The Red Turtle Part of the Studio Ghibli Collection?

While there are no witches or fantastical castles, like in Howl's Moving Castle  or Spirited Away , the safflower fields are imbued with just as much sun-soaked wonder and natural mysticism. Only Yesterday is a quiet, reflective drama that focuses on subject matter not usually covered by animated features: womanhood  and the pangs of an unfulfilling career and love life. The film explores the nature of how people change over time, losing their childhood innocence, yet are still plagued by the same idealistic desires in adulthood.

The film feels exceptionally intimate since most of the flashbacks to Taeko's childhood are not concerned with the significant milestones of adolescence but instead are small moments that stick in the back of one's brain for decades. Taeko as a child is as moody as she is endearing, making her feel well-rounded and relatable. Although the film gives adult Taeko a love interest on the safflower farm, the real love story is between Taeko and her younger self. Throughout Only Yesterday , Taeko learns to love and honor herself by reconnecting with her childhood and actualizing her desires for a new life.

While Only Yesterday does have an uplifting ending, the beautiful exploration of the past and its reoccurrence in the present is both a melancholic and sentimental journey that will induce tears. The film works on two powerful levels: a nostalgic ode to childhood and a soulful search for fulfillment in life. Takahata weaves together two character arcs for Taeko at both ages that merge in one affirming conclusion and a new beginning.

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What Only Yesterday lacks in unique magical elements, it makes up for in affecting sentiments that linger well past their time. The safflower fields' imagery alone is suffused with enough tender meditation and wistfulness to rival the Studio Ghibli realm's most awe-inspiring scenery.  Only Yesterday is a soft-spoken masterpiece that still delivers one of the studio's most enchanting and emotional messages. It has been unfairly left out of many of Studio Ghibli's greatest hits conversations, being overshadowed by the more embellished and intense greats in the Miyazaki pantheon .

Unfortunately, many people have slept on the touching story about an unexplored subject matter that packs a punch in its small packaging. At its heart,  Only Yesterday's  power lies in the subtleties, where the vital phenomena in life reside.

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Only Yesterday (Japan, 1991)

Only Yesterday was the first Studio Ghibli collaboration between Japanese animation titans Hiyao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. In interviews, Miyazaki has downplayed his role in Only Yesterday (he is officially credited as the “production producer”), claiming that his function was purely logistical and that he had no creative input. This was Takahata’s follow-up to 1988’s devastatingly powerful Grave of the Fireflies and represented the fifth Studio Ghibli release (three from Miyazaki, two from Takahata).

Only Yesterday is set during two timelines. The primary one occurs in 1982 where the main character, Taeko Okajima (Miki Imai), is a 27-year old office worker living in Tokyo. Throughout the film, Taeko takes memory excursions back to fifth grade when, as an 11-year old (Youko Honna), she struggles with puppy love, the onset of puberty, an early infatuation with theater, and other frustrations and joys of being young in the late 1960s.

The movie’s strength is the deftness of touch it shows in depicting Taeko’s childhood – tiny vignettes that capture the ups and downs of pre-adolescence – moments so universal in their presentation that they cross generational, cultural, and gender barriers. As a 51-year old white, American man, I have little in common with Takeo, yet I related to her experiences as if they were my own. This represents the genius of Takahata.

The film allows Taeko and Toshio’s romance to develop gradually. As in all love stories, we’re perhaps aware of the mutual attraction before they are. Toshio telegraphs his feelings but Taeko is oblivious until the end. During their time together, there are gestures and expressions (an indication of how much effort was put into the animated character details) that show the developing closeness. Their conversations are often banal (about things like organic farming) but the companionability in the interaction is evident. And, as in many restrained romances of the big screen, no kiss is needed at the end to confirm what we know.

The GKIDS home video release provides two options to cater to different preferences, both of which are good enough that it becomes a matter of personal choice. For “purists,” the original Japanese version is available (with English subtitles). The dubbed edition, with Daisy Ridley as Taeko and Dev Patel as Toshio, has the usual awkwardness that results from mismatched lip movements, but is fine for those who prefer not to read subtitles. (For an idea of the differences between the dubbed dialogue and the original Japanese, it can be instructive to watch the English dub with English subtitles turned on.)

For those who know Takahata only for Grave of the Fireflies , Only Yesterday provides a different perspective of the director – one that’s more playful and nostalgic. I have said that, although I consider Grave of the Fireflies to be one of the most moving and potent animated films ever made, it’s too painful to be revisited on a frequent (or even infrequent) basis. Only Yesterday , on the other hand, is as much a pleasure to see on the second or third time as it is on the first.

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• Beauty and the Beast (1991)
• Grave of the Fireflies (1993)
• Shrek (2001)
• Grinch, The (2018)
• Quest for Camelot, The (1998)
• Emoji Movie, The (2017)
• (There are no more better movies of Miki Imai)
• (There are no more worst movies of Miki Imai)
• (There are no more better movies of Toshiro Yanagiba)
• (There are no more worst movies of Toshiro Yanagiba)
• (There are no more better movies of Youko Honna)
• (There are no more worst movies of Youko Honna)

Movie Reviews

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When I was a kid, the guy who taught music classes in my school was an aging hippie with a long beard. He'd hand out tambourines and triangles and teach us simple songs. At the end of each class, he would regale us, unprompted, with first-hand stories of Beatlemania. He basically lived out the real-life version of Robert Zemeckis' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," traveling to New York City with his friends to try to score tickets to "The Ed Sullivan Show" for the Beatles' historic first appearance. (He failed, but he did stand in the mob outside the hotel where the Beatles were staying.) We were 8 years old and had no idea what he was talking about. His enthusiasm was catching, though. I learned how to harmonize by singing along to my parents' Beatles albums. (I recommend this approach.) The Beatles were just  there , absorbed by osmosis. If nothing else, Danny Boyle's "Yesterday," which imagines a world where the Beatles never happened, made me think about what would it be like to hear "Yesterday" for the first time, what life would be like if the Beatles didn't exist. The film, scripted by Richard Curtis , explores some of the implications of its premise, but, frustratingly, skips over others. 

To call Jack ( Himesh Patel ) a "struggling musician" is an understatement. He plays in coffee shops, populated only by his friends. He sings on an empty boardwalk. His childhood friend Ellie ( Lily James ), who fell in love with him—and his music—when he played Oasis' "Wonderwall" at a talent show in grade school, acts as his manager, giving him pep talks, fired up by her belief in him. He lives with his parents in Suffolk, and is ready to throw in the towel when, one night, the earth experiences a 12-second blackout. During those 12 seconds, Jack is hit by a bus, and when he wakes up in the hospital realizes something weird has happened when he says to Ellie "Will you still feed me when I'm 64?" and she doesn't recognize the lyrics. “Why 64?” she asks with curiosity. Jack races to Google, and no matter what the combination of search terms, no trace of the Beatles is to be found. Curtis has a lot of fun with how absurd it would be if you mentioned "The Beatles” to people and they asked "What's that?" Jack makes the choice to start playing these "lost" songs, passing them off as his own. 

He plays "Yesterday" for his friends, and the looks on their listening faces is a potent—and welcome—reminder of the song's melancholy beauty. The entire film stops, allowing us the space to really listen. But when Jack plays the songs at gigs, he's just background noise. So this makes him wonder: maybe it's me who is the problem? The songs are great, but I am not. There was an alchemical thing that happened with the Fab Four, and without that, maybe the rest wouldn’t have followed. This is an interesting possibility, which the film for the most part does not explore. Eventually, Jack records a few of the songs, appearing on local television shows to promote “his" music. Ed Sheeran (playing himself in a very self-deprecating cameo) catches one of these television spots, and swoops in to take Jack on tour with him. When Jack decides to play "Back in the U.S.S.R." to an all-Russian crowd in Moscow, mayhem erupts (it's a great scene), and the video of the performance goes viral. Sheeran murmurs, "I was always told someone would come along and be better than me. You're Mozart and I'm Salieri." 

Debra Hammer ( Kate McKinnon ), a shark-like record label exec sidles up to Jack after a show, talons out, and before he knows it, he's in Los Angeles being offered "the poisoned chalice" of fame (as Debra calls it). McKinnon puts such a deadpan spin on lines like: "I have a question, Jack. Is this as good as you can look?" that she almost single-handedly indicts the entire PR machinery of show business. The music industry is lightly lampooned, when some ad exec. nixes the album title  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band  as having "too many words" and points out that calling an album  The White Album  has "serious diversity issues." There are some fun sequences, like Jack trying, with a sense of increasing urgency, to remember the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," fearing if he doesn't the song will be lost forever. 

"Yesterday” dodges many of its most interesting ideas. Jack is a worldwide phenomenon almost instantly. But if the Beatles hadn't happened, there would have been a ripple effect. It's incorrect to say "Well, if it hadn't been the Beatles, it would have been someone else." That's not how culture works. So much of it is lightning  not  striking twice, of right-place-right-time mixed with the right combination of people at the right moment. It had to be John, Paul, George and Ringo. In "Yesterday," the music business is more or less the same as it is now. But how many artists have been inspired by the Beatles, and then that inspiration flowed into the next generation and the next? How many contemporary songwriters still show the Beatles' influence? It's very intriguing early on when Jack plays Beatles songs at coffee-shop gigs, and nobody even looks over. The music has zero impact on these people. What if things had developed so differently in the Beatles' absence that people would have no idea what they were missing, and, frankly, wouldn't care, because how can you miss what you've never had? These ideas are present, but "Yesterday" doesn't dig into them.

The film gets caught up in the relationship between Jack and Ellie, which is not all that interesting, pieced together with cliches from other films. "Yesterday" wants to be a feel-good movie, and much of it did make me feel good. The looks on his friends' faces when they hear "Yesterday" for the first time was very moving. I am conflicted about a choice made late in the film. You'll know it when you see it. It felt cheap to me, and also strangely underdeveloped, although the line "It is so good to see you" got to me. Like I said: conflicted. 

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Yesterday (2019)

Rated PG-13 for suggestive content and language.

112 minutes

Himesh Patel as Jack Malik

Lily James as Ellie Appleton

Ed Sheeran as Ed Sheeran

Kate McKinnon as Debra Hammer

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• Danny Boyle

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