Only Yes­ter­day is a mas­ter­ful reflec­tion on youth’s impermanence

The 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 ani­mé, 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.