Like Takahata’s other films, Only Yesterday has a sense of personal vision often lacking in American features. If he sounds very British in some scenes, the differences in pronunciation suggest the regional dialect his character would use. Dev Patel brings a low-key charm to Toshio. She gives Taeko a warmth and enthusiasm that quickly win the viewer over. The viewer knows the traditional farmer’s way of life is also fading away, although Toshio and Takeo will preserve a small part of it for as long as they can.ĭaisy Ridley reportedly likes the Studio Ghibli films and had expressed interest in becoming a voice before the success of The Force Awakens.

In the flashback sequences, Takahata’s artists allow the watercolor backgrounds to fade into the surrounding white paper, suggesting the incompleteness of memories. Takahata’s lyrical film celebrates the beauty of the forests and fields, but it's a restrained celebration, marked by the Japanese concept of mono no aware, an awareness of the inevitably transitory nature of life and beauty. It’s hard work, but he loves the land as much as Taeko does, and that shared affection leads to a maladroit courtship. Toshio (Dev Patel), an earnest, slightly clumsy young man with an easy laugh, is dedicated to sustainable, organic agriculture. But one person resolutely resists the urban flight. Young people were abandoning rural villages for the promise of a more exciting life in big cities, especially Tokyo. In 1991, the Japanese countryside was already becoming depopulated. The memories enable Takeo to explore who she is, and how she became a woman who lives in Tokyo, but loves the country. The spectral presence of the girl she once was triggers a flood of memories-discovering boys, the onset of puberty, adolescent friendships, trouble with math, arguments with her older sisters. She enjoys the contact with the soil and the connection with the past.īut Taeko is surprised to discover she seems to have brought her fifth grade self with her. She reflects on how generations of women tore their hands picking the thistle-like safflower blossoms that were used to make rouge-a compound so expensive, no farm woman could afford it. Taeko joins her cousins working in the fields. On a whim, she decides to visit the cousins she stayed with as a girl in the Yamagata region, northwest of Tokyo. Also, Taeko is 27 and single: at that time, an unmarried woman over 25 was referred to in Japan as “Christmas Cake”-something that’s still on the shelf after its sell-by date. But she’s spent her entire life in the city she’s ready for a change. Taeko (voice by Disney Ridley) has an agreeable, unexciting job and a tiny apartment in Tokyo in 1982. It was #1 film in Japan in 1991, and its appearance can only enhance the already enviable reputations of Takahata and Studio Ghibli.

No one seems to know why Only Yesterday has been overlooked for so long.

Although Takahata completed the film 25 years ago, it was only available to American viewers on the old bootleg Ghibli set. The one Studio Ghibli film that was never distributed in the US, Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday (Omohide Poro Poro, literally 'memories trickle down') is finally getting a long overdue release in a lively new English dub (opening in selected theaters this week). Anime Review: Isao Takahata’s 'Only Yesterday'

Only yesterday 1991 english dub