Just because your motion picture is made up of thousands upon thousands of individually hand-drawn pictures, it doesn’t mean you can’t be subtle with the medium you’re working in. While various purveyors of animation – from Walt Disney to Ralph Bakshi to Don Bluth to Katsuhiro Otomo – all utilised the artform to realise everything from lush, impossible fantasy kingdoms to dystopian futures, leave it to Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata to do something entirely different.
There’s not many people who would think to use animation to tell a straight drama without a single flying dragon or talking animal in sight, but anyone who saw Takahata’s emotion searing Grave Of The Fireflies (aka. one of the saddest films in the world) already knew that the director didn’t approach the medium in a way quite unlike anybody else. Harnessing numerous animators and countless drawings, Only Yesterday is a relatively simple story about a twenty seven year-old woman thinking back to her childhood as she embarks on a farming holiday, but the emotions it manages to evoke proves just how magical animation can be – even when it isn’t overtly featuring magic.
The year is 1982 and we meet umarried office worker Taeko Okajima as she’s about to go on a two week vacation to the rural countryside in order to help her sister’s in-laws with their safflower harvest. As she leaves Tokyo to Yamagata on a sleeper train she starts experiencing vivid memories from when she was a ten year-old girl back in 1966 that bring back powerful emotions from that time. The youngest of three, Taeko was brought up by somewhat flinty mother and a near-monosylabic father who often struggled with some of their daughter’s various shortcomings. However, as Taeko’s memories come thick and fast, we’re treated to a bunch of experiences that not only stuck with her with absolutely clarity, but seemingly helped make her the woman she would grow up to be. But who is that, exactly?
As she recalls such moments as the first time her family tried pineapple, her baseball playing first crush and the dreaded onset of her first period, Taeko discovers a sort of peace while working on a farm that she rarely seems to find in the city. She’s also starts to form something of a bond with her brother-in-law’s second cousin, Toshio, who passionately believes in people being more in tune with nature as it mutually benefits both. However as the memories keep on coming, we also see the more painful memories come to the fore such as the first time she was slapped by her father as punishment, her inability to grasp maths and a budding love of acting getting quashed by life constantly intervening.
But what does all this mean? Is there a reason her mind keeps her awash with wave after wave of nostalgia both good and bad? Could it be that her holiday has unlocked some yearning within her that city life just can’t sate?
If anyone could (or should) be brought forward as a shining example why animation should be regarded as an art form thar deserves respect, it’s Isao Takahata. By this point in the history of Studio Ghibli, both he and Hayao Miyazaki had fallen into something of a perfect rhythm with Miyazaki delivering achingly poignant flights of fancy that often felt like balm for the soul. However, while his colleague was effortlessly delivering groundbreaking fantasy, Takahata’s wheelhouse seemed to be delving into much more personal affairs, choosing not to hide behind fantastical creatures and mythical world but rather rubbing our face in extraordinarily human stories. After witnessing his previous movie – the unrelentingly moving story of two children slowly dying of malnutrition after the war – I was a little hesitant to approach Only Yesterday, if only because I was understandably gunshy about ugly crying my way through another film. However, after making it through, I found myself once again stunned at how these Ghibli guys know how to write girls so well.
When stripped down to the bare bones, Takahata is expertly detailing the growing divide that occurs as we gradually creep into adulthood that often results in some sort of spiritual upheaval as the added pressures of life make us long for the people we use to be. As Taeko experiences the simple but rewarding pleasures of tending the land, she lists all the growing pains and little traumas that occur that present a billion questions of what might have been. Be it the numerous blush-inducing issues that plague her that stretch from her inability to speak to a crush that rumour suggests actually likes her, to the horror stricken panic of having any of the boys think she’s skipping P.E. because she may be her period (thirty years before Pixar’s Turning Red, by the way), you feel them as if you’ve experienced them yourself – which is quite the feat considering I’m a white male.
Also creating little, but devestating wounds are the various cuts inflicted by a heavy hand or a careless word of a relative. The only time she’s slapped by her father is because of the shame she inadvertently causes by walking outside without shoes (a sign of poverty in post-war Japan) and her inability to grasp fractions leads her to hearing her mother describe her as “not normal” to her sisters.
But as ripe for drama as this all is, you may be wondering why Isao Takahata bothered to render any of this with countless painstakingly drawn drawings at all and simply just make a normal damn film – well if the director has a deft touch with the story, wait until you see the subtle, yet completely beguiling, tricks he does with the animation. While the sections of the film that take place in the 80s have a more brightly coloured and realistic look about them (it’s initially odd to see Anime characters with nasolabial folds), all the memories of the 60s look less realistic, with the edges of the frame kitted out withba white haze as if we really are viewing these events through the gauze of memory. Some may still wonder while you’d employ a small army of animators to simply draw endless frames of people talking, but the subtly of the “acting” is as superb as the voice work. And then, just as I let my guard down, Studio Ghibli nails me square in the feels once again with a sequence that see Taeko galvanised into making a momentous decision thanks to the memories of herself and her childhood friends urging her to make the leap of faith.
While Takahata’s insistence of only deviating from reality when the story truly calls for it may leave seekers of more fantastical Ghibli fare yearning for a big fuzzy animal or a flying sequence, Only Yesterday remains an impressively controlled piece of work that still manages to yank on our heart strings while mercifully leaving its youthful cast alive this time – seriously guys, Grave Of The Fireflies really did a number on me. Still, watching someone try to find their place in a modern world that proves to be an ill fit for them is still plenty emotional enough – for I too find pineapples a letdown and am randomly haunted by memories of my childhood…
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