I watched this a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it.
It's also somewhat linked in my mind with Kurosawa's "Dreams", though I can't recall if that's because of any actual similarity or just that I happened to see them within a few days of each other.
Such a beautiful movie. Because its so measured and subtle throughout, when you get to that part on the train with the song it's a total killshot and doesn't feel maudlin. I'm getting teary just thinking about it. I saw it when I was 20 or 21 and lay awake the next couple nights thinking about it and growing up and what it meant that I was an adult now. Great writeup, good points about the animation it really does make the adult scenes feel different.
yes, I fully thought the movie was over since the credits had started and was pulling up Letterboxd to log it and then it kept going and I was floored!
I had forgotten that it happened after credits were rolling, so I looked it up on YouTube and now I really am crying. It makes me happy though, good for her.
As someone who thought he'd "seen every Studio Ghibli movie", I only saw this (and Whisper of the Heart) recently. And I can't believe what I'd been missing! I love both of those movies so much! I recently watched Angel's Egg too and... wow.
Though thematically different than Ozu's films, some of the domestic scenes in Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart reminded me of his work. Or at least made me want to re-watch them too.
Once again, thanks for doing this series. It's been great reading your (and everybody else's) thoughts on some of my all-time favorites.
It took this movie a long time to come to America! I sort of tapped out of actively following anime around 2012(?) and at the time the conventional wisdom was it would never be released here. (I remember that I learned about it through this column: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/buried-treasure/2009-05-21/only-yesterday) I think it got licensed in 2016.
I also thought of Ozu, or really of Tokyo Story (the only Ozu movie I’ve seen), but one of the things I like about both Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart is the decision to have the protagonist take a decisive action at the end. In both cases it feels a little insane but when the movie is over it feels profoundly right.
I was so excited for this because it's my husband's favorite Ghibli! This was really beautiful and I can't wait for him to read it. Taeko is so unique among protagonists, not because she's exceptional, but I think a lot of versions of this story would have been sadder and more heavy handed about aging, identity crises, etc. I don't know if I've encountered many adult characters with her quirky/positive outlook that are still so grounded and not running off into whimsy.
Yeah this is sort of what I mean by feeling like this movie is better than The Green Ray—which is a great movie but full of a particular kind of French wistfulness where you're like my youth is sort of behind me, my future is uninteresting, I'll just kind of wander around.… the ending of Only Yesterday puts in a totally different world. (Also hello to Mr. Molly Starr.)
So THAT'S what's going on with the faces. I had noticed, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It does contribute to making Taeko possibly the most... normal? Looking woman in any anime I've ever seen? Which somehow also means ambiguous? For example, I don't think you can look at her and tell how pretty she is. I don't mean she comes off plain, she just looks like a real woman who is in a situation where she is not particularly concerned with looking attractive, but that tells you nothing about whether she could look attractive if she cared to. Probably? Again, it shouldn't be so strange, but in cartoon animation, where characters tend to be stereotypes or archetypes, you don't get a lot of women who look that way. To take it a step further, even Miyazaki, who uses a lot of different faces and body types and is obviously trying not to he one dimensional with his female characters, the adult women tend to have appearances that fall into these easily parsable categories like "wizened but kindly old lady, maternal figure, glamorous yet fallen woman, princess, etc" and all of them come with implicit ideas of their character. But Takeo as an adult has none of that. It would be absurd to project any of these roles onto her, which means you really have to wait to make up your mind about her. And that to me is one of the most fascinating things about the movie.
haha yes there's something funny with Miyazaki's women for me where they sometimes seem like they have distinct life stages where you start life as a petite child and then around 30 or so you suddenly become this surprisingly muscular mom. How does that happen? Do you go off into a cave for the winter?
In the little documentary it sounds like the decision to try to make the adult faces more realistic was motivated by trying to make it clear that Taeko is 27 and much older than a typical anime protagonist. I agree about this effect and I feel like the situation where it feels as if a different version of Taeko's face can unpredictably emerge as she talks fits with what you're saying…
Hmm. I don't know what I am going to do with the (obviously true) fact that 27 is "old" for an anime protagonist. This is like realizing I am at least a decade older than "adult" Peter Parker all over again.
I watched this a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it.
It's also somewhat linked in my mind with Kurosawa's "Dreams", though I can't recall if that's because of any actual similarity or just that I happened to see them within a few days of each other.
Such a beautiful movie. Because its so measured and subtle throughout, when you get to that part on the train with the song it's a total killshot and doesn't feel maudlin. I'm getting teary just thinking about it. I saw it when I was 20 or 21 and lay awake the next couple nights thinking about it and growing up and what it meant that I was an adult now. Great writeup, good points about the animation it really does make the adult scenes feel different.
yes, I fully thought the movie was over since the credits had started and was pulling up Letterboxd to log it and then it kept going and I was floored!
I had forgotten that it happened after credits were rolling, so I looked it up on YouTube and now I really am crying. It makes me happy though, good for her.
As someone who thought he'd "seen every Studio Ghibli movie", I only saw this (and Whisper of the Heart) recently. And I can't believe what I'd been missing! I love both of those movies so much! I recently watched Angel's Egg too and... wow.
Though thematically different than Ozu's films, some of the domestic scenes in Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart reminded me of his work. Or at least made me want to re-watch them too.
Once again, thanks for doing this series. It's been great reading your (and everybody else's) thoughts on some of my all-time favorites.
It took this movie a long time to come to America! I sort of tapped out of actively following anime around 2012(?) and at the time the conventional wisdom was it would never be released here. (I remember that I learned about it through this column: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/buried-treasure/2009-05-21/only-yesterday) I think it got licensed in 2016.
I also thought of Ozu, or really of Tokyo Story (the only Ozu movie I’ve seen), but one of the things I like about both Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart is the decision to have the protagonist take a decisive action at the end. In both cases it feels a little insane but when the movie is over it feels profoundly right.
I was so excited for this because it's my husband's favorite Ghibli! This was really beautiful and I can't wait for him to read it. Taeko is so unique among protagonists, not because she's exceptional, but I think a lot of versions of this story would have been sadder and more heavy handed about aging, identity crises, etc. I don't know if I've encountered many adult characters with her quirky/positive outlook that are still so grounded and not running off into whimsy.
Yeah this is sort of what I mean by feeling like this movie is better than The Green Ray—which is a great movie but full of a particular kind of French wistfulness where you're like my youth is sort of behind me, my future is uninteresting, I'll just kind of wander around.… the ending of Only Yesterday puts in a totally different world. (Also hello to Mr. Molly Starr.)
So THAT'S what's going on with the faces. I had noticed, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It does contribute to making Taeko possibly the most... normal? Looking woman in any anime I've ever seen? Which somehow also means ambiguous? For example, I don't think you can look at her and tell how pretty she is. I don't mean she comes off plain, she just looks like a real woman who is in a situation where she is not particularly concerned with looking attractive, but that tells you nothing about whether she could look attractive if she cared to. Probably? Again, it shouldn't be so strange, but in cartoon animation, where characters tend to be stereotypes or archetypes, you don't get a lot of women who look that way. To take it a step further, even Miyazaki, who uses a lot of different faces and body types and is obviously trying not to he one dimensional with his female characters, the adult women tend to have appearances that fall into these easily parsable categories like "wizened but kindly old lady, maternal figure, glamorous yet fallen woman, princess, etc" and all of them come with implicit ideas of their character. But Takeo as an adult has none of that. It would be absurd to project any of these roles onto her, which means you really have to wait to make up your mind about her. And that to me is one of the most fascinating things about the movie.
haha yes there's something funny with Miyazaki's women for me where they sometimes seem like they have distinct life stages where you start life as a petite child and then around 30 or so you suddenly become this surprisingly muscular mom. How does that happen? Do you go off into a cave for the winter?
In the little documentary it sounds like the decision to try to make the adult faces more realistic was motivated by trying to make it clear that Taeko is 27 and much older than a typical anime protagonist. I agree about this effect and I feel like the situation where it feels as if a different version of Taeko's face can unpredictably emerge as she talks fits with what you're saying…
Hmm. I don't know what I am going to do with the (obviously true) fact that 27 is "old" for an anime protagonist. This is like realizing I am at least a decade older than "adult" Peter Parker all over again.