Most of the films under discussion in this series involve elements of the fantastic—or, at the very least, the unrealistic. A flying witch on a broomstick, a giant robot: these are natural choices for cartoons. (Even Grave of the Fireflies is narrated through ghosts.) But what about Only Yesterday, a film in which Taeko Okajima, an unremarkable woman in her late twenties, takes a trip to the countryside and remembers being ten years old? Why should this movie be a cartoon? In a previous post about Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer (1984), I commented that “the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else.” It’s easy to see how that’s true when we’re watching a movie in which things are depicted that are not real and do not happen. Trips to the countryside, on the other hand, do happen. You could take one right now, unless you already live in the countryside. Even then, you could just go to a different countryside.
Yet Only Yesterday is and could only be an animated movie. Much like Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001), which we’ll get to in a later newsletter, Takahata uses animation here as a way of flattening the distinction between what we remember and what we experience in the present. I was thinking of Millennium Actress when I wrote that line about Beautiful Dreamer, but now that I’ve seen Only Yesterday, it’s even more true of this movie, in which past and present and imagined future all coincide without one feeling more real than the other.
And at the risk of sounding a little dramatic… if every other new-to-me movie in this series turns out to be complete garbage, it will be worth it to have seen this movie.
As already noted, Only Yesterday focuses on Taeko Okajima, a single office worker in her late twenties, who has taken ten days off from work to go work on a farm in the country. As a child, Taeko always wanted to visit family in the country, but never had the opportunity, because she did not in fact have family out in the country. Now, however, her sister has farmer in-laws. This trip is Taeko’s second. On her trip to the countryside, she finds herself thinking more and more about her ten-year-old self and the experiences she had in fifth grade—a first crush, a school play—and how she was approaching the transformative chrysalis of puberty. One of her extended memories is of finding out about the existence of periods in health class and then dealing with the fallout when all the boys in her class find out about the existence of periods. The girls confer on whether or not to buy special underwear from the school nurse, deciding they might as well since they’ll need it sooner or later; the boys run around flipping skirts up to see who is wearing said special underwear. Nobody seems to be able to figure out how important they feel periods are—whether they’re not a big deal, or a big deal and akin to being sick, or disgusting, or.…
Meanwhile, in her adult life, Taeko is enjoying harvesting safflower. There’s a new guest at the farm this time: Toshio, her brother-in-law’s cousin. It is blatantly obvious to everyone but Taeko that Toshio is nursing a huge crush on her; in fact, a brief meeting with her last year is the whole reason he’s even visiting at the same time. Toshio has quit his job to pursue organic farming, a cause he clearly believes in without being able to articulate it very well. Toshio and Taeko seem doomed to almost connect: Toshio is just not confident enough to make the first move. Taeko is a too oblivious to give him an opening. It takes the blunt intervention of a third party to make Taeko realize Toshio might be interested in her.
But what about Taeko? What interests her? The countryside, the past, the picking of safflowers, the long process through which safflower blossoms become dye for clothes and for rouge. But until she’s very straightforwardly asked—and not by Toshio, who will never get there under his own steam—to contemplate a future where she marries Toshio and stays at the farm, her interest keeps her a little detached from the people for whom farming is a way of life and not a ten day holiday. They are part of the scenery. She likes them, but she did not expect them to have thoughts about her, or ideas about the future that included her own life.
If you decide to watch Only Yesterday, the first thing you will notice is that the faces look strange. In the “adult” sections of Taeko’s life, when people talk or smile, their cheeks move. That’s what happens in real life, but cartoon faces, as a rule, do not do this.1 The faces in much of Only Yesterday therefore go from looking fairly flat to bulging outward, with prominent smile lines. This look really takes getting used to. It is odd.
In fact, even by the end of the movie, I wasn’t quite used to it. However, I suspect that Takahata wanted the look of the adult world of this movie to stay a little strange. The sections of the film which present Taeko as a child are done in a much more traditional and refined style, with beautiful and often super-simplified backgrounds. When Taeko inhabits the same frame as her younger self, they remain in their respective art styles. If Takahata had maintained the more realistic art style for the whole movie, we’d eventually become accustomed to the look and stop expecting the faces to look otherwise. He doesn’t. He wants the contrast.
Part of what it means for Taeko to look odd is that it means she looks older, because lines appear in her face when she talks.2 Taeko, who is 27, isn’t old (or even middle-aged), nor is she presented that way to us. (When we meet her, she’s just shot down a marriage proposal.) But her older face sometimes breaks through the younger face, the same way the ten-year-old is insistently present. We can see how Taeko will look when she actually is an old woman, and we can see how Toshio will look as an old man. Their faces already contain their past and their futures.
One of my reading projects for this year has been Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I mention because Only Yesterday feels truly “Proustian” to me.3 As works of art the two sit in accidental proximity for me, but I don’t think that is why they feel related. Takahata’s movie is Proustian first in the way time sits in layers on every face and every object in the landscape, but also in its depiction of childhood. Taeko’s childhood memories, like Marcel’s, recreate a state of alternating frustration and ecstasy. As a child, you are bored and jerked around a lot of the time, though even your boredom is an intense experience.
Lots of Taeko’s childhood depicts her irritation at being unable to do this or that thing, at being the youngest and dumbest in her family, and at the approach of an adulthood in which being able to divide fractions will determine her ability to find happiness. She is a little bit of a brat a lot of the time. In one vignette, she desperately wants to try a fresh pineapple. When her father gets her a pineapple, nobody knows to serve it. When somebody figures it out, it doesn’t taste good, because it’s not ripe. Her sisters take one bite each and abandon ship, but Taeko stubbornly keeps eating the hard slices of unripe pineapple, as if in disbelief that something that smells so delicious could be so disappointing, but also out of a loyalty to the general idea of pineapple.
When I watched this scene, I remembered a passage from the beginning of In a Budding Grove that I’d read a day or two earlier. Marcel spends days waiting to go to a play and see a famous actress. He is consumed with anxiety that at the last minute, his parents will decide he’d better not go, because Marcel is a sickly child and they worry about the effects of overexertion on his health. Once he goes to the play, though, he finds he’s let down by the actress’s performance. He wills himself into a state of non-disappointment that is not exactly enthusiasm either.
Yet in neither of these works is the disappointment of encountering the “real thing” depicted as inevitable. A boy who plays baseball has a crush on Taeko. In their first, apparently only, conversation, they both realize they like cloudy days best. The days leading up to this conversation have been full of intense personal humiliation for them both, as both feel exposed and vulnerable to their classmates. The realization that they both love cloudy days makes the boy so happy he runs down the street throwing his baseball in the air. Taeko, meanwhile, runs straight up into the sky with joy, a visual moment Takahata pulls off through a clever use of low-detail backgrounds that make it look at first like she’s running down the street.
Taeko begins to consider Toshio as a romantic prospect, not just part of the farmland scenery, when she tells him about an old classmate she had who was poor, dirty, widely disliked, and nasty to her even though she made efforts to be nice to him. When he left the school, he shook every hand in the school except for hers. She feels that his refusal is because he saw an essential nastiness in her character. He knew that she hated him the most and was only nice to him as compensation. To this story, Toshio says: well, maybe he liked you. Maybe you were the only person who gave him an opportunity to be tough. He was too weak to go toe to toe with the other boys, but he could act tough to you.
Up until this point, Toshio has not seemed very confident of knowing something that Taeko doesn’t know in his conversations with her. He is clearly afraid of looking stupid to her. (When they first meet, he quotes a poem; when she says the poem is a classic, he confesses he only just read it.) There are things he knows more about than she does, but he’s not great at talking about them. What he has not seemed like, until this moment, is a guy who has any particular insight into other people. His crush on Taeko hasn’t seemed terribly specific, either: she’s just a woman with a certain amount of glamor because she’s from Tokyo.
But in this exchange, we realize that he’s actually been paying a lot of attention to her. Her sudden outburst that she acts nice but she’s really a fake is not a shock to him. And what he has to say to her is that she has something to learn about vulnerability: that, for instance, sometimes we express vulnerability through a deliberate creation of distance between us and what we really want.
Taeko’s relationship with farm life is one where she is trying to be careful not to romanticize it to herself: she’s just here as a tourist. She wouldn’t really like to live like this every day. Farming is hard, constant labor. You are always at the mercy of the weather. Taeko spends a lot of time remembering the girls of the past who spent their lives picking safflower to make cosmetics that they could not even afford to buy. That’s what it would be like to be a farmer: to live with poverty and resentment. She’s looking at this life through rose-colored glasses. And so on. She makes a point of picking her first safflower without protective gloves—which is painful—then pulls them on. It’s an odd and pointed gesture, but it is a way of saying to herself: if you got what you wanted, you wouldn’t really be happy.
But maybe the anti-romantic eye is as immature as the romantic one, prone to making its own errors. Of course farming is hard, but what does that have to do with whether or not you want to spend your life farming? If you are reasonable, perhaps you’ll avoid some kinds of pain; if you’re unreasonable, you get to run up into the sky. Even if you never talk to that boy again, isn’t that worth it? Hundreds of safflower blossoms must be picked every day to be turned to rouge that quickly molds. It’s a lot of work for a transient creation, but so is everything. “It is quite possible that, even with respect to the millennial existence of the human race,” Marcel muses to himself, “the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is doomed to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything.” It’s a new day. Put on your gloves. Pick some more blossoms. Go to sleep. Do it again.
No Animation Obsessive directly about Only Yesterday, but here’s one on a Ghibli background artist.
According to the making of documentary, the adult parts of Only Yesterday were invented by Takahata—the source material is just about childhood! Also I’m so used to seeing pictures of Miyazaki as an old man that I failed to recognize him.
I appreciate that Taeko is not especially good at anything. Two movies that Only Yesterday reminded me of were Whisper of the Heart (which will appear in this series later) and the Australian movie My Brilliant Career. Both of those movies are about girls deciding to get serious and pursue vocations as writers. But Taeko has no particular vocation—not even for farming. That’s not what the story is about.
Another movie Only Yesterday reminded me of was Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray. (But… to get a little spicy… Only Yesterday is better.)
When Taeko tells the story about the boy who refused to shake her hand and Toshio looks at her and then says “what happened at the farmhouse”… I laughed out loud.
Here is the list of what is going to be covered over this series, by the way, for anybody joining in. Since Angel’s Egg is finally on streaming, we will do that next month, along with Porco Rosso. I may do Porco Rosso first and Angel’s Egg second—I also want to watch In the Aftermath, the Roger Corman–esque attempt to recut Angel’s Egg into a more straightforward movie, and since Angel’s Egg is so far out of chronological order it feels like there’s no reason to do it first.
You will see it in rotoscoped animation, though. (Rotoscoping is a technique where animators draw directly over video. I don’t like it and it often gives me something like motion sickness. One rotoscoped movie you might have seen is Don Bluth’s Anastasia, though people argue about how heavily rotoscoping was used there.)
The faces of the genuinely elderly characters of Only Yesterday don’t really change at all when they talk or smile; the effect is, as it were, permanent for them.
There’s no elegant way to segue into this statement, I have learned.
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.
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.