Only Yesterday (1991 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Only Yesterday" cost its color department roughly a year of searching for a single shade of red. The goal was accurately capturing the safflower in summer bloom. That effort, for one among 450 colors used to render the Yamagata countryside, reflects the precision Isao Takahata brought to his 1991 Japanese animated film.

  Takahata built his story around a twenty-seven-year-old Tokyo office worker named Taeko Okajima. She boards a sleeper train north to Yamagata to help her relatives with the safflower harvest. During her stay, she finds herself drawn into vivid recollections of her childhood in 1966. The source was a 1982 manga by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone; only the scenes set in 1966 came directly from that manga.

  The film opened in Japan on the 20th of July, 1991. It attracted a large adult audience for an animated feature and became the highest-grossing Japanese film of that year on the domestic market. Yet for more than a decade, Western audiences had no access to it. The path from that debut to an English-language release stretched over twenty-five years. Voice actress Miki Imai, cast as the adult Taeko, was also the visual model for the character's design.

• 2. A Fraught Production

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  The animation director on Only Yesterday was Yoshifumi Kondo. To expand the workforce, Studio Ghibli placed advertisements in Animage. Those staffing pressures coincided with a deeper reform of how the studio employed its artists.

  In November 1990, Hayao Miyazaki, who produced the film, proposed significant changes to Studio Ghibli's employment practices. Full-time positions, fixed salaries, regular recruitment, and in-house training programs were all introduced at once. The practice in Japan's animation industry had been to pay workers per drawing or painting produced, typically resulting in earnings below the societal average. The new arrangements doubled production costs.

  Miyazaki began work on what would become Porco Rosso on his own before Only Yesterday was finished. Sustaining the doubled production costs demanded a continuous stream of new projects. He also proposed building a new studio in Koganei, Tokyo, around this time.

  Miyazaki had initially been intrigued by the source manga and brought the idea to Takahata after feeling unable to adapt it himself. The working relationship between the two men was not always easy. Artists were occasionally subjected to bursts of anger during the production period. Miyazaki repeatedly complained that Takahata could not meet scheduled deadlines. Spring screenings, planned well ahead of the summer release, had to be cancelled as a result.

  Takahata reversed the standard approach to voice recording. In Japan, voice performances are typically recorded after animation is completed. On Only Yesterday, most dialogue was recorded first, and animators then shaped the characters' expressions and movement to fit the spoken lines. He also had voice actors record some lines together in the studio, using footage of their sessions as a guide for both character design and motion.

  Assistant director Norihiko Sudo used an 8mm camera and a quick action recorder to study realistic human movement. Images from that research were printed and analyzed, then used to eliminate the standardized, unnatural movements that had become conventional in animation. Toshiro Yanagiba, who voiced Toshio, had never dubbed a film before this production. He described his reaction to the unity of voice and animation as finding it "very strange."

  A puppet show the child Taeko fondly watches was an actual NHK program that aired every weekday from 1964-1969. The childhood sequences, unlike the adult scenes, were animated before any voice recording took place. This contributed to a visual separation between Taeko's adult world and her remembered past. The puppet seen onscreen was modeled on a creation by Mitsuo Iso, assembled from thick cloth, styrofoam, pencils, and sellotape.

  The story is set within the Takase district of Yamagata City. Both Takase Station and Yamadera Station of the JNR Senzan Line appear prominently in the film. Though the stations have since been rebuilt, the surrounding scenery remains largely unchanged.

• 3. Music in Three Parts

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  Seven months before the film opened, Takahata commissioned an image album from composer Katsu Hoshi, credited in the film as Katz. That album was released in December 1990. Hoshi and Takahata later repurposed several of those pieces for the film's soundtrack.

  Takahata organized the score around what he called three pillars. The first consisted of diegetic and non-diegetic musical fragments placed to illuminate specific moments in Taeko's flashbacks. The second drew on Eastern European folk music, including the Bulgarian Women's Chorus and a Romanian folk song by Gheorghe Zamfir. The song is known in English as "Fluttering Green Leaves Wedding Song." Zamfir himself performed the nai, a type of panpipe, on the recording, alongside cimbalom and violins. The third pillar was built from introspective compositions for piano and small string ensemble, designed to accompany scenes of Taeko's private self-examination.

  Alongside these pillars, the soundtrack incorporated motifs from Schubert and Brahms. Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5" plays during a lunch scene. Hungarian influence continued with "Teremtés," performed by Sebestyén Márta and Muzsikás, an adaptation of a traditional Hungarian folk song. The music of Márta Sebestyén with Muzsikás appears across several other scenes.

  Two Bulgarian folk songs, "Dilmano, Dilbero" and "Malka Moma Dvori Mete," are also woven through the soundtrack. Both address topics of farming life and marriage, themes that run directly through the film's central concerns. Fragments from Japanese rock bands, including The Wild Ones, appear alongside all of this.

  The closing theme was Takahata's own Japanese translation of "The Rose," originally composed by Amanda McBroom. His translation was performed by enka singer Harumi Miyako. Takahata used the three-pillar structure to conceptualize what he described as the film's larger approach of "quotation," treating the score as something that revisits and reframes material from the past.

  The 1991 release included an advertisement tie-in with Kagome, a tomato sauce brand, and the simultaneous launch of children's lunch sets.

• 4. The Long Western Wait

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  Walt Disney Studios held the North American distribution rights to the Studio Ghibli catalog. The studio chose not to release Only Yesterday. The reason cited was the film's candid treatment of menstruation in the childhood flashback sequences. For years, it held the distinction of being the only theatrical Studio Ghibli feature without a North American home video release.

  Germany became the first country to release the film on home video, issuing a German-dubbed version on the 6th of June, 2006. Australia and the United Kingdom followed that same year, through Madman Entertainment and Optimum Releasing respectively. In France, Belgium, and Switzerland, a DVD was released on the 31st of October, 2007, without a French dub.

  Brazil was among the few countries to see Only Yesterday on a cinema screen during the 1990s, with a theatrical run beginning on the 10th of July, 1993. In the United States, Turner Classic Movies aired a subtitled version in January 2006, as part of a month-long tribute to Miyazaki and Ghibli. That broadcast did not constitute a home video release.

  In 2015, the distributor GKIDS announced a North American theatrical release. The film premiered in New York City on the 1st of January, 2016. A wider North American release followed on the 26th of February, 2016, featuring a newly recorded English dub with voices including Daisy Ridley as the adult Taeko and Dev Patel as Toshio.

  The 25th anniversary home video release, issued by GKIDS and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment on the 5th of July, 2016, earned $1,780,357 in sales revenue. The 2016 theatrical run generated $525,958 in total, including $453,243 from the United States alone. A re-release across 169 cinemas in Italy on the 4th of July, 2024 brought in $62,329. The film's cumulative international box office across all territories has reached $608,562.

• 5. Memory and Place

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  The critic Susan Napier places Only Yesterday within what she calls the "elegiac" genre mode in anime. In her reading, the film is a celebration of "youth, innocence, and nostalgia for a disappearing past." She also describes the film's "conservative" structure as embodying a perspective she calls "quintessentially 'Japanese.'" This framing reflects a domestic positioning in a Japan whose international role was shifting.

  Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc describe Taeko's move from city to country as reflecting contrasting visions of growing up in a changing Japan. They read her train journeys as both a literal and a metaphysical movement between worlds. In their analysis, the flashback sequences use a softer color palette with faded edges. The 1980s scenes, by contrast, rely on precise lines for both characters and environments.

  Japanese state-sponsored programs that began in the mid-1980s had encouraged people to relocate from cities to rural areas. Odell and Le Blanc note that by the film's end, Taeko leaves behind her life as a single woman in an overpopulated city to join a new community. They compare this sense of community to that in Takahata's 1968 film Horus, Prince of the Sun. In Only Yesterday, they note, "socialism is a notable but subtle subtext."

  Roger Hecht draws on the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro to explain the film's treatment of people and their environment. The key concept is fudo, which describes the metaphysical relationship individuals form with the world around them. In Hecht's reading, Taeko's first day in the countryside represents a reconnection between people, work, and spirituality. He highlights how she follows her in-laws in pausing to pray as the sun rises during morning work.

  "A disappearing model of sustainable stewardship" is how Hecht characterizes the satoyama, the traditional working landscape at the film's heart. That description takes on weight in a scene where Taeko removes her gloves to handle the safflower with bare hands. Her gesture connects her to generations of farmers who worked those fields to supply luxury goods for women in Kyoto.

  Toshio tells Taeko that farming compels him even as he sees the industry dying out.

• 6. Acclaim and Adaptation

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  On Rotten Tomatoes, Only Yesterday holds a rating of 100% based on reviews from 63 critics. On Metacritic, its weighted average score is 90 out of 100, drawn from 19 critics. The site categorizes that score as indicating "universal acclaim."

  Roger Ebert called the film "a touching, melancholy meditation on the life of the same woman at ages 10 and 27." Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times described it as "psychologically acute." He noted that it "seems to grow in impact, too," as Taeko comes to a richer understanding of her own life. Glenn Kenny, writing on RogerEbert.com, called it "a breathtaking work of art on its own." He linked it to questions of women's experience in Japanese society.

  In Japan, the film won the Popularity Award at the 15th Japan Academy Prize in 1991. The following year it received the Excellence Award at the 9th Annual Golden Gross Award.

  A stage musical based on the film was announced in 2010 and debuted in 2011. It opened at the Galaxy Theatre in Shinagawa ward on the 16th of April before moving to Akita and then touring the country in 2012. Asami Hikaru played Taeko, alongside Mori Keaki of the Takarazuka theatre group and Mieno Aoi of the Warabiza theatre company. The director was Kuriyama Tamiya, and tickets had gone on sale on the 4th of December, 2010.

  A live-action special debuting in Japan in 2021 was directed by Kazutaka Watanabe and written by Koichi Yajima. It stars Keiko Matsuzaka as a sixty-four-year-old Taeko, now a grandmother living in 2020 Tokyo with her daughter and granddaughter. Anne Watanabe plays the daughter, Natsuki. Shooting took place around September 2020.

  The site's critical consensus describes the long-delayed American debut as filling "a frustrating gap for American Ghibli fans."