Only Yesterday

Long restricted to one-off screenings held within repertory programs, the Studio Ghibli film "Only Yesterday" finally gets an official U.S. release on New Year's Day.

"Yesterday" is one of the five films directed for the legendary studio by the equally legendary Isao Takahata -- his other works include "Grave of the Fireflies" and "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya" -- and was first released to Japanese audiences in the early 90s. The reason that film went unreleased and undervalued stateside is a sadly typical one: This is an animated film that's characterized by nuances, of character and form, that are rarely encountered in our domestic commercial cinema. Its sudden availability is reason enough for celebration -- one of the great cinema events of 2016 is happening on the year's very first day.

"Only Yesterday" is concerned, rather obviously, with the decades that have past. Takahata's subject is Taeko (she's voiced by Daisy Ridley in the recently-recorded English-language dub), a young woman of Tokyo who is forever adjusting to the rhythms of urban life. She grew up in one of Japan's rural prefectures, circa the traditionally-minded 1960s, so the perpetual anxiety associated with "city life" is only amplified to her eyes. Thus, when the opportunity to make an extended sojourn to the countryside presents itself, she's the first to board the train. Takahata does more than place us in her perspective during this time of change -- he gives us her senses. The first change you register, as we shift from city to countryside, is in the color palette. This movie goes green.

The color scheme will get softer even still. For Taeko, the time spent in the countryside proves to be a trigger. Each new experience (a fruitful dinner, or an encounter with a potential suitor named Toshio) flashes her back to a childhood experience (her first melon, and her first love). Takahata and his animators bring these flashbacks to vivid reality by painting them as half-remembered visions; there's unanimated space around the corners of the frame (the forgotten details), and the textures of dreams (like impossibly purple skies) intrudes on these sequences much more often than they do on the present tense. This looks ahead to later Takahata films, like "My Neighbors the Yamadas" and "Princess Kaguya," where such spare animation is the dominant aesthetic. But with "Yesterday," the shift itself provides the shape of the story: We're moving in and out of one woman's interior life.

It's the concept of catharsis made cinema. In Toshio (voiced in the dub by Dev Patel), there is the same passion that Taeko felt for her first crush. In the harvest work she's doing, there is the same satisfaction she felt as a hardworking child. At one point, the "present" and her memories of the "past" literally intersect; regrets and recollections are presented as a force strong enough to intrude upon reality. What's astonishing is the sensory details that Takahata and his animators are capable of evoking. The dirt kicked up at an elementary school's baseball field, or the sound that's left behind by a whistling gust of wind... "Only Yesterday" captures not just the emotional heft of memories, but the physical experience of forming them. This movie knows that if we have souls, then they have senses too.