I’ve previously done a couple of short posts about Studio Ghibli films, specifically My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, two films I absolutely love.
It’s not a profound gesture to be a fan of Studio Ghibli and the works of Miyazaki. Miyazaki is a living legend and I adore his films. I love many filmmakers but I walk around saying Miyazaki, Wong Kar Wai and Tony Scott are my favorite directors (though at the moment I want to make the list 5 with Satoshi Kon and Kore-eda) but my favorite Studio Ghibli movie is Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday (it and Spirted Away are probably in my top 10 favorite movies all time) and I just rewatched it and jotted down some thoughts.
There’s a moment in Only Yesterday when Taeko, age 27, bites into a slice of pineapple—an imported delicacy with the weight of promise—and finds it fibrous, dry, and unsweet. The disappointment lingers longer than expected, not just in taste but in metaphor: this is a film about the slow recognition that the future, when it arrives, often carries the texture of fruit picked too late or too early, never just right.
Only Yesterday is the most unassuming of Studio Ghibli’s works, and perhaps its most radical. There are no fantastical creatures here, no airborne wonders, no lush orchestral swells to cue epiphany. Instead: a woman, a train ride, and the quiet resurfacing of memory. A kind of diary disguised as a film, or maybe the inverse.
The animation floats between the precision of the present and the misted edges of the past. Adult Taeko drifts through the rural landscapes of Yamagata, her world rendered in sun-washed hues and delicate detail, while the memories of her ten-year-old self flicker on screen with soft-focus outlines, as though drawn on paper just slightly too thin. We’re never told when one ends and the other begins because they don’t. Takahata’s film operates under the radical proposition that we are always, irrevocably, the sum of our remembered selves.
Taeko is not tormented, not melodramatic. She is something far more rare in cinema: uncertain. She has a job in Tokyo, a potential suitor in the countryside, and a shadow-self in the form of her childhood memories, memories not of trauma, but of incompletions. A classmate’s cruelty. A hand not held. A desire unspoken. These fragments aren’t sharpened into moral lessons; they simply exist, unresolved and quietly formative.
In this way, Only Yesterday is less a narrative than a condition. Time here is not linear but ambient. The past is not past, merely dormant. And the self is not a single entity moving forward but a kaleidoscope, shifting, repeating, refracting through memory.
There’s immense restraint in Takahata’s direction. He does not insist. He offers. The silences in this film are not empty but filled with possibility: of thought, of regret, of joy so faint it almost evaporates. Even the final sequence—a train, a decision, a return—is handled with the gentlest brushstroke of sentiment. The catharsis is muted, but no less complete.
Only Yesterday is not a film for children, and not quite for adults either. It is a film for those in between for those who carry their younger selves like stowaways, who look at their lives not with triumph or failure, but with the aching curiosity of someone still figuring it out.
Watch it not for what happens, but for what doesn’t. Watch it for the memories you forgot you had. Watch it to remember what it felt like to want something so badly it made your face go hot.
Only Yesterday is not nostalgic. It’s truthful. And in its truth, it becomes quietly, devastatingly profound.