Only Yesterday

A twenty-seven-year-old woman remembers her childhood during a train journey out of Tokyo. Isao Takahata's adaptation rests on an odd problem: the source manga has no adult narrative at all. All of it is the 1966 material with ten-year-old Taeko. The adult frame in the countryside is entirely Takahata's invention. He reversed the standard Japanese animation order. Dialogue was recorded first and the animators drew to the performances, which is why facial muscles behave realistically in the adult scenes while the childhood flashbacks stay deliberately stylised. In Japan it took 3.18 billion yen and was the highest-grossing domestic film of 1991. The reason the West waited is on the record: Walt Disney Studios refused to release it because of its candid treatment of menstruation in the flashbacks. An English dub only arrived in 2016 from GKIDS, with Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel, more than twenty-five years late. Who it is for: anyone who believes animation can hold an adult interior life. Who it is not for: viewers who want incident. Almost nothing happens, and the farming sequences are genuinely long.