Only Yesterday (1991)

There's a particular kind of film that asks nothing of you except your afternoon and your patience. Only Yesterday is exactly that. Not bad, not brilliant. Just sort of... there, like a pleasant walk that ends more or less where it started.

The premise is simple enough. A 27-year-old woman heads out to the countryside and spends much of the journey lost in memories of herself at ten. That's the whole engine of the thing. Two timelines, two versions of the same person, woven together with the kind of care and craftsmanship you'd expect from Studio Ghibli. And look, that craft is genuinely beyond reproach. The animation is gorgeous, the soundtrack is beautiful, and there are moments where the way a memory is rendered, slightly softer, a little more impressionistic, feels genuinely inspired. On that level, it does what Ghibli always does: makes you feel like you're watching something made by people who care deeply about every single frame.

But the story is where I start to drift.

I'll be honest about something: I'm almost certainly not who this film was made for. Watching a woman work through her formative years, her small embarrassments, her confusions about growing up, her relationship with femininity and expectation, it's a specific kind of introspective journey that I think lands very differently depending on who's sitting in the seat. As a bloke, I felt like I was reading someone else's diary. Respectfully, carefully, but still aware that I was on the outside looking in.

What made it genuinely interesting for me, weirdly, was being the father of a ten-year-old girl. Watching the childhood sections, I found myself thinking about my own daughter, about what she might be quietly processing that she'd never tell me. That's a real and affecting thing, and I don't want to brush past it. There's something to this film for parents in that sense, even if the intended emotional core belongs to the women watching it.

There's also a cultural layer that I think matters and that I'm not sure I fully grasped. The film is rooted in Japanese life in the sixties and seventies, and some of what's presented, the social expectations, the dynamics between men and women, the particular rhythms of domestic and working life, probably carries more weight if you know that world. Without that context, parts of it feel a bit opaque, like a joke you understand intellectually but don't quite laugh at.

None of this makes it a poor film. It's thoughtful and quietly made, and it has that slow, meditative quality that Ghibli sometimes reaches for when it wants to be something other than spectacular. It's not trying to dazzle you the way something like Grave of the Fireflies devastates you. This is a much gentler proposition. A cup of tea on a slow afternoon. You finish it, it was warm and fine, and you move on.

And that's kind of the problem, isn't it? There's nothing here I'd argue with, nothing I'd push back against. But there's also nothing that's stayed with me in any particular way since the credits rolled. Middle of the road is a perfectly legitimate place to sit, but it's rarely where the memorable films end up.

Two and a half stars. Worth a watch if you're in the right mood for something unhurried and reflective. Just don't go in expecting to be knocked sideways.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1991  | Watched: 2025-05-04

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More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)